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This is kind of cool...

Submitted by vantage point on September 15, 2005 - 2:14am. 680x0 Macs and Lisa

This is kind of cool: surfing the web on my 33MHz 68040 based Quadra 950.

I gotta tell ya, browsing the web on an unupgraded Quadra 950 is not nearly as painful as I thought it would be. The iCab browser does a very respectable job of rendering webpages and everything looks, for the most part, as it would on a more modern browser, on a more modern computer.

Sure, the Quadra 950 is a little sluggish in actually putting the webpages on the screen, but once it does, it's truly breathtaking. I've been looking into acceleration options for this Quadra and I think I may have come up with a decent combination that will make websurfing on the Quadra a much more pleasant experience.

I don't want to pursue any of the PPC upgrade options that are available for this machine; I want to keep it 100% 68k. I've discovered that logic board for the 950 can be clockchipped to provide something between a 15 and 50% boost in performance. I've also discovered that the addiction of 128KB level-2 cache can boost performance by as much as 20%.

I think that boosting the speed of the machine through a clockchip will give me a little better processing performance, the addition of the cache will let the faster processor receive data faster, and if I had an accelerated video card to one of the Nubus slots, I should, hopefully, see a bit of a boost in image rendering. I'm hoping that these enhancements will make this Quadra 950 a half decent web surfing machine.

Now I know that this machine will probably never be able to handle Java, Flash animations, or any of the other cool stuff that burdens the 68k Macintosh computers, but it's just so cool to still be able to surf the web on this machine -- and to do it with images enabled. Smiling

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davintosh's picture

There was a day...

Submitted by davintosh on September 15, 2005 - 3:24am.

... in the not too distant past when a Quadra 950 was my Main Machine at work, and I did everything from web browsing & downloading software updates (using IE 4 on a 28K modem) to high-end Photoshop editing (Unsharp Mask on 300dpi images was painful) and printing 8-page spreads to an imagesetter. At home I believe I had an LCII that did e-mail and minimal web browsing (early version of IE.) Anything of substance on a web page was usually aborted after a few minutes of waiting.

And now I complain about my 333MHz beige MT and "slow" DSL connection.

» Obsolescence is just a lack of imagination.
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I'm responding on my beige G3...

Submitted by vantage point on September 15, 2005 - 3:38am.

I'm responding on my beige G3 this time, cuz my Quadra 950 is busy rendering a seemingly complex webpage. I created a RAMdisk and set the browser to use the RAMdisk for the page cache. Some of the graphics appear to load a bit faster, but I suspect the real bottleneck is in the processing required to render and display the images. Webpages that comprise text almost exclusively, Google, for example, seem to load somewaht faster on subsequent visits.

I'm hooked. I'm addicted to finding some way to make my Quadra 950 a decent websurfing machine without upgrading to a PPC processor...

Hmmm...

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In my experience, the best wa

Submitted by dead_elvis on September 15, 2005 - 4:52am.

In my experience, the best way to get a decent browsing experience on a 68k mac is to turn images off, or use the Wannabe text browser. It limits what you can do, but at 16-33 mhz, ya gotta make sacrifices.

» "One day I shot an elephant in my pajamas. What he was doing in my pajamas I have no idea."

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I use my IIfx quite regularly

Submitted by sfinro on September 15, 2005 - 7:33am.

I use my IIfx quite regularly as a web-surfing machine, because of its excellent Radius monitor. Sure, it is slow, but it gets there in the end, and iCab renders most pages reasonable well.

» Romana: 9600 with Sonnet G3/400. 384mb RAM, 8gb + 4.5gb HDD, OS 10.3.9
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Re: I use my IIfx quite regularly

Submitted by vantage point on September 15, 2005 - 5:44pm.
sfinro wrote:
I use my IIfx quite regularly as a web-surfing machine, because of its excellent Radius monitor. Sure, it is slow, but it gets there in the end, and iCab renders most pages reasonable well.

I concur, your worship, and move to strike all suggestions that a 68k Macintosh cannot be a respectable web browsing machine.

I agree, sfinro, my Quadra 950 and iCab do a rather impressive job of rendering web pages. Although, I will concede that they often do so at a speeding snail's pace. Eye-wink

Gotta find a way to go faster... Gotta find a way...

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merty's picture

Web surfing machines 68k

Submitted by merty on September 15, 2005 - 8:57pm.

Yeah well I have been using a macintosh powerbook 190cs as a web browsing machine it's real slow because I only have a 10mb network card installed and i'm running IE 4 (can't seem to get icab or wannabe going)

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Re: Web surfing machines 68k

Submitted by vantage point on September 15, 2005 - 9:34pm.
merty wrote:
Yeah well I have been using a macintosh powerbook 190cs as a web browsing machine it's real slow because I only have a 10mb network card installed and i'm running IE 4 (can't seem to get icab or wannabe going)

Somehow I really doubt that your 10Mb Internet connection is to blame. It's much more to do with the 190cs itself than anything else. In reality, you wouldn't see any better performance if you were using a 100Mb Ethernet connection or even a 1Gb ethernet connection. The bottleneck is the slow 68k processor and the bus of the 190cs.

It's still cool to be able to still use the 190cs for surfing the web though. I don't see too many people in the PC world using old 286 and 386 processor based machines to surf the web.

I forget, did the PowerBook 190cs use a 68040 processor or a 68030 processor?

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coius's picture

040

Submitted by coius on September 16, 2005 - 12:17am.

the PB 190 used an 040 processor. Those machines were slow as hell. I think a Duo 280 could outpace it

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merty's picture

look at this

Submitted by merty on September 16, 2005 - 9:56am.

Have you considered turning your mac into a web server?
Heres a website with a directory of old apple web servers
http://macintosh.luddite.ca/
It has a Lisa web server

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alk's picture

Why do you say that?

Submitted by alk on September 19, 2005 - 5:37am.

Both the 280 and 190 use the same CPU - 33MHz 680LC040. The bus speed is the same on both. RAM speed is the same. Neither has L2 cache.

They should be neck and neck in any horse race.

Peace,
Drew

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