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If you've been a Mac fan for more than a few years, chances are you've seen or even used Apple's most famous computer models. What you don't often see are the machines that Apple kept to itself—the prototypes that never reached the market.
To explore this hidden world, we'll take a look at four Macintosh prototypes from Apple, and one from an early Mac clone maker. When you're done reading, we'd love to hear (in the comments at the end of this article) whatever tales you might have of your personal encounters with legendary Apple prototypes.
Translucent Macintosh SE (circa 1987)
During the testing process for many Mac models, Apple's engineers routinely created a few prototypes of a particular computer with translucent plastic housing for air flow testing. Here we see this practice illustrated to stunning effect in this particular Macintosh SE prototype, although other Apple machines—from the Apple IIc to the Macintosh Portable—have been discovered with translucent testing cases.
Why translucent? With the help of a little smoke, engineers could easily see which components were or were not being cooled adequately and then make adjustments accordingly. It would take a new generation of designers to actually utilize translucent plastics in shipping products.
Twiggy Macintosh (circa 1983)
For most of the Macintosh's early life in development, Apple intended its diminutive GUI-based machine to utilize Apple's FileWare (aka 'Twiggy') disk media, a proprietary 5.25-inch floppy disk format that Apple developed for the Apple Lisa.
And that's what you see here: a rare, early Macintosh (that actually works) with one internal Twiggy drive. This particular model, owned by collector Adam Goolevitch, is currently the only one known to exist in such a complete state.
FileWare drives never shipped in a Macintosh, however. The Lisa launched with two Twiggy drives in 1983, but the drives proved slow and error-prone in practice. Worried, Mac engineers devised a plan to include Sony's new 3.5-inch floppy format in the Macintosh instead.
(That particular episode resulted in an amusing story about a Sony engineer hiding in a closet—an anecdote that you can find expertly told by Andy Hertzfeld at Folklore.org.)
The final, shipping 1984 Macintosh included one 400K 3.5-inch microfloppy drive, and that inclusion helped popularize the new disk format. It's hard to imagine what the Mac platform would have become if it had stuck with the problematic Twiggy drives.
Colby Classmate (circa 1991)
Electronics engineer Chuck Colby is something of a minor (albeit little-known) legend in Macintosh lore. His company, Colby Systems Corporation, created some of the first Macintosh clones, including the portable MacColby.
In 1991, Colby created the world's first Mac-compatible tablet computer, the Classmate, which would have included a 68000 CPU, a 20MB hard drive, a floppy drive, a trackball, and a touch-sensitive membrane keyboard. At 5.4 pounds, it wasn't as portable as an iPad, but it was a start.
While the Classmate came close to production, it never reached the market, and Colby left the Macintosh development world to work with video technology.
Apple Paladin (circa 1995)
In the mid-1990s, Apple tinkered with creating an integrated, all-in-one office appliance that included a computer, telephone, scanner, fax machine, modem, and printer. The result was the Apple Paladin prototype. It combined the guts of an Apple PowerBook Duo 230 (including its grayscale monitor) with a StyleWriter 1200 printer in a sleek white enclosure.
Early tests of the unit proved problematic, and after an internal corporate reshuffle, the Paladin was left without a division to call home, so it never reached the market.
Apple MultiServer (circa 1985)
In 1985, Apple announced the Macintosh Office system, which would combine AppleTalk networking, a laser printer (the LaserWriter), and a networked file server for use in a business environment.
Of those three components, only two shipped. Apple never managed to release a file server during that era, although it certainly tried to develop one. One such attempt was the Apple MultiServer, seen here in an extremely rare prototype form owned by Jonathan Zufi, proprietor of Shrine of Apple.
Beneath its Apple-branded skin, the MultiServer would have been a rebadged 3Com 3Server, a network server powered by an Intel 80188 CPU. Presumably, it would have run 3Com's 3+ file sharing software and not an OS designed by Apple.
According to Shrine of Apple, the server was cancelled at the last minute and the unshipped units were used for Apple's sales offices.
Apple did eventually ship its own dedicated server systems (the Workgroup Server series), but not for another decade.
Paladin front panel image credit: Jim Abeles
The game update and render loop can average 40 000 cycles and once every few seconds take up to 3X the amount. I know the timing isn't perfectly deterministic, but Casey's version prints 0.033ms/frame very consistently.
I first started with a timer that fires every 1/30 or 1/60 second, but it fluctuates a lot. I thought, maybe the timer isn't accurate, but that wouldn't explain the varying cycles in the game code which only measures the time spend from the beginning to the end of the game update and render loop.
Now that we learned how to start a different thread, I tried running the game on a different thread and as in Windows, do an 'infinite' while loop and adjust the sleep if the game runs too fast than the target ms/frame, but the results are not better, although different...
What's your experience with this? Is this harder to get right on OS X? This seems a trivial issue, so I can't see what I'd be doing wrong.
Note: I run the game at only 640-by-360, to make sure my 2008 laptop should be able to hit a consistent fps.
Is there a good reference to an implementation of a game loop without a timer on OS X?
Casey Muratori is a programmer at Molly Rocket on the game 1935 and is the host of the educational programming series Handmade Hero.
Second, regarding OS X, I would assume that it also always goes through a compositor, so flickering sounds like a strange thing to be seeing. I would suspect that something else might be wrong as well?
- Casey
There's got to be something crucial that I don't get.
What's also weird, is that the tearing happens even when the frame doesn't change. I know how to solve (or rather, minimize) this: by drawing in a separate buffer and right before returning from the gameUpdateAndRender function to the platform layer, copying the pixels from the secondary buffer to the buffer that's passed in the gameUpdateAndRender function as an argument. This buffer is then used to blit to the screen. But it doesn't solve the odd timings, and I don't think I should have to do this...
http://xyproblem.info/
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
I'm more concerned about finding out why the timings are so inconsistent, though. The only possible explanation I can think of is some sort of energy savings... Or I do something wrong, which I would prefer, because then I can hopefully find out what.
Mac Fps Booster
Casey Muratori is a programmer at Molly Rocket on the game 1935 and is the host of the educational programming series Handmade Hero.
So, I can't really offer much in the way of advice because it's been years since I've done any from-scratch programming on Mac OS X, but I would say the first thing to verify is that you are actually using a system service which guarantees low-latency precision timing. Typically, windowing system timers aren't unless they're specifically labeled as such.
- Casey
A software engineer that enjoys living in enemy territory.
I've looked at CVDisplayLinkRef before, but that's only possible when using OpenGL afaik, and it doesn't help with the timing of the gameUpdate function, I think. It only makes sure the framebuffer flips at the vertical blanking interval, I THINK.
Anyway, thank you everyone for reading my ramblings and suggesting options to try. If I can't solve it, I guess I'll see a possible solution at the end of Handmade Hero. ;)
A software engineer that enjoys living in enemy territory.
CVDisplayLink is a timer that is tied to your screen refresh rate (typically 60Hz), but since you use time deltas in the update code, it doesn't matter if it's a 120Hz screen or a variable refresh rate screen.
Mac Fps Boost
I'm seeing that every ~10 frames, the amount of cycles spend in gameUpdateAndRender can be up to 3x during 1 frame, the mystery of this is really what puzzles me the most. Is it possible that this is caused by reference counting? I don't think so, because I thought it should be deterministic as opposed to garbage collection, but I'm not a professional. Furthermore, 3x seems really high and it would make me sad if it's possible that the 3x cycles count every once in a while is caused by reference counting.
A software engineer that enjoys living in enemy territory.
Small off topic question: Now that Swift has support for SIMD, I tried to use it, but __m128i and all the corresponding functions are not declared in my project... I thought it was something I did wrong, but then I found out that __m128i is not supported on ARM, so maybe that's why, and OS X has to wait for proper support. :(
If this is the case: is there a way to reinterpret an integer vector to a float vector without the __m128i type and its functions 'manually'?
What you meant probably is that iOS doesn't support SSE. iOS works on ARM which has NEON intrinsics.
What do you mean reinterpret and integer vector to float vector? Just a cast?
http://xyproblem.info/
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
The problem is that __m128i is not defined in Swift for some reason (I think because it's not needed for ARM and that's what Apple only cares about.)
Can I just cast it instead of converting it? Or is that semantically different? I guess it wouldn't be enough, though, because there's no equivalent float4 function for every int4 function.
