Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

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> faster chip from Motorola could have been only MC88100+MC88200

So all Next had to do was

1 Develop another set of ASICs for fully incompatible CPU bus in parallel and in secret

2 Develop another motherboard in parallel and in secret

3 Manufacture another motherboard in parallel and in secret

4 Port NextStep to another fully incompatible CPU arch in parallel and in secret

5 Kill all the developers involved so none of this ever came out

> accelerator, on an expansion card

graphics on expansion, accelerator on expansion, additional HDD, new color monitor, new OS. Sound like in your alternate reality NSA paid $6K a pop for 20000 magnesium boxes with new incompatible with anything NuBus backplane offering whole 3 free slots, so $2K per slot.

No ASICs would have been needed for an expansion card with MC88100.

The interface bus of MC88100 was actually the same that was inherited by the first PowerPC CPUs a few years later, when Apple, IBM and Motorola cooperated to make the PowerPC specification, based on the IBM POWER ISA.

It would not have needed any ASICs, but just some PALs to interface with the on-card memory. The expansion card would only have needed to make the on-card memory also readable and writable by the host MC68030 CPU through NuBus, which would also have required only some PALs, no ASICs.

Your price estimate is likely to be around the correct value, so there is no doubt that CIA/NSA did not try to save pennies when buying all this hardware.

The NeXT computer was more expensive than an IBM PC/AT, but otherwise in all this configuration there is only the MC88100 card that is added in comparison with the CAD workstations that I have used myself in 1990, at a company with a moderate budget for such acquisitions, so there is no doubt that US TLA agencies could purchase something better.

A MC88100 accelerator card would have cost as much as an entire computer with its peripherals, but this just means that such a workstation would have cost as much as 2 standard CAD workstations, like the ones I used. Surely CIA/NSA could afford that.

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