On 7/7/23 17:24, Dan Ritter wrote:
Which could have done better, but debians support of accessory stuff was non-existent. I had a set of cd's that put an early Debian Linux on a 68040 based machine with 64 megs of 32 bit ram on the PP&S board. It did not recognize the ram so was running on the 2 megs on the 2090 SCSI controller so obviously it spent 98% of the 68000 CPU on the A-2000's main board hammering on the swap on a 1Gig seagate drive. It did not recognize the 68040 either, so just opening a shell was a 5 minute process. I went back to AmigaDos3.1 as it was usable until the battery leaked and ate the motherboard. I built by first Linux box, with a 400MHz k6 and installed Red Hat 5.0 circa 1998, used the Amiga for a net gateway back in dial-up days. Computing was fun then and I had lots of fun demoing to the dos lovers just how blazingly fast the Amiga was compared to their dos boxes. It was also a lot faster than the first McIntosh's from Apple. Then the 2 idiots that started Commode Door took the accounts receivables to Bermuda for a rum and coke and never came back.Bret Busby wrote:With bits and bytes, one strange thing that I remember, is that, in 1985, in Australia, a particular computer was introduced, that had a 32 bit processor with 8 bit buses. It was a Motorola 68008 CPU, and, I could not understand why a company would produce a 32 bit CPU wit 8 bit buses. The computer was named the Telecom Computerphone, and, it was an oddity in itself.Compatible parts make for cheaper systems. In the late 70s and early 80s, most mass-produced systems were 8-bit microprocessors with an 8-bit bus, connecting to peripherals that assumed an 8-bit bus. Motorola's 68000 line had an internal 32 bit architecture, which made the CPU both performant and expensive. But a manufacturer of systems could contain the overall cost by using 8-bit devices outside of the CPU. The first generation was hybrid 16/32 bit internally, and came in variants selected for cost vs performance: 8, 16 or 32 bit external bus. The 2nd generation 68030 was 32 bits inside and out, and had a hardware memory manager, which meant it was the first one that we, sitting here 36 years later, would think of as a system with enough features that we could reasonably compile software for it. Debian supported 68030s and later from 2.0 through 4.0, though by that time it was clearly a doomed target. -dsr- .
Cheers, Gene Heskett. -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940) If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. - Louis D. Brandeis Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/>