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Re: A 21st Century Apple II?

apple2freak@gmail.com wrote:

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.


In the late 1970s, I was quite fascinated by the possibilities of
wafer-scale integration, where all the unseparated dice were
interconnected into a mesh network.  As integration trends became
clear, I wondered what could be done with a wafer of a couple
hundred 6502s checkerboarded with RAM dice!  (It's pretty easy
to deal with the inevitable non-working dice.)

Now, that could be a 12" wafer with a thousand processors and
RAM dice, all in a 2D mesh, running at hundreds of megahertz.
The wafer would have to be bonded to a power distribution plate
and run submerged, of course, but it would still be a lot of fun!


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.


Not too bad, actually, if you can remove the boards from their
cases.  ;-)

-michael

******** Note new website URL ********

NadaNet and AppleCrate II for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."