John_Miller@mindlink.bc.ca (John Miller) (05/09/91)
Mark Anbinder (mha@baka.uucp) of BAKA Computers, Inc. posted the following information in Comp.sys.mac.announce (messsage <52-890-00003.2756626885.228@baka.UUCP>) >Subject: Apple Announcement Pending >Date: 5/9/91 Time: 9:34 AM > > Cupertino, 9 May 91 (AP) -- Responding to rumours that a system > software related announcement was scheduled for Monday, 13 May, > inside sources have said that Apple is about to announce a CP/M > compatibility mode for the Macintosh. The software for the new > operating mode requires an 80 Mb hard disk, a minimum of 4 Mb of > RAM, and the new "8-bit clean" ROMs. CP/M, made popular in the > early 1980s, has been conspicuously absent from the microcomputer > industry in recent years. Now, this got me thinking (always a mistake.) I still have a Z80 & CP/M emulation program for the IBM PC kicking around somewhere. There is, of course, Soft PC for the Mac. There's been various mutterings of Mac emulation software for things like SparcStations. So here's the idea ... We find a SparcStation with the required Mac emulation software and get it running. We then launch Soft PC to give us an IBM environment. Next comes the Z80 emulator. Now, the advantage of RISC architectures is supposed to be their simple instruction set so there should be no problem writing a Sparc emulator in Z80 assembly language. It could write things out to disk to get around address size limitations. We then make a recursive call and, at the same instant, yank away the underlying Sparc hardware. We're left with the world's first ever piece of free running software, capable of running four historically important operating systems. Because the constraints -- clock speed, disk access and transfer times -- of physical hardware have been eliminated, performance should shoot through the roof. Now I admit that the timing of the hardware removal would have to be very precise, and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle might cause problems, but if Apple truly wants to restore its healthy gross profit margins, it's an approach Apple should explore. Of course, this would eliminate forever the notion of free system software updates. The Installer program would become a piece of hardware that you would rent to update to Apple's latest offerings. I still haven't figured out a solution to the synchronization problems involved in updates. I sure hope this public disclosure doesn't mess up my patent application. _____________________________________________________________________ John Miller (604) 433-1795 Symplex Systems AppleLink (rarely) SYMPLEX Burnaby, British Columbia Fax: (604) 430-8516 Canada usenet: john_miller@mindlink.uucp Macintosh Consulting and Software Development (Would you rent this brain?) _____________________________________________________________________