Macintosh 128K Teardown
ifixit.com
ifixit.com
"But American business practices, they are very strange. Very strange." said the Japanese engineer, when he figured out they were hiding from the boss ...
We aren't just going to stop once our laptops are paper thin and lightning fast (ha ha), so what will it be? The future is a vast frontier even today with how far we've come.
Although we likely will see huge world-changing advancements that will be taken for granted in the future, much like the integrated circuit is now, the concept of a computer as we know it today probably won't disappear.
Death by CRT is definitely possible in theory and the lack of real-world examples could be an issue of shoddy reporting (i.e. cardiac arrest due to electric shock minus a CRT as the specific reason) but I'd think think that across the millions and millions of CRTs sold there'd be at least one concrete report of a death.
Does anyone know of any?
Ground the probe or screwdriver, then slide it under the rubber cup shielding the... good-grief, I've forgotten which. Anode connection of the tube.
The tube/circuit could/can carry considerable charge for a significant period of time. Simply unplugging the mains power lead was not sufficient protection for a person working inside the case.
But, the case was "easily" open-able -- aside from complaints about the non-standard screw heads and difficulty separating the halves if you didn't have a tool to insert into the seam and pry them apart.
And once you were inside, things were pretty accessible. There was even an entire cottage industry documenting and recommending/selling replacements particularly for analog components on the power board, some of which were perhaps a bit under-spec-ed in the original designs and prone to noticeable deterioration as well as outright, total failure.
The problem is, not everyone would know what they were doing. At least with current tech, the worst that can happen is you ruin your computer and not your life.
One the one hand, I take your point. On the other, people wrote books documenting the whole thing and you could replace that defective capacitor yourself. (Significantly less expensive than having a technician swap the power/video board, particularly if you did not have AppleCare. And you could replace it with a more robust part, so that you were not in the same circumstances again 6 months or a year later.)
I guess with the relative decline in price of whole subsystems -- in some cases -- these days, the greater availability of those, and -- again, in some cases -- the personal safety if not always ease of swapping them out, something might be said for "increased repairability". On the other hand, I don't think the Classic Mac design rates a 0/10. Lots of things back then could kill you. These days, you can't even purchase a real chemistry set for your kids, or in some cases hardly glassware for yourself.
How many CCFL-backlit laptops are they shipping these days?
EDIT: Also, high voltages, on their own, aren't necessarily dangerous. Tesla coils can run into the tens of kilovolts, but can be perfectly safe if they're properly constructed.
good-grief, I've forgotten which
That was a fun place to work. The guy who ran the place hated people touching his tools so he'd charge up a fat capacitor and drop it in his toolbox. Anyone rummaging unwarily soon learned a lesson.
The low-end Mac Pro has four cores at 3.9GHz each. I believe they'll do in the neighborhood of 3 instructions per clock cycle at peak performance, so that means the total is 3.9 x 4 x 3 x 1000 = 46,800 MIPS. Roughly. So in the neighborhood of 50,000 times faster when looking at the CPUs.
The GPUs make it outright ludicrous. The low-end Mac Pro does 2 teraFLOPS on the GPUs. Even if we're charitable to the 68000 and consider its 1 MIPS roughly equivalent to 1 MFLOPS, the Mac Pro is still two million times faster there.
And of course the Mac Pro is substantially cheaper when adjusted for inflation. Although it doesn't come with a display, nor any input devices.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Disk_Swappers_Elb...
[1] of course pushing compositeless full screen cga or even vga doesn't require the same architecture complexity
In comparison to all of this, a processor running at 8MHz that could do full 32-bit operations (though, yes, the external bus was half that) and with 16 32-bit registers. and no segments...mind blowing!
[1] That is, things that fit in mostly-16-bit data sets. Once framebuffer manipulation became the dominant operation a few years later, that status would flip. Nonetheless if you were trying to compile your code, model your circuit or calculate your spreadsheet as fast as possible in 1984, you'd probably pick a PC/AT over a Mac (if you couldn't get time on a VAX).
If you look at the cycle counts for 8086 instructions - see, e.g., http://zsmith.co/intel.html - they're much closer to the 68000 ones. Compared to the 68000, the 286 is just on another level.
Obviously all the Unix vendors jumped on the '10 instantly. The MK68000 itself was never dominant there.
Apple used to be much more open about their products. The service guide goes into great detail about how to disassemble the Mac - it makes the teardown almost redundant: http://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/legacy/macintosh_128k.512k.pd...
A hardware note: the iFixit teardown points out the "74LS393 Video Counter" chips - these are just plain TTL binary counter chips, not special video chips, so I don't know why it's pointed out as notable. The 6522 Versatile Interface Adapter (bottom center) seems much more notable.