Waaay OT - Macintosh software

[Larry Blanchard]

At least start your own off-topic thread instead of hijacking this one :-).

[Dave Mundt]

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 09:33:27 -0400, "J. Clarke" wrote: *snip*

What was different about the Apple/Macintosh floppy drives were that they were variable RPM drives whereas PCs simply spun the floppy disk at a fixed RPM. This design decision was made, IIRC, because Jobs wanted to not "waste" floppy disk space and to simplify the electronics needed to read and write data to the disk. Without telling you EVERYTHING I know, on a constant RPM disk, the surface velocity of the media is rather greater at the outer edge than at the inner edge of the writable area. Now... this means that the read/write circuitry needs to be more complicated, so as to be able to do its thing reliably both at the outer and inner sections of the disk. Jobs went with simpler read/write circuitry, and instead varied the RPM of the disk, slowing it down as the heads moved out towards the outer edge. This meant that the surface velocity of the media stayed "constant" no matter whether the heads were at the center of the disk or the outer edge. It not only makes the timing circutry simpler for determining where the bits are at, but, eliminates some power control circutry that controls how much electricity gets pumped through the heads.

Yea...I, for one, would LOVE to have a working IMSAI 8080 for my (admittedly small) collection. However, every time they appear, they seem to go for well over $1000...which is too much for me to spend on a whim. To continue the drift a bit, one of the things I really liked about my CP/M system (a z80 based, COmpuPro system named helen), was that it was really the last computer that I truly felt "in control" of. I was able to keep a picture of the internal workings of the OS and BIOS in my head, and, was able to re-program it to work the way

*I* wanted it to work. Although it is a trivial thing these days, it was an exciting moment for me when I was able to re-write the BIOS (in assembler, by the by) to change the keyboard input from a polled system that came "standard" to an interrupt driven system. It worked like a charm and made my life a LOT happier. That was a good system and still runs, although it is so limited that I really don't use it any longer, and, probably could not program a simple serial IO routine in assembler any longer. Actually, had some business decisions been made differently, I suspect that CP/M would not only still be around, but, it would have evolved much as PC/MS-DOS changed. There were extensions that were exploring the idea of a hierarchical filesystem when it was drowned by the flood of machines from IBM. Regards Dave Mundt

[Leon]

Start a wood related topic and we will go to that. ;~)

[Dave Balderstone]

Yes.

[Kevin Craig]

There's no reason to. Superior products are available for MacOS, like Vectorworks. Autocad tags are largely supported, as I understand it; it's been a couple of years since I did the comparisons.

The success of Autocad is one of those mysteries parallel to the success of Microsoft, Novell, and others: "Wow, I have to hire THREE more geeks to run this, so it must be better!"

Autodesk isn't in the software business; they're in the upgrade and support business. They charge an arm and a leg for the product, then four arms and six legs for the support (which really isn't optional). Not to mention several testicles for specialized libraries. It's one helluva business model!

But unless Autocad requires a hardware dongle, there's no reason you can't run it on a Mac. VirtualPC handles Windoze programs nicely, albeit much slower than on native hardware, or Mac equivalents on Apple hardware.

Kevin

[Dave Balderstone]

And a Mac. If you really want to.

USB floppy drive.

[Dave Balderstone]

Yeah. They can't even figure out how to spend the $4 billion cash they have.

Idiots...

djb

[J. Clarke]

FWIW, the Victor 9000 did the same thing for the same reason. Eventually they came out with a new diskette controller that could read and write PC disks. IIRC it involved replacing a circuit board on the drive itself--I installed a couple of them but that was a long time ago and I don't remember the details now, and neither of my 9000s have the mod.

Good example of an MS-DOS machine that was not PC compatible.

[J. Clarke]

I'm not sure what point you think you're making here. You seem to be trying to imply that they did not have the right to sell MS-DOS to IBM. The guy who wrote it seems to disagree with you, and quite honestly I think he knows a Hell of a lot more about that topic than you do.

I see. So every time someone brings a suit that's proof positive that whoever they sued did something wrong. Then I guess that James Randi was wrong about Uri Geller.

Regardless, you're clearly not rational on this topic.

[bridger]

but only if you forst run windows in some emulation mode. no thanks. one operating system at a time....

[bridger]

the virtual video card apple uses for it's virtual machine to run windows on really sucks. why would I want to buy an overpriced mac to poorly emulate windows on when I can build my own PC that will stomp the pants off of it for a fraction of the price?

[Dave Balderstone]

No buts... The straight answer is "yes, you can run AutoCad on a Mac"

;-)

[bridger]

way back when- in a version before I ever used autocad- there was acad for the mac. if that's what you mean, it's not going to work for me. but I don't think that's what you mean. I think you mean emulating windows on the mac and running acad on that. life's too short for such exercises in redundancy...

[Kevin Craig]

You wouldn't. But I was responding to the notion that it couldn't be done.

If you're devoting a machine to Autocad, then it would be silly to start with a Mac. But if you're using a Mac for other reasons, and you come across a particular PC-only program that you *must* use, then emulation is cheaper than buying another machine.

Kevin

[p_j]

You mean the guy who sued him?

Ah, another "so" insertion of words in my mouth. You didn't bother to explain or defend your earlier irrational insertion of words in my mouth, and this one no doubt not be defended. Clearly there is no way to jump from my words to your silly statement. In fact my words contradict it.

You just worship Bill all you want.

[Dave Balderstone]

Nope. I mean running Windows on the Mac, not emulating Windows. The software (Virtual PC, now owned by Microsoft) actually emulates the Intel hardware...

But I'm sure we both have better nits to pick, eh?

:-)

djb (of the Department of Redundancy Department)