Early Mac Clones

--- Mark Gregory <mgregory(a)vantageresearch.com> wrote: And available later as an internal board with the same ROM sockets, a pair of 34-pin connectors and external mini-DIN connectors. The 34-pin connectors were there to place the A-Max-II+ board between the floppy drive and the motherboard, allowing the Amiga's internal floppy to read/write 800K Mac disks. The mini-DIN connectors were for LocalTalk. I still use my A-3000 bought in 1990 to run M$ Word under A-Max and then print via LocalTalk to my HP LJ/4ML. It works great as a turbo B&W Mac. I only have the "A-Max II+". The IV had an upgraded PAL (security bit blown, unfortunately; I checked) and new software. I had one way back, too. I used to use Mac System 3.5 with it. There's another Amiga-based Mac implementation: Shapeshifter. It is software only. I sent the author a Zilog data book so he could support the A-MaxII+ card (Z8530, just like the Mac and old Suns, a *great* serial chip if you knew about its register access time limitations). My favorite demonstration with Shapeshifter was to fire off System 7 on the Mac side, connect up to a nearby Mac server and mount a share, switch back to the Amiga side, open up AMosaic and browse the web while copying files on the Mac. For an added touch, since there is no Netscape browser for AmigaDOS, shut down the TCP/IP stack on the Amiga side, then launch Netscape for the Mac. Those who saw the demo were usually stunned. This was all on a 25Mhz 68030 w/18Mb RAM (16Mb "FAST", 2Mb "CHIP" (kinda like video RAM but more versatile)) Most recently, I took a CD of several hundred Apple QuickTake 150 pictures that I shot over several months in Antarctica. My extensive research showed that there was no way with UNIX or Windows to convert these files to any other format. They are "Quicktime Compressed PICTs". The PBM utilities can parse them, but they get to the meat of the picture and declare that there is an unknown tag and skip the picture data. Anyway, I needed a Mac running the QuickTake 150 extensions to interpret these 1200 pictures. My fastest real Mac was a Mac SE/30. Running Picture Convert, it was 20-30 seconds to load an image and save it as a compressed TIFF; fortunately, there's a batch mode. Some of the pictures had developed bit rot, 10 in all. I couldn't just fire it off and go to bed; I had to supervise the batch. I loaded the stuff all up on to a 4Gb SCSI disk, hung it off my A4000 (25Mhz 68040) and ran ShapeShifter. It was now more like 5 seconds per picture, thus, my fastest Mac was really an Amiga. Last month when I picked up the MacIIci for $5, I passed on a Quadra 605 for $25 because it had no Ethernet and was only a 25Mhz 68040. I figured I already had that much and there was no reason to clutter up with one more box. I think, eventually, when the University surpluses something faster, I'll upgrade, but for now, the Amiga reigns supreme amongst my Mac collection. For me, it wasn't just being able to run Mac programs that was great; it was running them in a networked environment that was really awesome. -ethan ===== Infinet has been sold. The domain goes away on 15 March. See http://www.infinet.com/ for details. Please update your address lists to reflect my new address: erd(a)iname.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com