Recent content by bigD

Do that machine a favor and install System 6! :)

Nice work!

I was in middle school, but even then I understood that the initial 68K Powerbooks were revolutionary. Especially the 170 with its active matrix display. You've gotta remember that they were released at a time when laptops looked like this...

That's a fantastic first 68k Mac! Enjoy it.

I think the GeoPort telephony stuff made use of the DSP as well. The only other thing I remember seeing was a fractal application that (I believe) came with the DSP development tools - it had all the source code with it too. Interesting stuff, but I remember it being well beyond my meager...

My Quadra 700 feels *substantially* faster than my 50MHz IIci. The benchmarks confirm this, especially when it comes to FP. The '040 is simply a much faster chip on a clock for clock basis. That said, there are few things in vintage computing more satisfying than running System 6.x at 50MHz. :)

Welcome! Happy to see another '030 user running System 6. :) Nice machine!

I have a Houdini II that I've always wanted to get running in my Quadra 700, but misplaced the cable during a move. I'd love to have a replacement - if you build some adapters I'd be happy to buy one from you.

When I was young my Dad’s best friend bought an 840av with the 14” AudioVision display, and it was a pretty impressive piece of hardware for the time. The speakers were high quality, a mic was built in (speech recognition!) , and of course Sony’s Trinitron technology was highly regarded. I...

I don’t have the technical knowledge to be any help, but I thought I’d mention that it’s been really interesting reading your posts as you work through this. Good stuff! 

I assume the crystal provides timing for other stuff on the motherboard...is there a way to isolate any of it such that you can increase the clock for the CPU without affecting anything else?

Back in my collecting days I had an LC with the 12” display, and it’s surprising how compact it is. I ran it with dual floppy drives, making it essentially silent (this was before SCSI2SD!). It was a cute little setup, and if people dragged their compact Macs around in bags - I suppose this...

That thing is pretty cool. Curious, what’s the big connector along the right side of the board for?

I'm a zealot about running System 6 - especially on compact Macs, but it's all in good fun!

Growing up I used WriteNow, but these days I use Word 5.1a on my vintage hardware - mainly to make it easier to integrate with the current stuff. Although most ‘writing’ I do on my 68k machines these days is code or simple html, and for that I use BBEdit Lite.