Xah Lee's Unixism

[Rupert Pigott]

Pascal Bourguignon wrote:
> "Karl A. Krueger" <kkrueger at example.edu> writes:
> 
>>When you consider that the first Macs to run OS X were several hundred
>>times faster than the 1984 Mac, had one thousand times as much RAM, and
>>had fifty thousand times as much mass storage, it should follow pretty
>>naturally that the constraints of the old system's design would cease to
>>be appropriate.
> 
> 
> Yes, but the first NeXTcube or NeXTstation were not much more
> powerfull than even the original Macintosh.  In anycase, at the time
> the Macintosh appeared, there were already 680x0 based unix workstations.

It was specifically the 68000. Fixes were made that took effect in the
68010 and 68020. Dunno about 68008. IIRC the problem was that you could
not restart some instructions properly. Some UNIX workstations did use
68Ks, there was an Apollo that had two of them running in lock-step,
with one of them one instruction behind the other. When the leading CPU
barfed, action would be taken and the other CPU would take over. Someone
in comp.arch worked on the Fortune boxes and IIRC he claimed they had a
more elegant single CPU solution.

Cheers,
Rupert