I believe that I can acquire either an Ivory II or Ivory III board. How much
of an improvement is the III over the II?
I will also need to get an old macintosh for the Ivory. Which old mac makes
the ideal host for the Ivory board?
How much memory should my Ivory board have?
How much memory should the mac have?
What version of the macintosh system software will I need to set up the Ivory?
You may safely assume that the macintosh described above will be used
exclusively to run the Ivory and not for any macintosh applications.
Thanks in advance for your assistance.
-- Rich Robbins
In article <··········@nntp.interaccess.com>, ···@interaccess.com (Richard
E. Robbins) wrote:
> I believe that I can acquire either an Ivory II or Ivory III board. How much
> of an improvement is the III over the II?
Much. The MacIvory 3 is a single board (which takes up
two slots due to its size). The memory is on a daughter board.
So you won't need to access the memory via the Nubus (which
would be slow).
> I will also need to get an old macintosh for the Ivory. Which old mac makes
> the ideal host for the Ivory board?
Something with enough slots. You may want a Ethernet card for
the MacIvory and one for the Mac (maybe) and than you need graphics.
Some of the Macs have onboard video and ethernet. Look for
some Mac IIfx, Quadra 950, Quadra 840, ... 68040 Macs are faster
for the graphics stuff.
Make sure you have a *fast* graphics card with fast bitblt
operations. Genera uses large screens and large bitmaps.
Get a >= 17" color monitor and a 2 GB disk.
> How much memory should my Ivory board have?
As much as you can get. 8MW is great.
> How much memory should the mac have?
Atleast 8 MB. You won't need much more.
> What version of the macintosh system software will I need to set up the Ivory?
You can safely use 7.5 and up. This may depend on the system software
you have for the MacIvory.
Greetings,
Rainer Joswig
······@lavielle.com (Rainer Joswig) writes:
> In article <··········@nntp.interaccess.com>, ···@interaccess.com
> (Richard E. Robbins) wrote:
>
> > I believe that I can acquire either an Ivory II or Ivory III
> > board. How much of an improvement is the III over the II?
> [...]
> > I will also need to get an old macintosh for the Ivory. Which old
> > mac makes the ideal host for the Ivory board?
> [...]
> Make sure you have a *fast* graphics card with fast bitblt
> operations. Genera uses large screens and large bitmaps.
>
> Get a >= 17" color monitor and a 2 GB disk.
maybe a better choice for coding are grayscale monitors, that have
not color (oh yes :) but are cheaper, _have_better_definition_(*),
use less power
also, my personal idea of lisp machines (correct me if i'm wrong)
includes (requires) a grayscale monitor!
ciao
gb
* one electron beam to focus, versus 3 electron beams -> lesser
eye-strain, unbelievably less indeed
In article <··············@rachele.stru.polimi.it>, giacomo boffi
<·····@rachele.stru.polimi.it> wrote:
> > Get a >= 17" color monitor and a 2 GB disk.
>
> maybe a better choice for coding are grayscale monitors, that have
> not color (oh yes :) but are cheaper, _have_better_definition_(*),
> use less power
You won't get that much grayscale monitors nowadays. Personally
I have worked with them, but I like the color screens more.
If you can afford it, get a TFT LCD screen. Those are really good.
I hope that next year they will take off.
> also, my personal idea of lisp machines (correct me if i'm wrong)
> includes (requires) a grayscale monitor!
Oh no, the Symbolics MacIvory supports color on the Mac. You
can generate your graphics in color, no problem. Also
there were/are special combinations of Genera/Nuvista Cards/S-Products
which made it possible to use the Symbolics graphics suite
on the Mac.
Years ago we had a 3640 with two screens at the University. One
of them was a large color screen.
Greetings,
Rainer Joswig
In article <··········@nntp.interaccess.com>, ···@interaccess.com (Richard
E. Robbins) wrote:
>I believe that I can acquire either an Ivory II or Ivory III board. How much
>of an improvement is the III over the II?
i think the III is much faster. i don't remember the details, but among
other differences, was the fact that the III had on-board memory, whereas
i believe the II had to access memory on a separate card, and i think
this slowed it down somewhat.
>
>I will also need to get an old macintosh for the Ivory. Which old mac makes
>the ideal host for the Ivory board?
those old machines should all be pretty cheap by now. in my opinion, the
best by far would be the quadra 950. avoid the quadra 840, which,
although it has a slightly faster processor, has an incompatible nubus
controller, i'm told. anything above a mac II would be acceptable, but
you'd certainly be happier with something with a 68040.
the ivory board takes two slots physically (one electrically) because it
is very wide with it's daughtercard. be sure that you have enough slots
for the various cards that you might want (network, display, etc.). a
non-ancient mac (like the q950) comes with pretty good built-in display
hardware and built-in ethernet, so you could get by comfortably with a
3-slot machine. the 950 actually has 5 or 6 slots - overkill. i think
there are a couple of other quadra-series machines with 3. the
bigger/more monitors the better. greyscale monitors are generally both
cheaper and sharper than color monitors of the same size, and for most of
what people do in the ivory environment, there's no significant loss w/o
color.
>
>How much memory should my Ivory board have?
as much as possible.
>How much memory should the mac have?
ivory doesn't really demand much memory from your mac. i think a minimal
amount would be 8M or so, 16 would be safer and would make the mac useful
for things other than ivory, too.
>What version of the macintosh system software will I need to set up the Ivory?
i can't remember exactly, but i think i ran under 7.1. compatibility
beyond that, i know nothing about.
--
David A. Duff
The MITRE Corporation
AI Technical Center
703-883-7731
····@mitre.org
In article <···············@fbma.tuwien.ac.at>, ········@fbma.tuwien.ac.at
(Clemens Heitzinger) wrote:
>Could someone explain what an Ivory exactly is? How much does it
>cost? Any information would be appreciated.
>
"ivory" was the name of a family of processors produced by symbolics for
their lisp machines. it was fairly advanced and innovative for its time,
as were the techniques used to design it, as was the operating system and
software development environment that ran on it, etc.
in the context that it has been used recently in this newsgroup, "ivory"
was being used as a nickname for the macivory product which symbolics
produced. this was a nubus processor board which contained an ivory cpu
and memory and which used the host macintosh for i/o, display, disk, etc.
it was a nice idea. symbolics had a hard time competing in the area of
manufacturing hardware. they made very nice products, but it was very
hard to keep the prices competive with the relatively small volumes they
were selling. macivory was one step towards addressing this problem,
allowing symbolics to put all the lisp-specific hardware on a single
processor board and leverage off-the-shelf stuff for everything else.
unfortunately, i think it was too little, too late. symbolics made some
bad strategic decisions. the world embraced ibm-compatible pc's, sun took
over the workstation market, c and c++ became the most predominant
languages for software development, "ai" and "lisp" became bad words
during the "ai winter" of the early nineties. the rest is history, as
they say.
depending on how you looked at it, the macivory was either very expensive
(cost more than the machine that housed it, in almost all cases) or very
cheap (cost less than a lisp machine). i don't remember off the top of my
head, but i think to get a macivory with a healthy amount of memory cost
on the order of $20k.
nowadays, you'll undoubtedly see them showing up in the dumpsters of the
companies and universities that used to have AI labs (and are now calling
them something more trendy like "advanced information management").
--
David A. Duff
The MITRE Corporation
Intelligent Information Management and Exploitation (formerly AI Center)
703-883-7731
····@mitre.org
David Duff (····@mitre.org) wrote:
: nowadays, you'll undoubtedly see them showing up in the dumpsters of the
: companies and universities that used to have AI labs (and are now calling
: them something more trendy like "advanced information management").
You must hang around better dumpsters than do I.
Anyone tossing a MacIvory III?
--
Christopher Oliver Traverse Communications
Systems Coordinator 223 Grandview Pkwy, Suite 108
······@traverse.com Traverse City, Michigan, 49684
(lambda (r) ((lambda (f) (r (lambda (x) ((f f) x))))
(lambda (f) (r (lambda (x) ((f f) x)))))) Y ask Y?