[KLUG Advocacy] Re: BSD Amiga vs BSD Mac

[Adam Williams]

>>>>>I have a friend who is becoming interested in LINUX and I'd like to set 
>>>>>RH up on one of his ancient spare machines.  In particular, he would 
>>>>like to use a 32 MHz 68030 with 20Mb RAM and a 40Mb hard drive.
>>>>>Any chance we can install LINUX here?
>>>>Linux, maybe.  Redhat, NO.  
>>>>RH doesn't make a Mac distro. (at least not lately)
>>>>I think Debian does, not sure about SuSE and Mandrake.
>>>>Yellowdog is made for the MAC.
>>>>With that limited hardware, I doubt the machine would be useful for much
>>>>other than typing a few commands at the console prompt.  If it's even
>>>>supported and meets minimum requirements for an install.
>>>It might be worth giving NetBSD a shot.  Granted this was a long time
>>>ago, but I know a guy who ran a very functional mail and personal file
>>>server off of similar hardware with NetBSD.  It did just fine as a
>>>server.  I think the hardware was a 68020 powered Amiga but I wouldn't
>>>swear to that.  Could have been an 030, but it wasn't anything stronger
>>>than that.
>>Yes, a Mac may share the same CPU as the Amiga,  but not much else.  The
>>Amiga is (was) a thoughtfully designed system with a gang of
>>sub-processors for I/O, Video, Audio, etc...  The 'vintage' Macs have a
>>very winmodem-esque design,  from the people I've talked too performance
>>sucks.  Every wonder why it took Apple sssoooooooooo long to create a
>>preemptive OS?  And they basically had to ditch OS9 to do it?  That
>>hardware platform wasn't helping.
>You're preaching to the choir about the Amiga's hardware architecture,
>but it's only a factor if the OS accesses it properly.  Any idea how

True, but an OS can only do so much to make up for crappy hardware. 
Look at the 80286 multitaskers.  Sure, they "worked", but....

>much of the custom chips (Agnes, Denise, Paula, Buster:  can't believe I
>STILL remember their names) does / did NetBSD 68k actually use?  

I've read about the Linux/68xxx kernel, not so much about NetBSD.  There
are still issues of bus speed and wait states that are OS irrelevant. 
The Amiga was designed for 'heavily interactive' applications,  the Mac
***began*** as a glorified word processor.

>If it
>was fairly generic 680x0 code, wouldn't it run on a Mac IIvx at almost
>the same speed as on an Amiga?

Don't forget that 68xxx series Macs don't even have hardware primitives
for putting text on the screen (like the PC Video BIOS does, and EVERY
SINGLE VIDEO CARD EVER MADE!).  It is ***ALL*** done in software on the
'early' Mac 68xxx boxes.  Scary.

>>(Nothing against Apple,  or the utility of these machines as what they
>>were.  But a spade is a spade;  those machines were crap.  I actually
>>read through the hardware specs once...... ick......  Useful as a
>>workstation running a preemptive multi-user POSIX-ish OS?  No way!)
> Most of the Amiga's fancy chips were devoted to multimedia and I/O if I
>remember correctly.  I've never read through the specs of either machine
>in any detail, but with the exception of Agnes handling some memory
>access chores, 

Don't discount "some memory access chores".  How an architecture handles
memory access and moving block of bytes into and out of devices matters
a heck of a lot more than CPU MHz.

Lets take my 90MHz IBM RS/6000 which purred away under the load of ~120
users, and replace that with a 90MHz Pentium and the same amount of
RAM.  We'll use the same smart SCSI controllers.... Ha! Yeah right.

>how much would a text-based server use them?  I guess

Think "no graphic primitives in hardware" Ahhhhhhh!  Press the letter
a... and the CPU says "OK! now to draw the letter A we must...."

>there's hard drive I/O, but the IDE-based Amigas (4000, mostly) had
>pretty brainless IDE controllers.  

"Intelligent" IDE is a very recent event.  This was clearly a
step-backward-to-try-and-be-cheap death gasp on the part of Commodore.