Somebody at my university's IT department did me a favor

[MagicBoy]

... i386 mac (why not 286 or 486?) ...

The 386 was the first (what we now call an x86) Intel CPU that was 32-bit and had a memory management unit that enabled technologies like virtual memory. The instruction set did not significantly change until the Pentium Pro ten years later, so it's the common denominator of 32-bit Intel CPUs.

The Mac equivalent in technology would be the 68030 IIRC.

 

[eyoungren]

The 386 was the first (what we now call an x86) Intel CPU that was 32-bit and had a memory management unit that enabled technologies like virtual memory. The instruction set did not significantly change until the Pentium Pro ten years later, so it's the common denominator of 32-bit Intel CPUs.

The Mac equivalent in technology would be the 68030 IIRC.

As I recall, the reason for enabling virtual memory was because the 286 and 386 had a 1mb limit on ram.

So you had XMS, EMS and HIMEM.SYS all working together through AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, depending on what you needed for what particular function allowing you to load/access memory functions past 1mb.

Then Windows got involved and it all went to hell because Windows uses it own internal crap to muck things up.

But yeah. The instruction set was pretty much the same damn thing for ten or more years.

 

[Carlanga]

I've been enjoying my Intel MacBook so far. Browsing is faster and HD playback is a breeze, but the graphics are utterly horrendous. How they were able to greenlight a chipset as bad as GMA 960/965 is beyond me. That doesn't matter at all though since I don't use it for games.

Thats nice, my current computer is a macbook that I own since 2007, has GMA 950 (I think I ran COD II at one time, and age of empires III I think it was, both ran fine) I do recommend the unofficial mod 10.8 found in the forum (if it still exists), it works much better than the crap 10.7 they officially left the machine with. So smooth compared to the 10.7 that I didn't have to go and get a new mac thanks to it.

 

[MagicBoy]

As I recall, the reason for enabling virtual memory was because the 286 and 386 had a 1mb limit on ram.

So you had XMS, EMS and HIMEM.SYS all working together through AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, depending on what you needed for what particular function allowing you to load/access memory functions past 1mb.

Then Windows got involved and it all went to hell because Windows uses it own internal crap to muck things up.

But yeah. The instruction set was pretty much the same damn thing for ten or more years.

The 286 could in theory address up to 16MB, the reason most machines shipped with 1MB was twofold :
1) Accessing more than 640KB (the infamous DOS limit) required EMS as a workaround which was a pain to implement for developers.
2) Badly written applications coded using the wrong mode.

The 386 could address up to 4GB, enabled XMS memory in DOS/Windows and we didn't run into the 4GB limit for a good 20 years, not that any 386 ever supported that much RAM...

 

[bunnspecial]

I don't quite get that. CS2 would run on an Intel Mac via Rosetta. Unless the 2Gb memory limit on the early Core Duo machines was an issue for him?

You have to take what KR says with a grain of salt. As I said, he's somewhat infamous in photography circles for exaggerating.

With that said, from what I understand of early Rosetta implementations(remember, the linked article was written in early 2006, when the first Intel Macs had been out for a few months) is that they only emulated a G3 processor. At its best, it only emulated a G4, which is still a bottleneck for a program like CS2 that can take full advantage of the G5 instruction set. For someone who makes their living working in Photoshop all day, that would be a big bottleneck, and a high-end G5 would have made a lot more sense than an early Intel computer.

I realize that within a year(2007 or so), Intel computers could outperform all but the best G5s in most circumstances with sheer horsepower and improvements in Rosetta(I think that Leopard in the fall of '07 helped things out even more). Intel-native CS3 also came out in April of 2007. Again, though, if you're making your living on this stuff, a year or year and a half is a long time to wait.

 

[MagicBoy]

Actually, yeah that's a good point. Rosetta did emulate G4/Altivec by the time Intel Macs were on sale, my Feb build machine shipped with 10.4.5. I'd think it was early dev builds that were G3 only.

 

[128keaton]

Thats nice, my current computer is a macbook that I own since 2007, has GMA 950 (I think I ran COD II at one time, and age of empires III I think it was, both ran fine) I do recommend the unofficial mod 10.8 found in the forum (if it still exists), it works much better than the crap 10.7 they officially left the machine with. So smooth compared to the 10.7 that I didn't have to go and get a new mac thanks to it.

Nice. White book? I've got two of those, one running Mavericks pretty smoothly.

 

[Carlanga]

Nice. White book? I've got two of those, one running Mavericks pretty smoothly.

yes, but an older version than yours, mine can't run not even official 10.8.
(MB062LL/A) The middle one here: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP18?locale=en_US I do have it maxed to 3GB ram and a bigger HD