Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!sgi!decwrl!infopiz!lupine!rfg From: rfg@NCD.COM (Ron Guilmette) Newsgroups: comp.sys.m88k Subject: Re: 88k Macintoshes? / New 88k family member Message-ID: <2406@lupine.NCD.COM> Date: 3 Nov 90 23:56:58 GMT References: <127@raysnec.UUCP> Organization: Network Computing Devices, Inc., Mt. View, CA Lines: 49 In article twl@cs.brown.edu (Ted "Theodore" W. Leung) writes: > >... If they { apple } go to the 88k, they'd >better give people a really good reason to junk their old >applications... I don't see why such a transition should require end users to junk their existing applications programs. Hasn't a program to convert 68000 object code to 88000 object code been built? If not why not? It would seem to me to be a trivial exercize, given that you actually have *more* registers to play with in the 88000 and than in the 68000. The only other requirement for static conversion of existing object files that I can think of is that Apple would have to make sure that all of the software interrupts that hook you to specific functions in the old OS still hook you to similar (or identical) functions in the new (88k) OS. Gee! Now that I think of it, why hasn't DG written such a program? Aren't there a lot of people out there who have spent big bundles of money buying binary applications for Sun 2's and Sun'3 who now are in a position of having to kiss off those investments if they want to get horsepower upgrades to their hardware along Sun's prefered upgrade path (i.e. Sun 4's)? Could DG capture this market if they had a 68k => 88k binary code converter and if they did a bit of OS fiddling? I believe that 68k => 88k conversion would be one hell of a lot simpler than say 68k => sparc conversion (but I could be wrong). Am I oversimplifying? Is the Pope Catholic? Well maybe. Maybe there really is no such market, or maybe the market is just too small to be significant. Or maybe if the vendors of the original binary applications that ran on the original machines found out that their customers were running those applications on CPU's for which they were not licenced (and which even had different instruction sets!) they would frown upon the practice. Still, aren't there companes that make and sell binary converters which allow you to run your crusty old MS-DOG programs on various other (non-Intel) architectures? -- // Ron Guilmette - C++ Entomologist // Internet: rfg@ncd.com uucp: ...uunet!lupine!rfg // Motto: If it sticks, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.