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posted by
LaminatorX
on Friday February 21 2014, @01:33AM
from the I-don't-care,-I'm-still-free.-You-can't-take-the-garage-from-me dept.
from the I-don't-care,-I'm-still-free.-You-can't-take-the-garage-from-me dept.
demonlapin writes:
"Brian Benchoff at Hackaday has an ambitious new project: a homebrew computer based not on a classic 8-bit processor like the Z80 or 6502, but on the 16-bit Motorola 68000. It's a backplane-based machine with wire-wrapped connections planned. His first summary post is here. Blinkenlights are planned."
[ED Note: With so much commercially available hardware getting more and more locked down, projects like this are a good reminder of what is possible for a dedicated enthusiast.]
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Homebrew 68000-based Computer Build
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @01:40AM
Sure it's been over 30 years, why not reinvent the Macintosh computer, complete with wire wrap.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Macintosh_Prototypes.txt [folklore.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by regift_of_the_gods on Friday February 21 2014, @01:47AM
I remember Steve Jobs on stage yelling "The Macintosh 68000 eats 8086's for breakfast!" One of the things I miss about the '80s was all the trash talking between personal computer vendors.
This guy's da man. I even scrolled up to check the date on his web page - yup, February 2014.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @01:58AM
I remember meeting a complete idiot in college who seemed to be genuinely incapable of understanding that different microprocessors were incompatible because they used different instruction sets. Back then there were such things as x86 and 68000 and PowerPC and SPARC and UltraSPARC all in common use. Now almost everything uses AMD64. The idiot has finally won.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by regift_of_the_gods on Friday February 21 2014, @02:09AM
There's ARM. And as server-side computing is becoming mostly x86_64, I don't mind because it means that as I (slowly) learn to read the generated 64-bit instructions, I'm able to apply what I learned to different OS platforms. It's the trend towards JVM and other virtual machines that kinda bothers me. Now I've gotta learn this Node.js business and stuff like that, it's a totally different mindset from system programming. Java the language is not bad, but nobody - especially not employers - care about Java the language. They care about the hottest Java-based frameworks, APIs, and tools - or the same for Python, Ruby, or JS.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @02:23AM
Now that there's a 64-bit ARM, will we finally truly have one architecture to rule them all? Which will win the final battle, AArch64 or x86-64?
(Score: 1) by darinbob on Friday February 21 2014, @07:33PM
But the same CPU doesn't mean things are compatible. There are different application interfaces, like stack layouts and register usage conventions, plus different reliance on operating systems, different hardware memory layouts, an so forth. Even on the exact same machine we don't have compatibility.
(Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Friday February 21 2014, @04:13PM
The problem at the time was the price of memory. With 32 bit (actually 24bit with the high 8 bits undefined but unluckily used for other stuff which broke with later processors) pointers, data structures etc you needed at least twice as much memory to do the same stuff as a 8 bit computer. A Mac with only 128KBs of ram was pretty limited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitari
(Score: 1) by darinbob on Friday February 21 2014, @07:47PM
While it did not have 8 bit instructions it did have many 16 bit instructions. However for comparison with other CPUs it was considered very compact for its time. 8-bit only machines do often have smaller code, however this is often because the application itself has much more limited use. Ie, to add two 32-bit numbers on an 8-bit machine will take more bytes of instructions than it would on a 68000.
8-bit computers were really restricted to hobbyists, calculators, peripherals, and stuff like that. Professional general purpose computers at that time were commonly using 16, 32, or even 36 bit CPUs.
(Score: 2, Informative) by MachineShedFred on Friday February 21 2014, @12:22PM
The biggest issue with doing that would likely be getting the contents of the Macintosh ROM, and the system software. You could probably find the ROM chips and scrape an image, and even find old boot floppies to get the ancient system software, but there's that whole copyright issue. And we know how Apple loves their copyrights.
That being said, electrically, the original Mac is incredibly simple (now).
(Score: 1) by darinbob on Friday February 21 2014, @07:22PM
But there's so much better that can be done than the first Mac. Sure it looked great for a home computer, but simultaneously we had Unix workstations using that chip, with graphics. Also wait a few years for the Amiga 1000 which had the same CPU but was so much more functional. However both the Mac and the Amiga relied on a let of custom chips to get the job done, so re-creating either is not so simple.