Big Mess o' Wires

That's how I wish it was for me but it's not. So far the largest charger I've been able to find only has 2 USB-C plugs. So, switch + pixel + pocket wifi + macbook air

Then I have lots different computers. My Macbook Air has USB-C, my MacBook Pro has USB-A, My brand new desktop PC has USB-A, my Razer laptop has both USB-A and USB-C, my Playstation has USB-A. I have USB-A SD-Card readers and USB-A hubs.

Then, when If first got the Macbook Air I ended up going through 3 different USB-C hubs until I finally figured out how to buy one that actually supported 4k-60hz (the first 2 only supported 4k-30hz). Then later, I tried to use the Razer on a USB-C monitor. It worked but at some point the keyboard and mouse were flaky. Turned out apparently I needed a Thunderbolt HUB, not a USB-C hub (plugs are the same) so now I've gone through 4 hubs.

you can read about the 4 or 5 kinds of possible USB-C hubs you might end up with if you're not careful. I have no idea how a non-techie figures this out.

https://www.bigmessowires.com/2019/05/19/explaining-4k-60hz-video-through-usb-c-hub/

And then, I still have 3 iPhones that all use lighting (USB-A to lighting) and a few other devices at are USB-Micro (Kindle for example)

And several external hard-drives that are all that USB-3 wide plug to USB-A

I'm sure by the time USB-D arrives USB-C will be great and all my cables will be USB-C on both ends and all my devices will only have USB-C sockets but right now it's a mess

> The big storage breakthrough came in 1977 when Apple introduced the Apple II, its first mass-produced computer. It came with two 5-¼ inch floppy drives.

Not quite. The Disk II Interface Card wasn't available till 1978. It supported two drives. But the card and drives were options. A couple ads re-affirming my memory:

https://brian.carnell.com/articles/2021/apple-ii-ad-1978/

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d9/92/81/d99281c7517692b4809398ff3f4ce686.jpg

The second ad has this copy:

> Apple II'™ is a completely self-contained computer system with BASIC in ROM, color graphics, ASCII key board, light-weight, efficient switching power supply and molded case. It is supplied with BASIC in ROM, up to 48K bytes of RAM, and with cassette tape, video and game I/O interfaces built-in. Also included are two game paddles and a demonstration cassette.

I owned an Apple II fully loaded and upgraded to a II+. (I actually still have most of it in a closet and someday need to get it functional again.)

The Disk II Interface Card was another one of Woz's legendary designs:

https://www.bigmessowires.com/2021/11/12/the-amazing-disk-ii-controller-card/

> So yeah, if you want to help, that's where to contribute your effort.

Gentoo and Arch are good options. However, in the long term classical Linux will likely only be able to run on retro systems and FREE HARDWARE! If Gentoo and Arch want to survive they should focus on free hardware pretty soon.

I think so because upcoming mainstream hardware will likely all be based on UEFI/SB. SB is yet optional but I expect it to be mandatory soon. Only Linux with certified kernels -- likely systemd Linux -- will be supported on those systems. I don't like that because I want to be able to install up-to-date kernels and software at any time without messing around with proprietary certificates.

The Monster 6502 [1] was an excellent starting point into a world of discrete SMD cpus. I hope there will also be a 16/32-bit cpu capable to run Linux (or its successor). At least 68katy [2] is capable.

The most promising project however is RISC-V which will hopefully be available with non SB-mainboards.

[1] http://monster6502.com

[2] http://www.bigmessowires.com/category/68katy/

[3] https://riscv.org

Reminds me of this compression project from a few years back from Steve Chamberlin at Big Mess O' Wires, FC8.

FC8 is designed to be as fast as possible to decompress on "legacy" hardware, while still maintaining a decent compression ratio. Generic C code for compression and decompression is provided, as well as an optimized 68K decompressor for the 68020 or later CPUs. The main loop of the 68K decompressor is exactly 256 bytes, so it fits entirely within the instruction cache of the 68020/030. Decompression speed on a 68030 is about 25% as fast as an optimized memcpy of uncompressed data.

The algorithm is based on the classic LZ77 compression scheme, with a sliding history window and duplicated data replaced by (distance,length) markers pointing to previous instances of the same data. No extra RAM is required during decompression, aside from the input and output buffers. The match-finding code and length lookup table were borrowed from liblzg by Marcus Geelnard.

https://www.bigmessowires.com/2016/05/06/fc8-faster-68k-decompression/

This is why I was so excited when I heard about this. I have a Mac Classic II in the role of "transfer station" - it has a SuperDrive (the floppy drive, not the CD/DVD drive), so can read both standard IBM 1.44MB disks as well as the Mac 800K ones. But it's been getting a bit temperamental recently, mainly due to failing capacitors and an old SCSI hard drive.

FluxEngine completely eliminates the need for it - I can download a 800k system disk image, write it to a physical floppy disk, and use that. What's more, transferring individual files is easy now too: I can read back the physical disk to a DiskCopy image, and either mount that in an emulator such as Mini vMac, or convert[1] it to a raw disk image and mount it with hmount[2]. (The reverse process is similar).

[1] https://www.bigmessowires.com/2013/12/16/macintosh-diskcopy-4-2-floppy-image-converter/

[2] https://linux.die.net/man/1/hfsutils

4k60 + gigabit is not possible without going up to Thunderbolt 3 - there isn't enough bandwidth otherwise. The best you can do is 4k60 + USB 2.0 (so a gigabit Ethernet connection would cap out at ~300mbps in practice.) See https://www.bigmessowires.com/2019/05/19/explaining-4k-60hz-video-through-usb-c-hub/

DisplayPort 1.4 changes this, but everything seems to be stuck on 1.2

100W is, of course, possible.

I use a CalDigit USB-C Pro Dock with my MBP: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07VL675DT - it's TB3, but it can fall back to USC-C (with reduced capabilities, of course). It uses Intel's newer Titan Ridge chipset. The older and more common Alpine Ridge chipset is TB3 only.