Nearly 25 Years Ago, IBM Helped Save Macintosh 236
dcblogs (1096431) writes "Apple and IBM, which just announced partnership to bring iOS and cloud services to enterprises, have helped each other before. IBM played a key role in turning the Macintosh into a successful hardware platform at a point when it — and the company itself — were struggling. Nearly 25 years ago, IBM was a part of an alliance that gave Apple access to PowerPC chips for Macintosh systems that were competitive, if not better performing in some benchmarks, than the processors Intel was producing at the time for Windows PCs. In 1991, Apple was looking for a RISC-based processor to replace the Motorola 68K it had been using in its Macintosh line. "The PCs of the era were definitely outperforming the Macintoshes that were based on the 68K," he said. "Apple was definitely behind the power, performance curve," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. The PowerPC processor that emerged from that earlier pairing changed that. PowerPC processors were used in Macintoshes for more than a decade, until 2006, when Apple switched to Intel chips.
Re:Intel (Score:5, Interesting)
Errr, yeah, but they could have just used Intel chips like everyone else. Ultimately it would have given better performance, saved themselves a lot of pain in switch over, and put themselves ahead of the curve selling to people who wanted to dual boot. So did IBM save them or cripple them?
As a result, Apple had the more POWERful chips for many years. They avoided the Pentium debacle completely. Pentium M was the first sane chip that Intel produced, and Apple got in with the Core Duo - just when the whole world was screaming how for ahead AMD was, and just before Intel turned things around.
Re:Another misleading headline (Score:4, Interesting)
At that time, Apple had plenty of RISC choices, all of which had better floating point performance than x86 and better performance overall. They could have chosen Alpha for its performance or MIPS as MS had done with the NT reference platform. They could have chosen SPARC or 88K and had more direct involvement with the future of their processors. Instead, they bought into IBM's claim that they would take over the x86 with equal performance at lower cost and lower power and got saddled with Motorola's processor design ineptitude.
It's a gross mischaracterization to say that IBM helped save the Macintosh. IBM led Apple to make a poor strategic decision that they had to rectify a decade later.
Re:Pairing? (Score:0, Interesting)
And to crack the Wintel monopoly, if not break it. This was feasible, DEC had finally folded, so Intel couldn't steal their architecture anymore (as Alpha technology was stolen for the Pentium and x86_64 architecture) or the kernels (as Microsoft hired David Cutler to bring the VMS kernel with him to create Windows NT.)
Too bad the PowerPC machines *couldn't run the damn games* or the requisite MS Office suites for students and business people to use them.
Re: Intel (Score:0, Interesting)
My impression was that Apple wanted to be incompatible, as this had several positive effects, the most important being staying in control. But building your own is always more expensive, so even at the time of the PowerPC they had to switch to PCI as a bus, as their customers were still prone to compare prices. With regular components Apple has much more trouble keeping customers using their OS with off the shelf hardware, but they probably feel compelled to continue on this way to stay competetive in pricing.
Re:Intel (Score:5, Interesting)
This is technically true. Windows NT was originally designed to be OS/2 version 3.0 and at first they targeted the i860 which never did well, so they changed to the MIPS platform. Prior to release Microsoft decided to make it their next Windows platform and the rest was history.
What made Windows NT unique at the time was the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that allowed Microsoft to target multiple processor platforms. At release, Windows NT supported i386 (called IA-32 at the time), Alpha, and MIPS.
Re:PPC macs were awful (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I was surprised how solid Mac OS 8 was after going through Mac OS 7 and the trials and tribulations of unimplemented trap errors (hallmarks of 68K emulation). As long as you didn't have to go crazy on extensions, you could expect your Mac to keep on working. It didn't have any of the conveniences we have now with OS X, but it was far better than most of the Windows experience at the time (remember Plug and Pray?).
Besides, if you were really serious about running a server with Mac hardware, you loaded up MkLinux or bastardized AUX implementation. Hell, there was even a Mach kernel implementation for Mac hardware. And as you got further along into PPC architecture, you selection of Linux became even better (Yellow Dog was a favorite of mine). Apple's closed architecture made it fairly easy to target device drivers for almost all the peripherals. And the early adoption of USB made it easier as well.
Re:Intel (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pairing? (Score:0, Interesting)
That is extremely wrong and revisionist. Wintel was fucking huge in 1991. If you bought a machine with an x86 chip it very likely came with Windows "free" even if you never started it. Windows was everywhere; most people just didn't happen to like it.
No, it was inferior to most other OSes, but it also crushed them all, too. Whether preloads count as "competition" or "not competing" was something plenty of people argued about back then. But from an installed-base PoV (i.e. how an app developer would look at the potential market for their apps) it unambiguously "completed" and won.
Also, MacOS was horrible in 1991. That was the one relatively-popular OS that Windows could nearly compete on merit with.
Gotta agree with you, there. It would be several more years before I ever saw anyone with MS Office, and a few years after that, before I had to have some way to read MS Office files. Fucking lusers, you tell em "save in a standard format," and the blank stare-backs were just priceless .. yet also very frustrating. It was almost like being trapped in the novel Catch-22, where you wanna laugh at the fuckwits and yet their actions also really mattered and were dooming everyone, so laughing just wasn't quite the right response. Dark, dark times. 1991 was bad, but not nearly that bad, yet.
Re:Intel (Score:4, Interesting)
At the time, PowerPC chips were more powerful than x86 in terms of raw computing power. I believe that the G5 Mac was technically classified as a supercomputer based on an old standard of flops and could not be exported until the US government updated the definitions.
The reason for the switchover to x86 had to do more with power efficiency, customization, and logistics. While the PowerPC architecture did lend itself to better overall computing performance, it was lacking in power efficiency and heat. For a desktop that's not a major problem, but it is a problem for laptops. It's a problem that IBM never really solved as they never released a mobile G5 and Apple was stuck with mobile G4s until the Intel switchover. Here is one area where Intel was way ahead.
The two other related issues have to do with Apple's needs and IBM and Motorola's manufacturing logistics. Apple despite ordering millions of chips a year was always going to be a small customer in terms of volume. However Apple was going to need a heavily customized consumer PowerPC chip that required to be updated almost every year. Meanwhile most other PowerPC customers would want server/workstation chips that IBM used in their own products. Now these can be done but these factors cost time and money. I can see why Motorola and IBM (and also Apple) would be less likely to invest into new chips.
On the flipside, the Xbox 360's Xenon processor would be more the model of what IBM/Motorola wanted. Although it was heavily customized, the basic design has not changed in 8 years when the Xbox One was launched with estimated sales of 40+ million. This gave IBM enough time to do a die shrink to cut costs.
The change to Intel gave Apple many advantages. First of all, faster and more efficient mobile processors were available. Second, most of the features that Apple wanted were already in the x86 design as they were designed for consumer PCs. Third, any customization Apple requested from Intel, Intel could sell to competitors like Dell. For example, the first MacBook Airs used customized Intel Core processors in which the chip package had been shrunk 40%. Intel didn't mind investing the money for this customization as they sold them immediately to other customers. Many of the features that Intel got in the collaboration became part of the Ultrabook specification.
Re:Pairing? (Score:3, Interesting)
That is extremely wrong and revisionist. Wintel was fucking huge in 1991. If you bought a machine with an x86 chip it very likely came with Windows "free" even if you never started it. Windows was everywhere; most people just didn't happen to like it.
No, it was inferior to most other OSes, but it also crushed them all, too. Whether preloads count as "competition" or "not competing" was something plenty of people argued about back then. But from an installed-base PoV (i.e. how an app developer would look at the potential market for their apps) it unambiguously "completed" and won.
Also, MacOS was horrible in 1991. That was the one relatively-popular OS that Windows could nearly compete on merit with.
Gotta agree with you, there. It would be several more years before I ever saw anyone with MS Office, and a few years after that, before I had to have some way to read MS Office files. Fucking lusers, you tell em "save in a standard format," and the blank stare-backs were just priceless .. yet also very frustrating. It was almost like being trapped in the novel Catch-22, where you wanna laugh at the fuckwits and yet their actions also really mattered and were dooming everyone, so laughing just wasn't quite the right response. Dark, dark times. 1991 was bad, but not nearly that bad, yet.
NO, he is correct WINTEL was NOT big in 1991. In 1991 MS released Windows 3.0. Win 1.0 thru 2.1 were pretty crappy and the PC industry was leary of 3.0 and had not really jumped on it. IBM PC and PC juuior came standard with DOS 6. You would have to go purchase Window separately. It wasn't until 1992 when Win 3.1 and 3.11 came out that IBM and Compaq started shipping PC's with Windows on them. That is when the Intel based "PC Clones" ( HP, Packard Bell, Compaq, and a littel later Dell , Gateway, etc) started really hitting the market and the WINTEL hold began and solidified when Windows 95 came out.