apple2freak{at}gmail.com wrote:
> On Mar 5, 3:50 pm, "Michael J. Mahon"  wrote:
>> apple2fr...{at}gmail.com wrote:
>>> Regarding the Apple II -- it is a beautiful computer -- but the design
>>> was constrained not only by the principles of simplicity, elegance,
>>> and efficiency, but also by cost and the technological limitations of
>>> the time.  If you remove the latter two limitations (well, at least
>>> the technological limitation anyway), and put yourself in Woz's shoes,
>>> what new works of beauty might you come up with?
>> That's an interesting question.  I'd like to think it would head off
>> in the direction of parallelism--multiple copies of a simple unit that
>> could do wonders in concert.  (The Propeller, or the AppleCrate, comes
>> to mind.  ;-)
>>
> 
> This is exactly what reconfigurable hardware will let us explore, and
> coincidentally exactly the sort of input I was hoping to get in this
> thread (although everyone's contributions have been a pleasant
> surprise as well).
> 
> With reconfigurable hardware, how many parallel Apple II computers
> could be simulated?  Probably quite a few, depending on the size of
> the FPGA.  Certainly a lot more than could be emulated (especially at
> accelerated speeds) even on a modern high performance PC with multiple
> cores.
> 
> I imagine some good fun could be had with a dozen virtual Apple IIs
> running with 50MHz 6502s and all connected with a virtual nadanet,
> huh?  All using the existing toolchains developed 25 years ago for the
> Apple system.

In the late 1970s, I was quite fascinated by the possibilities of
wafer-scale integration, where all the unseparated dice were
interconnected into a mesh network.  As integration trends became
clear, I wondered what could be done with a wafer of a couple
hundred 6502s checkerboarded with RAM dice!  (It's pretty easy
to deal with the inevitable non-working dice.)

Now, that could be a 12" wafer with a thousand processors and
RAM dice, all in a 2D mesh, running at hundreds of megahertz.
The wafer would have to be bonded to a power distribution plate
and run submerged, of course, but it would still be a lot of fun!

> And of course you could do exactly the same thing with a dozen or so
> Apple IIs with suitable accelerators in them all hooked up with
> nadanet, although it would be a lot more of a pain to physically
> connect everything together.

Not too bad, actually, if you can remove the boards from their
cases.  ;-)

-michael

******** Note new website URL ********

NadaNet and AppleCrate II for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

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