Apple Nearly Moved to SPARC 257
taskforce writes "Sun Microsystems Co-Founder Bill Joy claims that Apple nearly moved to Sun's SPARC chips instead of IBM's PPC platform, back in the mid-1990s. From the article: "We got very close to having Apple use Sparc. That almost happened," Joy said at a panel discussion featuring reminiscences by Sun's four cofounders at the Computer History Museum. An account of his entire presentation can be found on Cnet."
Dupe (Score:2, Informative)
Good decision (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, the SPARC V9 is a horrendeus monster thar is just plain scary when dealing with supervisor level code. IMHO the PPC64 is much nicer than the V9, in many aspects.
But, on the other hand the PPC, has gone out of order, while the SPARC has stayed in order, making the CPU a hell to compile code for.
Architecturally, the PPC is a slight bit nicer than the SPARC, and as a plus, the PPC64 was defined exactly the same time as the PPC32 was, and thus they (PPC32 & 64) are very similar.
In my eye, it was a good decision to go for the PPC.
Re:Fine dining (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Back in the day.. (Score:4, Informative)
Second, Microsoft was a member of ACE and Windows NT was built to run on ACE machines as well as PC's. For those who wonder why NT/2000/XP boots the way it does, the reason is that PC's run special boot code that emulates an ACE bootstrap environment. It could be argued that ACE was the preferred platform for NT and MS internally built ACE workstations as reference platforms. Much of the NT code was developed on them. The ACE machines inside MS had EISA busses and used PC peripherals. ACE even included a spec that allowed ACE machines to use PC expansion cards with modified option ROMS.
It's conceivable that ACE intended the workstations to run a UNIX derivative but I doubt MS saw it that way. It's far more likely, had ACE succeeded, that its main platform would have been Windows. ACE machines, despite their MIPS processors, ran DOS applications! Sorry, ACE wasn't a UNIX workstation, it was a PC replacement that ran MS OS'es in addition to UNIX variants.
Now, about ARC---the PowerPC version of ACE...
Re:SPARC was the dominant chip at the time. (Score:2, Informative)
We used to be really psyched that the PowerMacs had a version of IBM's workstation chip inside (PPC 601/604 chips were in both PowerMacs and AIX workstations). A lot of people bought them for Mathematica as a result.
Re:Back in the day.. (Score:4, Informative)
As for GUI's, OS/2 1.1 (the first with a GUI) was introduced in 88. Windows/386, the first fully virtual, fully preemptive version of Windows was introduced in 87. Windows 3.0 in 90 and 3.1 in 92. Windows was not the exclusive desktop at the time but it was certainly established. Compelling Windows apps that forced the PC world over to Windows started appearing around 92, not much after the creation of ACE. Word started dominating WP beginning in 92. There was still a lot of DOS use but the PC world was hardly as you describe (slow 286's and 386's).
Memory cost the same for PC's as it did for workstations. If anything, PC's with their compact instruction sets and small footprint OS'es made better use of memory than workstations did. Don't know what your point is there. Workstations had more memory typically but they needed it and their prices reflected it. Business ppl didn't buy workstations.
Claiming that the Athlon was substantially better than the P3 is silly. It had a slight IPC advantage and eventually a clockrate advantage, but the two designs offered similar performance. While the Athlon was introduced in 99, 8 years after ACE (not a good decade), the first of the P3 designs was introduced in 95, only 4 years after ACE.
AMD's Opterons aren't Alpha's and it's a good thing. Alpha's sucked and the P4 looks much more like and Alpha than the Opterons do. DEC had good engineers and contributed nicely to the PC world, most notably with their PCI work, not their processor designs. They gave use PCI bridges and a nice ethernet controller.
If we are comparing experience with these machines, my first PC was an IBM 8088 machine. I started work for a major PC manufacturer in 87. I did OS/2 1.0 and 1.1 work, UNIX systems programming and NT driver development. I did firmware programming work for that company starting in 88. My first machine there was a 10Mhz 286 and I used every type processor and most speed grades since then. I had extensive experience with the 960, Alpha, and PPC 603 in addition to all the Intel x86 processors. I worked some with the i860, the Moto 88K and the Itanium. I'm quite familiar with the history of the processors, OS'es and ACE. You can have your Slackware 486 machine. I got rid of mine long ago and wouldn't be bragging if I was still using one.
Re:Had the workstation vendors worked together. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Had the workstation vendors worked together. (Score:3, Informative)
sgi (at the time, known as cray research) used alphas in their supercomputers.
it kicked serious butt. and they were NOT DEC, last time I checked.
(although sgi and cray will probably go the way of DEC, sadly to say).
ob disc: I worked at both DEC and SGI in my past.
Re:Back in the day.. (Score:2, Informative)
Turgid is right about this one. In 1991, there were still AT and even XT machines on the market, and 1MB would have been the stock RAM. The early 486 machines cost well over $5000 and it took a couple years for the chip to filter down to regular machines.
Re:a company of "almosts" (Score:3, Informative)
You are wrong. Java client-side development is far from dead - it is growing, and at the end of last year overtook MS WinForms as the most popular client-side development platform in North America. There are even 'shrink-wrapped' commercial Java applications based on Swing that are amongst the best in their class (the financial package Moneydance is a good example).
Then in the Java era, they went through the AWT and Swing eras, both of which combine complexity with poor performance.
Easy to say, but wrong. AWT was not poor performance because it was the native GUI. Swing went through years of poor performance, but
It is easy to take cheap shots at a technology by on recycling common myths based on the way things were 4 or 5 years ago. However, to post facts it is a good idea to actually try the technology as it is now. Swing on Java 1.5 is neither memory hungry or slow.
Re:a company of "almosts" (Score:2, Informative)
> You are wrong. Java client-side development is far from dead - it is growing, and at the end of last year overtook MS WinForms as the most popular client-side development platform in North America.
Hey! You didn't count all the gazillions of mobile phones out there that all (well >95%) run java.
> Swing went through years of poor performance, but
What you mean is that some of the drawing operations are accelerated. 1.5 is quite good and 1.6 will finally get rid of the famous 'gray rect' for good. Most of the components that are geared towards heavy use (e.g. JTree, JTable) are top performers already.
The event handling framework is quite complex (you can do practically anything with it) and the fact that each java class behaves almost like a dynamically linked library in more static languages will keep the start-up performance forever behind.
> Swing on Java 1.5 is neither memory hungry or slow.
The memory usage hasn't shrank since I was introduced to java. The extra hit that comes from the VM and GC is major pain in small applications but negligible in bigger ones. Class data sharing for java's built in classes (introduced in 1.5) helps too little in that respect and I don't expect major improvements in that area, at least not in the near future. Speed is getting better and better with every release and I expect java 1.6 (Mustang) to finally put an end to this everlasting java is slow whining.
Re:a company of "almosts" (Score:4, Informative)
You might think so, but it really doesn't. Try the following: Install a significant Java application like JEdit or Moneydance. Time it's startup. I typically get start-up times of 3-4 seconds. That is faster than most KDE apps on the same machine!
The memory usage hasn't shrank since I was introduced to java. The extra hit that comes from the VM and GC is major pain in small applications but negligible in bigger ones.
I don't find this. I can start up trivial Java apps in just a few megabytes, and even Swing apps like JEdit can run in 8MB. That is nothing on modern machines. As for the GC being a major pain - it can be finely tuned these days, so much so that real-time APIs can be implemented even on standard VMs.
My impression is that performance and memory efficiency has improved significantly since Java 1.4.x.
No, not really. (Score:1, Informative)
No, many processors were not considered.
The transition was to be to 88K. The engineers worked that out, and a IIsi with 88K chips in it was created for development. When the idea was turned over to the PHBs, the PHBs decided that switching to 88K was stupid and that the switch would be to PowerPC instead. Using PowerPC instead of 88K was called just "a packaging issue" by the PHBs, although it required a lot of effort since the emulator was written in 88K assembly.
The idea of moving to PPC was because 88K was only made by one company (who owned the IP), whereas PPC had the AIM (Apple-IBM-Motorola) alliance behind it and the IP was available to all 3 (presumably Apple could make CPUs if the other two refused). Since SPARC was wholly owned by SUN, it would not have merited serious consideration.
Star Trek was different. Star Trek had no emulator, it only ran recompiled binaries. Actually, it couldn't run those either, it didn't run binaries, the demo was just the Finder and System compiled together in one big compilation unit.
Also, as far as I know, Star Trek was never officially demonstrated outside the 3 companies involved (Apple,Novell,Intel). There was only one group in the company (Gifford Calenda's) behind it, and they only had control over operating systems, not any other technology or evangelism. Although early demos of MAE (Macintosh Application Environment, which ran Mac apps on various UNIX machines) were actually the Star Trek code recompiled for different platforms. This is what Morris Taradalsky (sp?) showed at WWDC on an IBM RS/6000.
MAE came a bit later, it did have an emulator, but it was a different emulator than the PPC machines used. It ran on SUNs and IBM RS/6000s, I don't recall what else.
My guess is Bill Joy (or other SUN person in question) got MAE confused with the PPC transition effort.