Mac II question

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Thu Oct 19 10:49:16 2000

> Does anybody know more about this accelerator? What kind of
> performance does it yield compared to, say, one of the later
> Quadras? Are there basic differences in the I/O and bus
> architecture that will prevent the 68040 from reaching its
> full potential on a Mac II mainboard as opposed to a 68040
> in a Quadra? Do Quadras have faster SCSI?

Don't know about the accelerator, Daystar is either out of
the Mac business altogether, or at least not making accelerators
anymore; Sonnet resells some Daystar stuff; a web search should
yield more info.

Quadras vary significantly in their apparant speeds; we've had
Quadra 605s (an LC-II class machine, 16 or 25MHz 040 sans FPU),
Quadra 700s (Mac IIci form factor, 25MHz 040 w/FPU), Quadra 650s
(33MHz 040 w/FPU), Quadra 800s (80MHz 040/40MHz bus w/FPU) and
the similar Quadra 840AV which has two SCSI busses (busi?) using
a different chipset or on-board acrchitecture.

But as a comparison, on some tasks, the 25MHz 700s are as fast
as the 33MHz 650s; on other tasks, the 650s were faster.

I have a Mac IIci at home with the Radius Rocket installed
(mine is the 33MHz version). Different accelerator (the
rocket has its own RAM and plugs into a NuBus slot); it is
definitely not as fast as a Q650, and maybe not even as fast
as the Q700. However, software was available called Rocketshare
which made it possible to run the Mac in sort of an SMP mode.

> Also, the machine has two floppy drives; how do the Mac II
> drives rank among those found in Apple machines in terms of
> usefulness/durability?

The earlier 800k floppy drives weren't Superdrives (actually
standard 1.44/2.0MB floppies), IIRC; I think the Mac IIci was
the first with those. Not sure if a retrofit is possible.

Mac owners tend to have been less sophisticated, and either
never cleaned their floppy drives, or cleaned them wrongly;
however, I've seen few that totally quit working. They usually
just refuse to read floppies written on drives other than
themselves.

regards,
-dq
 
Received on Thu Oct 19 2000 - 10:49:16 BST