On Mar 5, 3:50�pm, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
apple2fr...@gmail.com wrote:
Regarding the Apple II -- it is a beautiful computer -- but the design
was constrained not only by the principles of simplicity, elegance,
and efficiency, but also by cost and the technological limitations of
the time. �If you remove the latter two limitations (well, at least
the technological limitation anyway), and put yourself in Woz's shoes,
what new works of beauty might you come up with?
That's an interesting question. �I'd like to think it would head off
in the direction of parallelism--multiple copies of a simple unit that
could do wonders in concert. �(The Propeller, or the AppleCrate, comes
to mind. �;-)
This is exactly what reconfigurable hardware will let us explore, and
coincidentally exactly the sort of input I was hoping to get in this
thread (although everyone's contributions have been a pleasant
surprise as well).
With reconfigurable hardware, how many parallel Apple II computers
could be simulated? Probably quite a few, depending on the size of
the FPGA. Certainly a lot more than could be emulated (especially at
accelerated speeds) even on a modern high performance PC with multiple
cores.
I imagine some good fun could be had with a dozen virtual Apple IIs
running with 50MHz 6502s and all connected with a virtual nadanet,
huh? All using the existing toolchains developed 25 years ago for the
Apple system.
And of course you could do exactly the same thing with a dozen or so
Apple IIs with suitable accelerators in them all hooked up with
nadanet, although it would be a lot more of a pain to physically
connect everything together.