In house Mac Plus upgrade card for 68020 coding makes a world of sense. I'd like to see how that PSU contraption looks installed on the an open Plus chassis. Why button them up at all? Might that oddly placed fan have been pointing at the hottest parts of the Plus A/B?
If David Ramsey programmed on a "Big Mac" prototype, I'm sure Apple came up with something in house with HDD that could be more widely distributed, if a bit slower. Then again, how much raw performance did you really need for coding in that time frame? My dad did plenty of it on far less powerful "Big Iron" at IBM for many years in the 60's and early 70s. Timeshare terminals seemed to be fine for coding at college in the mid-70s.
"Most of MacPaint was developed on a "Big Mac" prototype-- a computer that was a design study for the next Macintosh. Basically it was a 16mHz 68020 version of a Mac Plus. Cases were never made, so it was simply a 1 foot square circuit board mounted on a piece of wood, connected to a 10 megabyte SCSI hard drive.
I used the Big Mac prototype since it was faster and more reliable than the Macintosh II prototypes available. It was never produced, and designer Rich Page left Apple to work at NeXT shortly after his design "lost" to the slotted Mac II."
folklore.org
edit: I'm wondering if the "Big Mac" prototype might possibly have been a 12MHz machine or if the Macintosh II prototypes were 12MHz?
If David Ramsey programmed on a "Big Mac" prototype, I'm sure Apple came up with something in house with HDD that could be more widely distributed, if a bit slower. Then again, how much raw performance did you really need for coding in that time frame? My dad did plenty of it on far less powerful "Big Iron" at IBM for many years in the 60's and early 70s. Timeshare terminals seemed to be fine for coding at college in the mid-70s.
"Most of MacPaint was developed on a "Big Mac" prototype-- a computer that was a design study for the next Macintosh. Basically it was a 16mHz 68020 version of a Mac Plus. Cases were never made, so it was simply a 1 foot square circuit board mounted on a piece of wood, connected to a 10 megabyte SCSI hard drive.
I used the Big Mac prototype since it was faster and more reliable than the Macintosh II prototypes available. It was never produced, and designer Rich Page left Apple to work at NeXT shortly after his design "lost" to the slotted Mac II."
Folklore.org: Evolution Of A Classic
edit: I'm wondering if the "Big Mac" prototype might possibly have been a 12MHz machine or if the Macintosh II prototypes were 12MHz?
