Re: meeting?

[Brad Boyer <flar@allandria.com>]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 02:32:49PM +0200, Christian T. Steigies wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 03:41:07AM -0700, Brian Morris wrote:
> > not everybody lives in europe (I myself live in SanFrancisco,
> > some body lives in Australia I guess).
> 
> But I think most m68k hackers are in Europe. I wouldn't mind a meeting in
> SF, but I am not going to take my m68k boxes back to the US...

I always got the impression that while most Atari and Amiga work
happened in Europe, much of the Mac work happened in North America.
Obviously most of the early work was done by Alan Cox, but many of
the people who got the Mac port going were in US or CA. We had the
Mac stuff hosted on a .ca domain for a while, I know. That doesn't
apply so much at the moment, since Finn seems to be doing the most
work on Mac support now. If anyone does end up getting together in
person for this near San Francisco, that's a pretty easy trip for me.

> > some people have never seen an atari or an amiga m68k.
> > (I wouldn't mind seeing one of those or a next or a sun again)
> 
> I bought my Falcon and my Mac on eb*y, and many Amigas are listed there
> also. I think you can even buy "new" Amigas. Or look at the pictures here:
> http://www.a1k.org/forum/index.php?mode=viewforum&forum_id=12

The Amiga systems were pretty popular. I've seen many of them in
small television stations and in various other forms of video
post-production that can't afford to buy newer equipment. I have
never seen an Atari that could run Linux, but I saw many of the
other models such as the Atari 800.

> > a)
> > I think it would be interesting to have some sort of autonomous
> > program that would just run and evolve itself. I guess there
> > are some issues about entropy. you have to feed it some data.
> > one advantage of old 68k is they are low power, although slow
> > of course, the 605 is I think about 25 watt.  my powerbooks are also
> > pretty low power but they do get hot after a few hours.
> 
> Low power? Not when I look at my electricity bill. I think the powersupply
> in my Amiga is rated for 120W, maybe more? The Quadra840 is probably in the
> same range, the Falcon has a 200W ATX supply but I hope it uses a lot less.
> My server is what I consider low power, it runs on a 60W brick. And the
> efika board, I read the CPU uses 1W, the RAM 2W, add a little for video and
> harddisk, maybe the total is under 25W. And a 400MHz PPC, or 800MHz VIA CPU
> can do quite a bit more than even my fastest 68k machine. If you want a low
> power board, the Efika is available for 99$ I think, just add a video card
> and a harddisk and you have a nice silent machine.

For m68k Macs, it completely depends on the model. Based on what I found
online, the Quadra 605 only has a 30W power supply. Some of the bigger
models have over 300W max power. Actual usage would depend on expansion
cards and drives and such, but it still isn't as much as many modern boxes.

	Brad Boyer
	flar@allandria.com