Thread
SkyLab Lore & eBay piccies . . .
. . . of an auction long ago in a place far, far away.
I'll have to search out the posts here and on 'fritter about this auction. IIRC this was in my last months in the Big Apple and I was likely more than a bit psychotic (undiagnosed manic episode) at the time. The search may prove interesting . . . or not. =8-\
Radius SkyLab
LEM article: Rocket Science 101
I'll have to search out the posts here and on 'fritter about this auction. IIRC this was in my last months in the Big Apple and I was likely more than a bit psychotic (undiagnosed manic episode) at the time. The search may prove interesting . . . or not. =8-\
Radius SkyLab
LEM article: Rocket Science 101
Where are all the NuBus slots mentioned in the article? I have a Rocket I bought a while ago to play with, not sure what I would use it for. Suggestions?
My guess is that those two PDS lookin' EuroDIN connectors on the underside were for a pair of, or one very large, NuBus Risers for the Rockets. I've never actually counted pins, but the rectanglular cross section says PDS pincount to me.
With one stack of fourteen Rockets, that'd mean the PSU(s)(?) and Drive Bays would stack front-n-back on the other "side" of the Rockets above the MoBo.
Under RocketShare with the DSP DaughterCard, or the more affordable STORM Card, in DSP support, coupled with a PAS16, SAII Card or equivalent, I think an early nineties IIfx MPEGDEC stereo output CoPro rig would BD'Bombe. [}
] ]'> PixelPlaytime in PhotoShop on another Rocket using the DSPs on the NuBus Card for a 21" Display with your playlist/panel in a window or on a second monitor along with your menus would be killer. you'd still have slots for a SCSI II Card and NIC left over in that config.
A custom multihreaded parallel co-processing App running multiple Rockets under A/UX? SETI work units? All new driver setup for 'NIX though.
Dunno, I'm a knuckle dragger, programming is beyond my purview, but that'd be the place for hackin' a Rocket, it never happened other than Radius' RIP code back in the day as I recall. Having that code re-surface would be better'n having a complete SkyLab turn up, especially the source code! [
] ]'>
With one stack of fourteen Rockets, that'd mean the PSU(s)(?) and Drive Bays would stack front-n-back on the other "side" of the Rockets above the MoBo.
Under RocketShare with the DSP DaughterCard, or the more affordable STORM Card, in DSP support, coupled with a PAS16, SAII Card or equivalent, I think an early nineties IIfx MPEGDEC stereo output CoPro rig would BD'Bombe. [}
] ]'> PixelPlaytime in PhotoShop on another Rocket using the DSPs on the NuBus Card for a 21" Display with your playlist/panel in a window or on a second monitor along with your menus would be killer. you'd still have slots for a SCSI II Card and NIC left over in that config.A custom multihreaded parallel co-processing App running multiple Rockets under A/UX? SETI work units? All new driver setup for 'NIX though.
Dunno, I'm a knuckle dragger, programming is beyond my purview, but that'd be the place for hackin' a Rocket, it never happened other than Radius' RIP code back in the day as I recall. Having that code re-surface would be better'n having a complete SkyLab turn up, especially the source code! [
] ]'>
Are these the only photographs known to exist?
I think it might not be quite as amazing as it seems, Trash-80. From what little I know of AppleEvents, one could cook up a parallel-processing application on System 7 using all supported interfaces. Then you'd just need a big old stack of Macs connected together with AppleTalk, and you could have at it.Having that code re-surface would be better'n having a complete SkyLab turn up, especially the source code! [
Such a "MAC CLUSTER" in a box full of Rockets would have obvious advantages because of the speed and latency of the AppleTalk connection. But if you were doing something sufficiently compute heavy and embarrassingly parallel, even LocalTalk might be OK.
As an example, maybe a parallel implementation of a really naive prime number test? Evenly divide up the integers between 1 and SQRT(N) between all the nodes in the cluster. Each node attempts to divide N by all the integers in its allotment. Virtually zero network traffic necessary, and it'd scale almost linearly with the number of nodes in the cluster. It would also be useless except as a proof of concept.
Heck, a skilled programmer who wanted to do it could write a Photoshop plugin to use a farm of Rockets for things like gaussian blur. You'd have to send the hunks of image data back and forth across the AppleTalk, so it wouldn't be very efficient, but it'd be a really impressive hack!
I seem to recall that Adobe Premiere had this capability built in way back around the Quadra era.
I don't really know, but I haven't searched for any, more may have turned up since the 1994+- time frame.
HRMMM? < . . . fires up google . . . >
p. 1 hits:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jim-wolcott/4/ba4/a32 may be well worth contacting!
http://www.mail-archive.com/rocketeer@mail.maclaunch.com/msg00200.html
http://www.cbronline.com/news/radius_skylab_multimedia_server_to_pack_12_rockets
http://www.applefritter.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.pl?board=hacks;action=display;num=1075668076;start=15
Cinemo's 68kMLA thread/post linked at the end of my thread seems to be gone, was it lost in the great crash?
pp. 2 & 3 hits:
http://www.kennedybrandt.com/supermac_insider/history/index.html
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-mac68k/2004/01/19/0003.html
It looks like someone else came up with the Rocket/MPEGDEC angle, I don't ever remember seeing this article.
http://new.lowendmac.com/sable/05/1213.html
Google Image Search turned up bopkes, BTW. :-/
I posted about this auction 4 mos. before I had to shut down that lifetime and flee to NC to recover at my brother's place, definitely psychotic in retrospect. Thank God for supportive family. I've had to do the Phoenix gig three times already and hopefully this will be the last of my series of lifetimes. Take good care of yourselves gang, a mind is a terrible thing to lose.