On Sun, 8/11/13, J.S. Garrison <[email protected]> wrote: Subject: Re: Expert Vintage Member's Input Needed To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Sunday, August 11, 2013, 6:49 PM There's the home run I was looking for! Thanks, Dylan, you've earned your stripes in the knowledge department. Next phase of the dilemma would be, since the IIsi was already 32 bit clean, what was this experimental ROM SIMM intended to do? Guess I'd need a working IIsi to go there. --------
AFAIK, no IIsi shipped with a ROM SIMM and none were released later. From what you described it's probably from a prototype or possibly an engineering sample IIsi. A sort of "Holy Grail" of vintage Mac lovers are the "Mr. Clean" ROMs for Macs made prior to the IIci. Tid-Bits ran a short article on them, someone found a box with "Mr. Clean" written on it, in storage at Apple. In it were ROMs for the SE/30 and other Macs. It was presumed they were 32 bit clean ROMs used during the design of System 7.0 and the IIci. Having 32 bit clean ROMs for the SE, SE/30, and the pre IIci Mac II models would be very nice. Apple could have produced and sold them as upgrades but chose not to. :-( Nobody knows if they're still hidden somewhere at Apple. Apple's prototypes they released to developers (which they were supposed to later return but some didn't) tended to be almost identical to the production versions. The next stage was engineering samples, which almost always were identical to productions versions except sometimes missing labels on the cases. That was the last step for finding any problems or bugs Apple's own testing failed to find, and at least once they somehow missed a huge problem, but it turned out to be a non-issue because the product got canceled. Some years ago I conversed on IRC with a person who worked in Micron's RAM compatibility testing lab. Apple had sent the company several second version "Super Cubes" and every one of them had one of the RAM slots that didn't work*. A week later the Super Cube was a dead product. The disassembled ones (the lab always took the test subjects apart to mount the boards in fixtures so swapping RAM multiple times would be easier) are likely still in a bin in a Micron warehouse somewhere in Idaho. I figured that was the final nail for the Super Cube, after the slow sales of the original Apple didn't want to waste money fixing such a major screwup. I used to have a Yeager prototype Duo 280 (but alas, not the 280c) which had the lid and screen from a 250 on it and production style lables on the bottom stating it was a Yeager Prototype Unit, Not For Resale and that it was NOT tested to comply with FCC regulations. There was a glitch somewhere in the ROM which caused all the black pixels in window titlebars to be white in a narrow vertical stripe below the Edit menu. Only the title bars were affected, everything else on the screen was fine. I also had a Duo 230 engineering sample with no lables at all on the bottom and the printing on the screen bezel was different from the production version. Far as I could tell the ROM was identical to production. How'd I know it was an ES? It had pink labels on its innards with ENGINEERING SAMPLE and a note written in Sharpie on the metal frame - Glued and tested ground clips - followed by a date. I booted both clean and used a ROM image utility on them. I most likely have those files somewhere if someone wants to do a compare with production versions. *IIRC it was around the time Intel managed to have a similar bug in thousands of motherboards they shipped with one RAMBUS slot non-functional. HTH does a company like Apple or Intel manage to get a computer mainboard to a production state with a non-functional RAM slot? I guess it's a similar kind of stupid to the 47 story condo building that's almost finished in Spain - where the architects completely forgot to include any elevators in the design. -- -- ----- You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Vintage Macs" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
