On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 03:48:29PM -0400, Greg Weeks wrote:
On Sat, 8 May 2010, Brian Foley wrote:
d) The SE/30, which is possibly the machine Greg was thinking of, was released in 1989, had a 16 MHz 68030 with a built-in MMU, an FPU, and could (with upgraded ROMs and dense SIMMs) use up to 128 MB of RAM (8 MB with the original ROMs). There were a large number of expansion cards produced for it, including powerful (for the time) graphics cards; ethernet cards; and CPU & FPU upgrades.
Nope I remember the SE/30 as a diffferent beast, the SE/30 needed the OS upgrade to work at all. I don't think it actually needed system 7 and the MMU on, but it came with an update just to work. It was a fair bit faster too. Dang, that was a long time ago.
At the risk of veering even further off topic (sorry!)... You needed System 7 and either Connectix's MODE32 software, or 32-bit clean ROMs taken from a machine like the IIsi or IIfx to use >14 MB RAM. System 6 and earlier only supported 8 MB RAM (24-bit addressing was required because of the way the memory manager used to store state in the top 8 bits of address pointers, and half the address space was used to map NuBus cards). There were products like Maxima for System 6 that let you stretch this 8 MB to 14 MB, but they had drawbacks. And while System 7 had an appallingly slow (and optional) VM implementation, at least it had one: System 6 had no VM subsystem at all. IIRC System 6.0.3 was the earliest one that supported the SE/30's hardware. http://www.lowendmac.com/daystar/pages/dsd_products/support/ts_mode32.html Fun times! I really need to replace the dodgy capacitors in my poor little SE/30 one of these days. At a desperate attempt at relevance, at least you could get reasonably current commercial OCR software for the Mac back then. Cheers, Brian.