I finally got around to refurbishing my troublesome IIci with a MacIvory III, the last and most powerful of the NuBus Lisp coprocessor boards running Genera, and a direct descendant of the MIT Lisp machines. This machine all told has cost me over $6000, first the $4500 purchase price - which arrived DOA with a hard disk full of soft errors - and then recapping and rebuilding it, plus the 1x CD-ROM it requires.
The current configuration now has a recapped AppleCD 150, a DayStar 50MHz PowerCache '030 in the PDS slot, an 8*24*GC graphics card (Lisp machines need big screen real estate and I wanted it to be fast), an Apple Ethernet NuBus card, a ZuluSCSI main drive and the main attraction, a Symbolics MacIvory III with a 30.75MHz Ivory CPU and 8 megawords of 40-bit memory. I needed to instrument the PowerCache's PDS pins to get it to seat reliably, install a second case fan and replace the power supply.
Benchmarks, screenshots and general vitriol in the post (who's wicked fast now?). It runs Genera 8.3, the last version available for real Symbolics hardware, on 7.1. Incidentally, my numbers show that the 8*24*GC is indeed a fast card but acceleration doesn't seem to make as big a difference as Apple claimed.
oldvcr.blogspot.com
The current configuration now has a recapped AppleCD 150, a DayStar 50MHz PowerCache '030 in the PDS slot, an 8*24*GC graphics card (Lisp machines need big screen real estate and I wanted it to be fast), an Apple Ethernet NuBus card, a ZuluSCSI main drive and the main attraction, a Symbolics MacIvory III with a 30.75MHz Ivory CPU and 8 megawords of 40-bit memory. I needed to instrument the PowerCache's PDS pins to get it to seat reliably, install a second case fan and replace the power supply.
Benchmarks, screenshots and general vitriol in the post (who's wicked fast now?). It runs Genera 8.3, the last version available for real Symbolics hardware, on 7.1. Incidentally, my numbers show that the 8*24*GC is indeed a fast card but acceleration doesn't seem to make as big a difference as Apple claimed.
Refurb weekend: the Symbolics MacIvory Lisp machine I have hated
Every collector has that machine, the machine they sunk so much time and, often, money into that they would have defenestrated it years ago...
oldvcr.blogspot.com
