Re: Problems in "Modernizing" a //gs

[bjblackbear@ibm.net (B.J. Major)]

Mitchell Spector <spec@vax2.concordia.ca> wrote:

>     Well, almost 4 years have passed and the PowerMacintosh has had
> ample time to grow and start ending its infancy stage. I personally
> see it as a disappointment. What we got is the same old Macintosh
> but with more horsepower than the 68k original. The 68k emulation
> and the Macintosh design, toolbox and software drag the whole thing
> down to a crawl. As someone out there once said, the PowerMac has
> the PowerPC RISC processor acting as if it were hand-cuffed from
> behind the back. Yes, it is a very powerful processor, but it is
> going to waste emulating a Macintosh. All this power yet you can't
> even do true multitasking? The inferior "PC" does, so what is wrong
> with this picture?

The PCs running either Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, two systems that are
sitting right here in the office I work in, next to my Mac, DO NOT do
true multitasking as well.  You may *think* they do, but they don't.

And you haven't kept up with the latest in Mac OS redesign either.  Many
of the System features in the new OS 8 have been rewritten to take
advantage of PPC native code, and there are fewer and fewer calls being
made to the 68K emulator.  When Rhapsody comes out, everything about the
machine will be PPC native.
 
> 
> >This very speculative question of whether or not a modern Apple IIgs
> >could exist while running all the demand's of today's software, and
> >STILL run all the games and apps from the early 1980s onward is very
> >questionable to say the least.  *This is NOT a put-down of the idea to
> >have a modern IIgs; it's reality*.
> 
>     Why do you have the notion the Apple IIgs design, as-is from 1986,
> is the most the machine could have ever been? Do you actually believe
> Apple pushed the envelope on the technology as much they could when it
> was originally released? 

I don't believe this, but as you can readily read from the "Modernizing
the IIgs" posts, the machine would need such a complete redoing in this
day and age, that much of the gs as you know it now would be replaced
(or redone).  Whoever has the funds for this project is certainly free
to pursue the project.

-- 
--bj    Auto reply will not work; please remove "black" to reply.
Proud owner/user of Apple Computers since 1984.  
"None of my computers do Windows."