In the not quite two years that I've been in the throes of rampant
Macoholism (see A Love of Simple
Elegance, b.b's "My First Mac" story), I've been lucky enough to
find (or have given to me) some of the more choice (nay,
legendary!) goodies of MacYears-gone-by to play with: Dove's
"MacSnap" SCSI and RAM upgrades on an original
1984 Mac, DayStar Turbo 040 accelerators, a Radius Color Pivot
monitor, Apple Two-Page and Portrait Displays, a Logitech handheld
"ScanMan," etc.
I suppose that's one of the payoffs of being a "late bloomer" here
in this Mac game: what was once a $6,000 toy for the privileged few
may now be a $3.95 thrift store item, which translates into an
empowering tool for someone else. [Aside: Macs have only
now truly become "the computer for the rest of us" - they have
always been "the computer for those who can afford them"!] What
makes me giddy about all this is that (for mere pennies, really) I'm
getting to play with (and pass on) utterly useable toys that I never
could have afforded had I been a MacHead "back in the day" and
certainly couldn't afford now if they sold for their original
"retail" price.
Nowadays, financially challenged MacHeads can take heart that
these things are set out by curbs by the compassionate and tossed
into dumpsters by the unconcerned on a regular basis. More often than
not they end up on thrift store shelves for basically nothing. Latest
case in point: getting to play with a pair of those most legendary of
Mac accelerators, a couple of Radius
Rocket 33's, in a Mac IIci.
Before this little crash course in Rocket Science, I really didn't
know anything about them, and I figured that they were basically an
'040 accelerator like the DayStar Turbo 040 series, meaning they
simply "replaced" that poky '030 IIci or IIcx processor with a
screamin' 33 MHz of Real Quad Power.
That's all accelerators do, right?
Different
I was about to find out different. I was in the midst of getting a
big bunch of Mac goodies in the mail: I'd just found the
aforementioned Color Pivot monitor for $12 and was in the process of
getting video cards and cables from far-flung buddies on the
Vintage Macs list. William Ahearn was sending the Color Pivot
Interface Card and his faithful old IIsi
from New York, and Ken (Harbourmaster) in Hawaii was sending the
cable to get the Pivot working. As a surprise bonus, Ken tossed in a
toy he'd recently gotten to play with, a Radius Rocket, along with a
few disks of software for it. I buckled down to the task of getting
the Color Pivot working in a dual-monitor setup in the IIsi for some
friends, and I left the Rocket in its box to play with later, when I
could spare a slot and partially behead the Fearsome
Four-Headed Turbo IIci.
In a flurry of thrift store visits a couple of days later, I found
yet another IIci for about six bucks. I was really on the lookout for
4 MB
SIMMs that I could toss in the SE/30
I'd gotten from Kyle Hansen in California and figured I could stand
another IIci in the house for about the price of one SIMM! I lifted
the lid on the IIci, only to find inside a full-size NuBus card with
RAM SIMMs on it in the first NuBus slot - a Radius Rocket! Well,
that cinched the deal. Plopped down my six bucks, got home and
started looking at my new prize.
Yep, those were 4 MB SIMMs on Bank 1 of both the mobo and the
card! I booted it up, got a second boot, and then saw a cool Rocket
splash-screen and heard an excellent "whoooooosh!" launching sound. I
was a happy boy! Houston, we have liftoff!
Having had the DayStar Turbo 040 in The
Terrible Three Headed Turbo IIci (before it grew its last head),
I knew how "fast" it felt. This Rocket was rated at 33 MHz, the same
speed as the DayStar, but it just felt speedier and smoother. Very
nice!
I couldn't figure out why the "About This Macintosh" screen
claimed 19 MB of RAM, when I was certain there were 20 MB on the mobo
and 20 MB on the card itself. More info was obviously required. A web
search turned up little good operational info, but I did find a
reference to the original retail price: $2,499 per Rocket. I had a
fit of giggles trying to work out what my total "discount" off the
retail price of a IIci and a Rocket was! In exploring the hard drive,
I discovered that this IIci had passed through the hands of jag,
resident MacHead of the Goodwill ComputerWorks here in Austin, fellow
LEM listie.
Not really knowing how the Rockets worked, I turned to the Vintage
Macs list for some hints. After getting to look like a complete and
utter newbie one more time, I finally found out what made Rockets so
special. With the RocketWare software, they functioned as plain old
accelerators, but with another software package called
RocketShare, they gained the ability to be booted as a
completely separate Mac (a Quadra
950, to be precise) within the host Mac.
You could, theoretically at least, have as many Rockets as you had
NuBus slots. This was mind boggling: You
could have up to four Macs in one box with a IIci and (gasp!) six
Macs-in-one with a IIfx!
The implications, as John Allan in London said, "Impressive, but
what good is it? What do you do with it?" One could be
batch-processing images in Photoshop, another could be crunching big
numbers, and you could be cruising the web and doing email with the
third. Now that would rock - true "multitasking" on an
eleven-year-old machine! Who needs multiprocessor G4s anyway?
A IIci with a pair of Rockets would kick serious vintage Mac butt.
A IIci with a pair of Rockets and a DayStar Turbo 040 (in the
cache-card slot) would kick even more. Suddenly I'm 17 again, back in
the garage, tryin' to tune those damned triple carburetors on a '64
GTO. Of course, the parallels between hot rod cars and hot rod Macs
were fully explored over the next few days on the Vintage Macs list
and even spawned a few new/old hit songs: the inevitable molding of
the Beach Boys-era "car songs" to fit our twisted MacGeek purposes:
William penned a great little number (to be sung to the tune of
"Little GTO" by Ronnie & the Daytonas) in honor of my
Rocket-powered IIci - look for the album soon.
The new IIci was quickly dusted out, spruced up with some GooGone,
and dubbed "Apollo." It seemed only appropriate. I dug the second
Rocket and the RocketShare disks out of the box from Hawaii, stuck
the Rocket into a free NuBus slot, and installed the software. The
main application you work with in the RocketShare software is called
"Mission Control". The whole Rocket theme is carried out quite well
throughout the design of the software. The main "Equipment" window
shows your main CPU and however many Rockets you happen to have
installed, which are initially referred to as "so-and-so's Rocket
33-1" and "so-and-so's Rocket 33-2," using whatever owner's name is
in your Sharing Setup Control Panel (see screenshot).
From the Equipment window, you can launch or test your Rockets, as
well as perform other tasks, such as creating/assigning "RocketDisks"
(soft partitions on your hard drive with System 7.1 System Folders on
them) to boot your Rockets with, set the resolution and color depth
of each Rocket's desktop, set disk cache performance, and adjust
other preferences. There is a "Programmers Mode" that, if invoked,
will provide you with an onscreen reset and interrupt button for each
Rocket, and the ability to zap the PRAM and call up MacsBug, if it is
installed.
As I played with the setup and read more of the excellent on-line
help within Mission Control, I learned that the Rockets are
essentially "AppleTalking" to your main computer thru the NuBus
slots. You can even rename the Rockets with the Sharing Setup control
panels in their respective System Folders. Of course, in keeping with
the Rocket theme, and taking into account antiquity (mine, the Mac's
and the Rockets') these two Rockets had to be dubbed "Sputnik" and
"Telstar."
As you "launch" each Rocket, a separate desktop window opens up
for it. This is a complete Macintosh desktop in a smaller window on
your regular desktop. Each Rocket gets its own separate window,
complete with menu bar and Trash. If you choose "About This
Macintosh" from the Apple Menu of one of the Rocket windows, you find
that it does, indeed, think it's a Quadra 950 (see screenshot).
All in all, the whole RocketShare package is impressive. A click
brings either of the two Rocket desktops, or the Mac's, to the
foreground. The Mission Control app is very slick and gives you
plenty of options as far as interfacing with the Rocket desktops. In
theory, the whole RocketShare idea is an absolute knockout. In actual
practice, trying to get two Rockets to behave equally well in a IIci
was an entirely different matter.
Aside from the odd hang upon launch, the two Rockets essentially
performed as advertised: I had two separate Quadra 950's inside the
Turbo 040 equipped IIci - Three Quadras in One Box!
Vrooom-vrooom, rev-rev. It's just that one of those three carburetors
sputtered a bit. OK, not just a bit, a lot.
While one Rocket behaved quite well, and opened/closed windows and
launched apps like a true second Mac, faster than the one I was
using, the other suffered from painfully slow general response and
agonizingly slow screen draws. The window-opening and closing
animations took a full three seconds, in which you saw every "frame"
of the animation in slow-motion, while the cursor flickered between
the spinning beach ball and the pointer. Add to this some odd
artifacts that were left in the wake of any movement of the mouse
(pixels that were the wrong color/shade in patterns that resembled
items in windows that were either behind the one open or that had
just closed), and it was an excruciating experience just opening a
folder. Everything else on the "slow" Rocket seemed to function, but
the heinously slow response was screaming that something was wrong.
Meanwhile, the other Rocket and the Turbo IIci were just hummin'
right along.
The final result of trying to solve this problem was quite a
learning experience for me, as has been just about every adventure
into MacLand so far.
At first, I thought it was because of a jumper setting (there are
three jumpers on each Rocket, only one of which we came up with a
purpose for) or a difference in the amount of RAM on the two Rockets:
one of them had 20 MB and the other had 8 MB. Bumping the second
Rocket to 20 MB made no difference. The online help alluringly refers
to a section in the User Manual on curing sluggish video performance.
Having no manual, I tried logical troubleshooting procedures on each
Rocket to see if it was something "standard" - trim
extensions/control panels to a bare minimum (and discover in the
process that you need the networking extensions, of course), zap the
PRAM, rebuild desktops, reduce number of colors within each Rocket's
desktop, do clean installs of System 7.1 (the preferred System for
Rockets) on all the RocketDisks, fresh install on the Mac - no dice.
Then it was a test to see if it was specifically one of the Rockets
malfunctioning: switch slots.
Here's where the root of the problem was finally found.
Whichever Rocket was in the outermost NuBus slot did great;
whichever one was in the slot closest to the cache card slot
suffered.
Several thousand posts to Vintage Macs and one MacFixIt Forum
Topic later, and it was conceded that the NuBus slots on the IIci do
not get equal "juice," and whichever Rocket was unlucky enough to be
placed in an "inner" NuBus slot suffered a dramatic handicap in
performance due to the uneven NuBus power inherent to the IIci.
Benjamin Koh had pointed out earlier that the Rockets demand more
than the IIci power supply can provide. In other words, Apollo,
Sputnik, Telstar, and I weren't gonna fly together happily ever after
into MacSpace after all (sigh) unless I was willing to put up with
the lousy performance. I decided I wasn't.
Undaunted, I tried it with just one Rocket and was pleasantly
surprised. A single Rocket in the outermost NuBus slot will function
beautifully (if a tad jerky, visually) with RocketShare on a IIci. In
practice it was a hoot. I fired up AppleWorks and did a silly graphic
on the IIci. Clicking to the Rocket, I launched Photoshop, pulled the
graphic to the Rocket, and played with it a bit. I saved the final
doc as a JPEG, closed Photoshop, and dragged a folder full of images
over the BigPicture icon, hit "cmd-A," and started a slide show on
the Rocket. Clicking to the Mac desktop, I started a new doc in a
small window in SimpleText. The slide show continued without a hitch
on the Rocket desktop, dimmed in the background. Clicking between the
two was a bit jerky, but it was pretty easy to get the hang of
working with multiple Mac desktops at the same time. Several other
"real-life" situations were run, and the total system performed
great. Two Macs-in-one worked quite nice enough.
I could see that if it were implemented right, this idea would've
been revolutionary. A side experiment where I put the two Rockets
into a IIcx, though, was pretty
laughable - both Rockets choked! The IIcx NuBus can't deal with the
demands of the Rockets in a much worse way than the IIci! One of the
respondents to the MacFixIt Forum Topic didn't mince words, declaring
the Rockets to be "pieces of s***," saying he and his colleagues had
tossed theirs off a building.
My experience of them was like most everything else I've found
about Macs so far: work within the limitations, and you're pleased as
punch. Push them too far, and you'll be reaching for that reset
button far too often to call your user experience a success.
For now the dream of "Three Quads in a Box" is on hold, especially
since I have decided to try the two Rockets for a while in the
Power Mac 7100/66 that I'm getting
ready for my niece. I haven't had much chance to push them, but
initial indications are that, while there is still a slight
difference in performance between the two Rockets, they are on a much
more even keel, so to speak, with the 7100's NuBus slots. The level
of "handicap" is much more acceptable, and both Rockets respond well.
More details as I get to work with them more. Of course, this 7100
has got to move on eventually, and I'll be looking for a Quadra
840AV or 950
to try these pups in.
A Google search turned up a
reference to a page on the AppleFritter
site that made me drool: a Seventies-boy's MacHeaven! A true Holy
Grail to pursue! You must understand that turning information like
this loose to a bunch of crazed Vintage MacHeadz is dangerous:
remember, we're talking about people who have planned road trips to
Utah landfills to dig up the Lisas!
SkyLab
"As far as Mac Prototypes go, one of the most glorious I ever saw
was the Radius 'SkyLab.' That was the development name for the
project we were working on. Radius at that time was an early Mac
peripheral manufacturer. We had made a Mac II accelerator called the
Radius Rocket.
"The SkyLab was a server with 14 NuBus slots and a power supply so
huge you could do arc welding on the side with it. It also had
fifteen 3-1/2" drive bays, and four 5-1/4" drive bays (for CD ROMs or
optical drives).
"The idea was for it to be a dedicated Image RIPer for graphic
houses. It never happened.
"I was a Radius employee from 1988 to 1997. The SkyLab box was
just as I described: power supply, drive bays and slots. The
processors were the Radius Rocket Accelerators. Each Radius Rocket
contained its own 68040 Processor and six 72-pin SIMM sockets. The
concept was that it would operate as a distributed processor. A
render farm. Your computer would have a plug-in that would break down
your tasks and divide it amongst the Rocket Processors.
"At the Time of development, we didn't have an agreement with
Apple. Only after showing SkyLab to Apple did they have us sign a
Licensing agreement. (This was before the PowerPC clones.) An
interesting result of the licensing agreement allowed us to use the
actual Mac ROMs, but we were forbidden to include a boot floppy.
Which was fine, since the whole thing ran from a console application
anyway. So we had a Mac SE/30 as the console, but it would run with
almost any '020 Mac.
"Another stipulation of the agreement was that we could not
actually come out and say we were using the Mac ROMs. This was
because at the time DayStar Digital and a few others were working on
accelerators, and Apple didn't want to look as if they were playing
favorites.
"From what I remember it was possible to boot the whole shebang
from a floppy, but for fear of God and Apple it was not pursued or
ever mentioned ever again. Using the SE/30 or a Mac IIcx, the whole
thing was run like a headless server. The ROM issue was handled by us
loading the ROM image into RAM. I forget why we did that, but just
another aspect of the goofiness."
-by Anonymous Former Radius Engineer
Dangerous info, that. Even worse, a few days later we were all
teased with the possibility that one of these might still exist.
VMac'er Gregg Eshelman made contact with one "JFK" who claimed to
have seen a SkyLab at his workplace - "stuffed with Radius Rockets"!
Holy Grail, indeed!
Back to Rockets
Throughout the troubleshooting/learning process of trying to get
the Rockets working in the IIci, a lot of things were observed
(coming soon to a FAQ near you). Here are some of the observations
made by me and other folks on the Vintage Macs list:
Rockets are quirky - deal with it.
A single Rocket with the standard RocketWare software is a
quite stable and speedy "traditional" accelerator for a IIci or
IIcx.
A single Rocket with RocketShare performs as a separate Quadra
950 in a IIci quite well, as long as it is placed in the outermost
(left-hand-side) NuBus slot, furthest away from the cache card
slot.
The RocketShare software won't install onto a System that has
Open Transport. The installer says that it cannot "replace the
item 'Network'. No Installation may take place." A clean install
of 7.1 with "classic" networking on the IIci, and RocketShare
installed just fine. It installs its own version of AppleShare, so
I'm assuming that it won't install if it detects that the version
of AppleShare on the "host" Mac is later than the one it is
installing.
While using RocketShare, having the cache-card slot be empty,
filled with Apple cache card, or of with a DayStar Turbo 040 card
had no effect on Rocket performance: any performance difference
was due to NuBus slot placement.
You should remove jumper J2 on the Rocket 33 only if you are
using 120 ns RAM on the Rocket itself.
Stage II Rockets (a later model that sported a full 40 MHz
'040) do not exhibit this sensitivity to NuBus slot placement.
Perhaps the Stage II Rocket's design was vastly improved in the
energy-usage department, enabling the host Mac to handle them more
gracefully.
A mix of Stage II and Rocket 33's seems to run stable,
also.
I would really like to get in contact with some of these Radius
folks from back-when who worked on the Rockets or the RocketShare
software and ask some questions! (In fact, if any of you original
Rocketeers might chance to read this, please email
me!)
As I get a chance to work with the Rockets in this PowerMac 7100,
I'll definitely have the chance to "push the envelope" and see just
what they're made of with a much more solid NuBus foundation than on
the IIci.
Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.
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4 MB
SIMMs that I could toss in the 
You
could have up to four Macs in one box with a IIci and (gasp!) six
Macs-in-one with a 
