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From: bmug@garnet.berkeley.edu (BMUG)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Is Apple Dumping Mac IIs?
Message-ID: <1989Oct13.223420.17194@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 13 Oct 89 22:34:20 GMT
References: <1989Oct12.163734.26748@agate.berkeley.edu> <963@bridge2.ESD.3Com.COM> <1989Oct13.165741.28675@agate.berkeley.edu>
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In article <1989Oct13.165741.28675@agate.berkeley.edu> steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield) writes:
>I don't think it's unreasonable to expect--when you buy a machine
>with six empty slots, with the selling point that the slots will
>be used in part for technology improvements--that all the new
>improvements would be made available through the slots at a
>reasonable cost. My Mac is only 2 years old after all.
>
Slots *are* useful, if you want to add mondo memory for RAMdisks or
A/UX operations, multiple serial-port controllers, DMA cards for
SCSI devices, internal modems, multiple video controllers, data
acquisition devices, etc.  Not bad compared with what was available
on Macs before...
>
>Apple apparently is choosing (somebody correct me if there are
>more reasonable justifications for what they are doing) to
>upgrade its technology in ways which force consumers to buy
>entirely new machines to get the latest technology, rather than
>to upgrade through plug-in boards in the slots that Apple sold
>them.

I can understand why you'd like to simply slip a card into a slot
and have a newer, faster machine.  However, there is one big problem
with doing this on a Mac II: the Nubus is rated at 10mh.  The Nubus
spec (which Apple has only partial say about) is for 10mh.  It is
possible to bump that up with some fancy hardware modifications, or
the way NeXT did using non-standard methods, but for all practical
purposes, putting a 25mh 030 on a Nubus card would not be a very
good solution.  Of course, Apple could have opted for a higher-speed
bus, but then that would have driven the cost of the machine through
the stratosphere.  The Nubus is fine if you want to add something like
a coprocessor to the machine, however, if it doesn't demand too much
speed.  

If you want a faster machine, one way to do it is to get something like
a DayStar board, which these days will give you over 33mh.  It is also
entirely possible that a logic board switch will be available in the
future to bump the old venerable II to beyond x stage.

John Heckendorn
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