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At one point, one of my partners had a hand-me-down PowerPC apple laptop.
Does that count as Ancient? :)
Does that count as Ancient? :)
Maybe, maybe not, but it's an interesting platform nonetheless. I quite liked the PPC-based machines in the Lombard/Pismo era. Great keyboards, relatively robust, repairable. Too bad MacOS was a dunce in that era. They made nice NetBSD machines though. I had a later Titanium machine too, but I never got NetBSD running well on it and kept it on MacOSX Tiger, which was livable.
From what i remember she ran Linux of some sort on it. i had my own laptop, so didn't pay much attention, and while the tech in me can appreciate the PowerPC architecture, but i was not ( still not ) an apple fan.
The apple transition from Motorola to PowerPC was disappointing. The 68000 didn't live much longer after that, and the 68000 was superior in every way to the 8086. It had a flat 32-bit memory space from the beginning. Segmented addressing should have been rejected by the entire industry as soon as it came out. Decades later we're still stuck with it.
POWER and PowerPC were interesting only in observing that IBM kept so many different variants around for so long. They were similar enough that even to this day you run the "PowerPC" Linux kernel on a POWER machine. The convergence of AS/400 and RS/6000 onto the same architecture (now "System i" and "System p") speaks volumes about how little variance there really was inside those machines all along. It's just the half century old System/3X all grown up :)
Even their biggest mainframe processors are really just POWER wrapped by a whole lot of microcode.
You can thank Bill gates for that.
Segmented addressing should have been rejected by the entire industry as soon as it came out. Decades later we're still stuck with it.
Supposedly IBM rejected the 68000 because of supply chain issues and support infrastructure. But we can definitely go ahead and blame Microsoft anyway
:)
My beloved Altos 586, which was the first computer Uncensored ran on in 1988, had an 8086 CPU ... but they added an MMU so it could run Unix properly, and it also had two Z80's, one for the disk controller and one for the communications controller. What a beast of a machine. But it still had to deal with the 8086 and Xenix ran Microsoft's busted C compiler where you had to deal with "small" and "large" memory models.
I really liked the 68000, despite the fact that it didn't have an onboard MMU (as any Amiga user knew all too well). PowerPC did from the beginning, but the beginning was more than a decade later.