Re: A 21st Century Apple II?

[apple2freak@gmail.com]

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.

--
Apple2Freak