Recent content by William Hern

I repeated my scrolling tests for Nisus today, both with and without the FPU card. The scrolling speeds for both proportional and fixed-width TT typefaces were unaffected by the presence/absence of the FPU card. I think that we can conclude that the FPU won't help you in your quest to speed up...

Ah, I'd forgotten that it was included in later MacOS installs. I've have a root around my disks and see what I can find. Unfortunately the Classic II's performance bottlenecks are likely too fundamental to be resolved by the addition of an FPU. However I'll do some more testing next week and...

Yes, it was. To be honest, the more I think about it, the less I'm sure that the performance gains came from the presence of the FPU. Looking at the stats in Nisus, the document had 492 lines when Times 12pt was used and 568 for Courier 10pt. That's enough of a difference to explain the faster...

One further update: I repeated my tests in Mini vMac and saw similar variation in the scroll timings for Nisus - Times 12pt was about ten percent faster than Courier 10pt. Given that vMac emulates a standard MC68000 Mac system, I don't think that the difference in timings that I was seeing on...

As promised, I ran some scrolling tests on my Mac Classic II (System 7.5.5, 10MB RAM and 68882 FPU) with Nisus 4.1.6. Using the text of the sample Report document that Nisus includes, I timed the length of time to scroll the length of the document, using the down arrow key. The document was 14...

I'm happy to try running some tests on my FPU'ed Classic II to see if the FPU does make a difference for text handling (particularly scrolling). It will probably take me a couple of days to get set up but I'll report back when I have some measurements.

I was able to run Mathematica 2.0 successfully from the first download on this Macintosh Garden page - https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mathematica-2

The only software that I'm aware of that requires the presence of the FPU is Mathematica. I've been able to run this on my Classic II successfully, with maxed out RAM (10MB) and the FPU. Other software may be sped up by the FPU - I can see a difference in the benchmark scores for floating point...

Thanks for doing this! I've really enjoyed reading these discussions and so it's very helpful to have the two threads combined into one.

Busy restoring a Mac Classic II to full operation ...

Fair point - "requires" is too strong a word here. Let me rephrase as "it is sensible to implement memory protection alongside pre-emptive multitasking". Without memory protection, the stability of the overall system is limited to the stability of the least reliable piece of software running...

The original vision for the Macintosh project, when it was led by Jef Raskin, was for a low cost $500 computer. It would have featured the 8 bit 6809 processor (with a 64K memory limit) running at perhaps 2 MHz, so multi-tasking was not viable for memory and performance reasons. Leaving aside...