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Apple Businesses

Looking Back at MacOS on x86 197

Posted by CmdrTaco from the as-science-fiction-as-teleporters-and-tricorders dept.
nutt writes "The MacSpeedZone's Apple Confidential column has a good Article which looks back at what happened to Apple's Star Trek project, (which was to "boldly go where no Mac had gone before." ... Intel hardware.) Its a very good read, and makes one wonder where Star Trek is now? The Article says the NDA's on the engineers was lifted in late 1997. It would be _very_ interesting if something like this could get out to the OSS. Note: Darwin currently compiles on Intel hardware."
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Looking Back at MacOS on x86 More

Looking Back at MacOS on x86

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  • My friend, I hate to burst your bubble over there, but -- and I am not saying this to start a flamewar -- Apple hardware is fucking expensive. Not just plain expensive, it is FUCKING expensive.

    Case in point: I am moving to a new company in a few weeks, and I was told that I could choose between an Apple and an Intel clone. Just out of curiosity, I checked up on some prices; an apple machine with all the trimmings came out to over 8 THOUSAND dollars. That's without the 4000 dollar display! A comparable machine (equals 1Ghz, 512 megs ram, yada yada) on the x86 architecture runs about 2500 dollars less.

    I'm sorry to say that an apple machine is just too bloody expensive with too little gain. Parts are expensive to replace, support is hell to get, here in Israel at least, and the initial price is too high.

    While the Apple machines look nice (and they do!), I don't want to pay that much for that little. Not only that, but MacOS X isn't out yet, and I wouldn't want to work on OS 9. (It's just as crash happy as Windows, don't let anyone tell you otherwise).

    Clock for clock, the G4 may wack a p3/4/athlon, but dollar for dollar, that Apple machine is getting smacked in the hoopla like nobodies business.

    (Don't even start me on the iMacs, no Graphic designer, decent or otherwise, would work on that machine.

    Rami
    --
  • You need Windows? Reboot.

    Funny, this also seems to be the case on my Windows-only computer. Quite often, in fact.

    ;)
    -J

  • Not on *every* Intel box... (Score:3)

    by Soupwizard ( 133933 ) on Monday September 04, 2000 @04:04AM (#807208)
    Apple doesn't have to release a version that runs on *every* generic Intel box out there - they can make Apple-branded boxes that use Intel hardware.

    One of the main reasons Mac OS is stable is that Apple controls the hardware environment. A PC box can have a near-infinite combination of random hardware of varying quality - half the time when my Windows box goes flakey it's the crappy sound card (or whatever) I got at a CompUSA free after rebate sale.

    So, to compete with Windows in megahertz-hype marketing wars, Apple could bring out their own cool Intel or Athlon based machines. The best of both worlds, so to speak.

    Soupwizard
    ---
    Twelve Step "How to Mountain Bike" Program:
    Step One: Falling and Hurting Yourself A Great Deal
  • That's like saying Mitsubishi would be monopolistic if they only ship Eclipses with their own stock stereo.

    Apple considers their product a combination of OS and hardware. Big deal. You can delete the contents of your Mac's hard-drive and install Linux if you'd prefer. Heaven forbid they decide what is in their own product.

    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])

  • If I'm not mistaken, the ability to re-compile Carbonised applications to run on Mac OS X is via use of Frameworks (libraries + headers etc).

    Is there anything stopping Apple from providing a Carbon Framework with a Windows runtime?

    At the moment, with WebObjects, you get a heap of other cross-platform frameworks.

    This would enable Mac developers to re-compile their Carbon MacOS apps to run on Windows.
  • If it works with your hardware

    Mind you, that's a _big_ if there. Their scsi support range is a joke right now, as is the NIC support. This pretty much rules out my running it on any of my machines, all of them with standard hardware which Linux uses perfectly well.
  • Never happened. MS wanted the Mac OS on Intel so they could sell apps and tools. The OS market was tiny back then. DOS didn't make that much money by comparison with Mac apps and the savings over having to write for two OSs and develop Windows and OS/2 would have made up the loss in DOS income. Plus it would have cut IBM out of the picture which would have been a nice bonus as IBM was throwing their weight around and killing the MS market.
  • the boy named Griff asked "What's matter, McFly? Chicken?"
    1. If you're reffering to Back to the future, It was BIFF that said that. Biff Tannen. (Leave it to a Slashdot User to correct your movie knowledge.)
  • Accurate except that in 1985, Microsoft had already been working on Windows for two years. And had been stuck with dealing with IBM for a painful four years.

  • WTF? (Score:1)

    by pwhysall ( 9225 )
    For that kind of price, why don't you get a PROPER computer?

    Get yerself a beefy Alpha box instead.
    --

  • Re:Also (Score:1)

    by SEE ( 7681 )
    No, it doesn't, unless you count eight milestones ago as "running".

    The attempt to bring it up to date that began in June has slammed headlong into an add-on limitation in the BeOS kernel. Be chokes on code written as a small executable that loads lots and lots of modules, instead of as a monolithic megaprogram -- and the modularity is a major Mozilla feature.

    A workaround has been proposed which will hopefully work, since correcting the problem would require either a total rewrite of Mozilla or a massive rewrite of the Be kernel.

    MacOS, Windows, OS/2, OpenVMS, and 7 Unicies/Unix clones can handle it, however, and M17 is available for them.

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • "Why should a physicist writing a paper have to know about files and directories?"

    Well, he shouldn't. If you're going to abstract something away, ABSTRACT THE FUCKER AWAY. Get rid of it, don't let the user touch it (except through a proper administrative interface). Don't just slap a bit of useless chrome (Program Manager, Start Menu) over the filesystem and then the first time J. Random Luser wants to install a program or open a file that's not in the 10 recent files dangling off the Start Menu, he's got to know about Files And Directories...

    Of course, if you could persuade people to actually PUSH F1 and READ THE FUCKING MANUAL...

    But then, if you could do that, your name's probably Jesus Christ and you spend your days walking on water anyway.
    --
  • That's one benchmark, based on a couple of operations in a single application. Benchmarks like that tend to present a skewed view of the reality of the situation. In real-world, Joe Six-Pack usage, the G4 is competitive but a similarly-priced PC system will be faster. As the other respondent said, I could easily rig other benchmarks to show just about anything I wanted.

    And, by your own admission, "most people who use macs are doing graphic/design work"...so, if they want to use a G4-based Mac, fine. But that has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the G4 is "twice as fast" in general case, real world computing.

  • This is two kids at each end of the yard going "yah boo sucks to you too".

    Because each of these "operating systems" locks up totally while you're copying files to the floppy disk drive...
    --
  • More realistically, Apple was dying and decided to do a last ditch attempt at suing Microsoft for patent infringement in order to raise money. Microsoft paid $300M for the patents (nobody even on Apple's side ever said Microsoft stole code) and bought $100M and did Office 98 as a show of good will (and part of keeping the patent issues from spending years in court).

    Basically, Apple used their patent library as a blackmail threat and Microsoft got freedom from future litigation at a good price.

    Whether there were any patents that actually were infringing has never really been decided. The litigation costs would have cost about that much anyway. Again, nobody ever charged that there was theft of code. Patent infringement can occur when two groups develop similar products and one gets the patent first.

  • Adobe is like the second or third biggest software maker in the world. Everybody competes with them on something. They sell a billion dollars worth of Mac software per year, though ... they can stand a little competition from Apple in DV editing.

    Apple bought Final Cut Pro from Macromedia, so the thing was going to come out from somebody at some point. It wasn't even like somebody at Apple started Final Cut Pro.
  • There are a few hints of this in the above posts, but logically, the time is not right to announce OSX on Intel. OSX will be introduced next year without a lot of native apps. Many of the apps that are optimized will be based on carbon, which won't port over to Intel.

    However, new apps (or those developed for with Cocoa) would run on an Intel port. The work to make OSX run on Intel is not what's holding Apple back from releasing an Intel based OSX box. Millions of Mac users with PPC legacy apps who would cry havoc if they could not run their apps on OSX is the real holdup.

    About one year after OSX is out, most of the major apps should be ported over to OSX. Apple can then release an Apple branded Intel based OSX box. Run all your PC software, and gain the power of OSX as well on a duel boot Apple machine. This would be a no brainer for most customers. They would get a Apple OSX box, and an Apple branded Intel compatible windows box. How long do you think it would take for developers to start testing compatibility on Mac Intel HW?

    My guess is that OSX on Intel is coming, but not until a good core set of apps is available that will compile on Intel. Then, it's just a matter of managing the migration and cashing the checks. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to imagine Apple's box sales doubling with such a box.

    As far as cannibalizing sales, Apple could use a Rom or special motherboard check to make sure that OSX did not run on non Apple hardware. Gives a person a good reason to stick with an Apple brqanded box (in addition to the rep for quality).
  • Don't worry about it :) you PC guys so often are! One gets used to it :)
  • Oh, and it runs on Intel AND PowerPC already.

    I've got three macs: a 7100 - too old for BeOS, a PowerBook G3 - too young for BeOS and a PowerMac G3 - too young for BeOS. Great PowerPC-support.
    BeOS/PPC was dead the moment Apple refused to buy Be.

  • DR DOS.com [drdos.com] and DR DOS.org [drdos.org] have more information on DR DOS.
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]

  • I think it's a pitty mac os X will never run on intel.

    Mac OS X Server DP1 does run on Intel. Apple killed it. Internally, it's a sure bet they have Mac OS X running on Intel currently, and probably Alpha, too. Will we ever see it? Probably not.
  • MacOS was clearly superior to Windows 3.x. Hell, MacOS 7 was superior to Windows 95/98 in just about every way imaginable.

    Um, MacOS 7 didn't do memory protection nor preemptive multitasking, right?

    When your clueless office-mate asks you "how did Microsoft's practices hurt me?" you can point to the MacOS on Intel that never was and say "here's something you might have wanted that Microsoft made damn certain you couldn't get."

    Hmm... The BeOS guys surely aren't too glad that every Macintosh must be bought with MacOS either.

    -jfedor
  • Fusion started on the Amiga. :)
  • ...that Darwin has been compiled for the Intel target, but the compilation itself was done on a PPC box.
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • They killed it. Maybe I should put my CDs of DP1 for Intel up on eBay . . . :-)
  • Why would apple want to make MacOS available on the PC platform? Apple is in the business of making computers. The whole thing: a tight, integrated product. Steve Jobs wants access to every nook and cranny of the product. And that's what makes a Mac a quality product. It's not just the OS, it's the package. -Erik
  • > The project ballooned from 18 people to 50,
    > and most were forced to write detailed
    > specifications and white papers instead of
    > concentrating on writing code.
     Even though reducing Mac hardware sales could have been a decisive reason not to carry on the Star Trek project, I still think it also lost much of its inertia because of such a constraint.
    Big projects usually involve lots of Quality Insurance features which have a negative impact on people's motivation:
    • Lots of paperwork to do prevent coder from focussing on what they are here for (coding, yep...).
    • Dividing the project tasks in subcategories remove its role's transversality.
    • Innovation is led by initiative. Allocating some specific subtask to a coder is a right way to reduce the global vision of the project it otherwise would have had, hence their opportunity to share their visions laterally across the project hierarchy instead of up then down.
    • BTW, increasing the project staff increases the costs and also reduces each bonus part. this is not that good for motivation.
    So, with a few people coding there could still have been this sparkling emulation which would have let them do some amazing stuff.
    Each time I was confronted to a similar situation we had the same problem.
    Solving this issue is a choice to make:
    Quality or Innovation ?
    Securing or Pioneering ?
    This is a manichean problem, there's no long-term compromise and Star Trek may have made its way if coders had not lost their motivation doing administrative tasks.
    --
  • I don't care about Mhz issues. What I care is: For the same amount of money, which machine will be the fastest for what I want to do: G4 Macs or PC ?

    That IS the issue.

  • Um, MacOS 7 didn't do memory protection nor preemptive multitasking, right?

    Nor does Windows 3.x, 9x. It doesn't support true preemptive multitasking nor a real memory protection model in order to maintain backward compatibility; everything runs in ring 0. It's true that MacOS 7/8/9 shares these limitations with Microsoft's Win9x/ME brethren. However, MacOS has a far superior interface to Windows (INHO). I'll give but one flagrant example:

    Windows 3.x abstracted the filesystem away from users through the use of "Program Groups", which had no relation to the filesystem whatsoever. For this reason, many Windows users never learned basic filesystem concepts, such as directory hierarchies. This model continued in Win9x through the use of the "start" button, even though explorer provided access to the filesystem. To this day I know many Windows users who have NO IDEA what the difference is between a directory and a file, and don't care. This means that when they lose files in the filesystem they have no way to find them again.

    MacOS represents the filesystem as a set of folders within folders. Let's not even get into a debate on the superiority of HFS to FAT... filesystem metadata support under HFS is so superior to FAT it's just a joke.

    That said, I won't consider buying a Mac until they release OS X. I am a UNIX weenie and have been using UNIX since the '80s. NeXTStep is probably the best operating environment I've ever used.

    Finally, even given that your argument were true: how does this change Microsoft's anti-competitive and exclusionary licensing behavior with the hardware integrators. Are you arguing that because Win9x has "preemptive multitasking" that Apple should not have been given entry into the market?

  • MacOS was clearly superior to Windows 3.x. Hell, MacOS 7 was superior to Windows 95/98 in just about every way imaginable.

    I would have to disagree. Even the modern Mac OS 9 is plagued by stability problems and does not have pre-emptive multitasking. Mac OS can't do more than one thing at a time. A simple clogged local hub while plugged in, and your Mac slows to a crawl while it tries to talk to a local AppleTalk server. You can't do ANYTHING while it waits for the network.

    Quite basically, Mac OS could never multitask. Mac OS X will change this however.

  • When he talks about software and hardware integration, he's not talking about dongles. When you push the setup button on an Apple display, for example, you get the Mac OS Monitors Control Panel, customized for that display, including ColorSync, and an assistant that helps you to calibrate your display correctly. If you use that same Apple display with a PC, the setup button brings up a simple on-screen display from the display itself. You don't have access to ColorSync or anything. That kind of thing is a feature that people pay Apple the extra money for. Take that stuff away and you might as well run Windows, because the experience will be similar.

    Digidesign is similar to Apple in this way. Rather than offer separate audio hardware and software, Pro Tools is an all-in-one thing. They take the current PowerMac and they add both hardware and software and turn it into a world-class digital audio workstation. They do the same for one particular high-end model of IBM PC running Windows NT. They don't support installing their stuff onto a generic PC because the increase in variables destroys their ability to add value. If you're going to have to troubleshoot glitches, you might as well just run the cheapest box and Windows and Cubase (nothing against Cubase, which I also use).

    Both of these companies serve markets that are willing to pay a little more for somebody to go the extra mile. That is not the x86 PC market.
  • VMware isn't an emulator. You'll have to get an x86 if you want windows with VMware. You haven't convinced anyone to get linux.
  • You guys are looking to the wrong idea for your dream system... I have a conspiracy theory for you to chew on.
    Current Macs ship with 2 processors, and Mac OS X is going to be released with full support for two processors. This doesn't seem like much, until we come up with the ultimate piece of vaporware. Make me right, Connectix!
    How difficult would it be to provide:
    1. Realtime linking of core OS files from a full, licensed install of Win95/98 or Linux (most likely installed to a virtual drive for reference use only)
    2. Dynamic, uniprocessor binary code conversion for x86 binaries (Windows and Linux)
    3. Execution of dynamically converted code on second processor
    MacOS and Be are currently the only Operating Systems with a tight enough control over distribution configuration to make this viable, but it IS a viable option. I want someone to do this! We've had VirtualPC for years, so why can't we do multiprocessor support and OS integration?
    This is where SMP starts to make sense...
  • Remember that Apple sold a Windows compatible Mac a few years ago and it bombed. And that didn't require rebooting to use apps from both OSs. A Mac that can run Windows apps is going to be percieved as a Mac. It will sell to Mac users who are willing to pay extra to run Windows apps. That has historically been a small audience.

    In order for it to sell to the Windows audience, it would have to run WinApps as well as the price equivalent Windows box since being able to run Mac Apps doesn't have that much added value. (at least perceived value) and since most Mac Apps are available in Windows versions already since Apple's near death experience a few years ago.

    In short, it is a hard sell. In addition, if the PentiuMac is so different as to prevent other x86 boxes from running OSX then it'll be perceived as just another proprietary Mac-Only product for Apple. That would be the kiss of death.

  • They haven't *officially* killed it yet, but it looks like they're merging OS X client and OS X server into just plain OS X.

    Server was very powerful...great alternate server platform for those that wanted to get away from NT and couldn't handle UNIX or Linux without pains. I'm sad that they're axing the more advanced features.
  • > I guess I was overzealous in my attack on
    > Apple. Hehe.

    It's even worse. With the Mac, you also got:

    Gigabit Ethernet
    FireWire
    two separate USB busses
    iMovie 2.0
    an optical mouse
    ColorSync (and Photoshop plug-ins)
    Altivec (and Photoshop plug-ins)
    AppleScript
    space for up to 2GB of RAM
    an easy open case for when you add more RAM, or another hard drive (you still have space for two more).

    Not to mention that Type 1 font support and the ability to open almost any image type are built into Mac OS.

    People who don't need or want that stuff (most Slashdotters) are happy with a generic PC, and think Macs are expensive by comparison, but if those "extras" make an artist or musician twice as productive, or enable a beginner to do DV editing instead of not, then a Mac doesn't seem expensive anymore.
  • The other reply is correct, G4 is a nice processor but the marketing numbers Apple floats are complete, unadulterated bullshit.

    I don't know about you, but when I saw the dual G4/500 vs P3 1Ghz photoshop test....well, it was pretty obvious. True that's only one app, but what people on /. forget is that most people who use macs are doing graphic/design work.

  • Also (Score:1)

    by Jowr ( 226732 )
    If there is anyone who doubts, MacOS 8 can run on x86 platforms. The program that does it is called FUSION PC. I dont see why Apple hasnt done a x86 conversion.
  • From the Darwin to do list [apple.com]:
    Bootstrap Intel

    The Intel support in Darwin is largely dormant and hasn't been exercised much since Rhapsody. Getting Darwin installation working on Intel is the first problem. Getting it running is second. We have some experience with this; we'll need to dig up some old tools at Apple to help this get rolling.


    The Uber Nerd [ubernerd.org]

  • Chicken, McFly? (Score:5)

    by tooth ( 111958 ) on Monday September 04, 2000 @03:02AM (#807245)
    When Bill Gates heard of Apple's plan to put the Mac OS on an Intel machine, he responded by saying it would be "like putting lipstick on a chicken."

    Am I mistaken, or did Bill call Intel Chicken?

    the boy named Griff asked "What's matter, McFly? Chicken?"

  • IBM makes copper G3's and G4's, as well as their Power4 series of PowerPC-based chips.

    The PPC market is pretty big, actually. PPC chips are in cameras, set-top boxes, the new Nintendo Game Cube, and lots of other things. Anything where power is an issue, because these chips all use a fraction of the power (and generate a fraction of the heat) of the other chips they're compared to (that's why the iBook gets 5-6 hours of battery life).

    I bet there are two or three PowerPC chips in your home right now, but you just don't know it.
  • Apple was quiet about it, but news reports of the time indicated that a large chunk of QuickTime code ended up in Video For Windows via a small third party contract house.

    It was (apparently) a clear case of copyright infringement, not patents. Apple also apparently had a judge willing to issue an injunction against Microsoft shipping certain products if the settlement talks fell through. One of those products could have been Windows 95.

    Apple was hush-hush about it because they wanted to settle and get Office and IE. Part of the complications was they also wanted to get Microsoft to commit to Copeland (and later OSX), and Microsoft wanted certain things too.

    The notion that Apple was going to go out of business with Microsoft's help is bullshit. They still had money in the bank, and Microsoft had nothing to do with fixing their fucked-up product strategy and production problems. Former CEO Spindler covers much of this stuff in his book, but old San Jose paper reports were also interesting.
  • Actually, the iBook definitely doesn't have a fan, and it runs very quietly. When the hard drive spins down, it is silent. I've heard that the PowerBook does have a small fan, but my wife has a new one and when the hard drive spins down, it is also completely silent. I certainly didn't see any fan when I put in the AirPort card and RAM.

    Fans are definitely the loudest part of a computer, though. I do notice the difference when I use a PowerMac as opposed to an iBook, even though the PowerMac has a much quieter fan than the IBM PC I used to use (which actually had two fans).

  • Do you mean that the code has become more tied to the hardware, or just that Apple's stopped talking about supporting other platforms? There's a difference.

    Not in the case of Apple. They've hyped the hell out of projects that see 1 month of R&D and never ship a product. In this case, they had a working technology they dropped. Cross platform is as dead as a freakin' Newton. Make any other plans, and you're just gambling, with crap odds at that.

    [WO vs ObjC]

    I don't see where you read in a comparison. If anything, I was comparing Java with ObjC, and my Basic take on that would be, "Don't look to Apple if your focus is Java, since other platforms have better support and Apple marketing may just decide to focus on C# instead, or whatever language gets the hype next." Yes, ObjC is still very usable for native apps, but some of the beauty with WO is that you could use the same object frameworks (for which I find ObjC to be a much more capable language than Java) you created for your desktop ordering software as part of the web site ordering system. With WO 5.0 Apple is saying "pure Java only", which is a big "fuck you" to those of us who were actually using the existing technology like it was intended.

    I know marketing is a dirty word around here, but a platform without developers is not a happy platform.

    Then Apple is building a very unhappy platform. There are few enough developers without Apple pissing us off. If marketing were just marketing, they could easily have said "pure Java", but they added the "only", which cripples the technology, and will ultimately cripple Apple. Who in their right mind is going to buy an Apple machine for Java development when there are so many other, better choices out there? Apple should be pushing ObjC as much as Microsoft is pushing C#, with the line from marketing being, "Yeah, we got great Java support, but [ObjC/C#] is what you really want to use to get an advantage over your competition for your next-generation applications."

  • You're right that Microsoft was more interested in the apps market than the OS market. The question is whether they wanted Apple to licence by themselves, or whether MS wanted their piece too.
  • Even funnier..
    Fusion runs on Amiga too(only useable if you've got a PPC Amiga of course)
  • Well, shit happens. They almost went out of business. They had to revamp plans. If you promise something that will unknowingly cause your demise and you later discover that it will, it's generally okay to reneg on the deal.

  • Re:MacOS on Intel would have failed (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There is something of an analogue to nice, a shareware (uncrippled) utility called "Peek-a-Boo" (it's also an analogue to ps, top, and kill). It's not preemptive multitasking on the Mac, of course (except between threads), but I gather it's possible to modify the number of ticks a background app gets because they all go through the same event handler loop, and that loop can be patched. What can't be changed is the scheduling for the *frontmost* application, which always gets as much or as little time as it wants. You can find Peek-a-Boo ST 1.5 at http://www.clarkwoodsoftware.com/

  • Re:Chicken, McFly? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    He continued by pointing out that putting the MS OS on an intel machine was like tying a brick to the chicken's neck
  • I don't know how happy Connectix would be if MacOS was ported to the x86 platform. Apple gave them a pretty solid market to sell VirtualPC...So if people see MacOS runs on the much cheaper Intel platform, they'll buy a PC, and install MacOS on it.

    Virtual PC would lose a significant portion of their business. People won't need to virtually run Windows under MacOS anymore, as they would be able to simply dual boot their system. You need Windows? Reboot.

    Virtual PC is too much of a Mac selling point for them to allow this to go by quietly. I expect to hear something from them.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I think it's likely that MS would have killed Office for the Mac. Remember, MS threatened to kill Office once before that, too. MS threatened to kill Office if Scully didn't give them the "perpetual license" to the look and feel of the Mac for Windows. The Mac was pretty vulnerable to not having applications at the time, and Apple conceded. (see Linsmeyer's book, "The Mac Bathroom Reader")

    This resulted in the major reason why Apple later lost their look/feel lawsuit against MS. Apple gained the dubious honor of Microsoft admitting that they copied the look/feel in a private document, Microsoft got a license to steal from Apple wholesale for Windows 95, and the consumers gained a true innovation in computers: the trash can being renamed the recycle bin!
  • Actually, there were a couple of rumors on http://www.mosr.com a while ago that said that Mac OS X may be in the works for Intel processors.
    Also, i remember some old rumors about the Yellow box (Cocoa) in Mac OS X and that Yellow Box was to be a cross-platform for Intel and PPC processors!

    Interesting...
  • If putting a MacOs shell over DR-DOS is like putting lipstick on a chicken, putting the win98 infrastructure on MS-DOS is like putting 150 kg of makeup, concrete stilletto heals, and barbed-wire fishnet stockings on said chicken.

    ---

  • Yes, I realized that. Kinda bums me out a little bit - I'd love an absolutely quite computer. I've read stories about totally quiet iMac clusters (hard drives must have spun down). Sounds (ha, ha) neat.

    However, speed differences aside, I much prefer working on my fan-less PowerBook 1400 than my not fan-less Blue and White G3 simply because of the noise difference. Both, obviously, have hard drives. Maybe notebook hard drives are quieter (spin slower due to power constraints?).

  • Finally, even given that your argument were true: how does this change Microsoft's anti-competitive and exclusionary licensing behavior with the hardware integrators. Are you arguing that because Win9x has "preemptive multitasking" that Apple should not have been given entry into the market?

    I never said that, I just didn't agree with the statement that MacOS 7 was superior to Windows 9x
    "in just about every way imaginable".

    -jfedor
  • ...and that is that many Mac users are not only OS fanatics, but hardware fanatics as well. I know I am.

    I happen to like having that Apple logo plastered all over my cpu and monitor. It lets me know that no matter what, I've got good hardware inside that box; Hardware that is compatible and works properly with the OS.

    Personally, I think Apple is wrong to believe that hardware sales would be incredibly hurt w/ a port of the OS to intel. Certainly they may shrink a little, and almost certainly wouldn't grow, but there are a lot of users like myself that would continue to buy it because we need that power and that stability.

    Anyway that is my two cents. My new G4 should be here soon.

    *nothing clever to say here*

  • SMP makes alot of sense in other areas too, if you've ever seen an Origin at work you know what I mean. I dont know what you are getting at by talking about realtime linking of core OS files. Do you want Windows or Linux to run on one processor with MacOS on the other? The problem lies in system bandwidth. Multiple processors provide more protessor time per second but don't usually provide faster data throughput. The limiting factor is the system bus, each processor is sharing the 100 or 133 mhz of bus clock. It would be entirely too unstable for two OS's to run without dedicated hardware for each (like the old Power Macs used to do with PC cards).
  • Quick question...

    >Apple got $300 Million under the table, $100
    >Million over the table

    Where do you get your numbers?

    I assume the "over the table" cash you refer to is actually the $150 million of non-voting stock that gates purchased. Or was there another public cash settlement.

    But for the "under the table" payment, where do you get the $300 million figure? Whenever I've read about the Apple/gates cease-fire, I've always seen the phrase "undisclosed sum" to describe the rest of the settlement. Was the value of this ever actually disclosed?

    A link would be really cool if there is a legitimate source, or is the $300 million figure from a Mac rumours site, and subject to the dubious reliability of those sites?

    thanks

    john
    Resistance is NOT futile!!!

    Haiku:
    I am not a drone.
    Remove the collective if

  • My Win 98 box is pretty stable and fairly quick on load times, especially IE5. Windows runs well if you know how to use it and don't expect it to do the impossible. Apple producing the hardware and OS is not bad business, the hardware is theirs afterall. Why isn't SGI chided for their old machines running IRIX which they produced or someone tell Sun they ought to stop packaging Solaris on their hardware or else you Linux fanatics will do something crazy.
  • The OS running a computer does not mean shit in the real world. You may have religious devotion to a certain kernel and library base or just version of a certain kernel but in the real world where people need to do work, the OS means shit. The OS is for running the hardware, it is what takes your high level commands and smashes them down into something silicon circuits can understand. Porting OS X to x86 hardware would not be all too difficult. The problem lies in where the real work gets done, the applications. Linux could be the best OS ever but if a company or individual needs or wants a program not available on Linux, they won't regard it much if at all. This is what is rarely understood when I see this shit about OS X being ported to x86 or some other chipset. As it stands, OS X will be running on G3 and G4 processors and on standard configuration Macs. If a company wants to write a video editing suite or office suite, they know what hardware they'll have available and also know which special things they can add due to the G4's vector processor. How many programs do you see for Windows with SSE, MMX, or 3DNow! instructions embedded in them? Not a whole lot huh. With the Wintel PC market it is next to impossible to know what sort of configuration to expect so you throw out some lowest common denominators and hope for the best. No one would program anything for OS X on x86 hardware, there is just too much to chance and too many possible configurations available. OS X's port to x86 is also beset by problems with drivers. Just count how many times you've had trouble finding Linux or Windows drivers for a piece of hardware, times that by 20 and you can imagine how difficult said process would be to find OS X drivers. Stop bitching and expecting things to be ported to every piece of electronics ever invented, I'm not boycotting the fact that I can't run Palm OS on an ENIAC.
  • Interesting that you mention the YB, 'cause that's the one colour that Apple has so far not used for the iMac. Word is they wanted to avoid the association with "lemons". Also, I believe Berke Breathed has prior art on the "Banana" computer.

  • Re:MacOS on Intel would have failed (Score:3)

    by Forgotten ( 225254 ) on Monday September 04, 2000 @10:22AM (#807268)
    Actually, there is a special database (the Desktop DB). It's just updated automatically, so most people never need to know about it (especially since it doesn't tend to get corrupted like it used do in the earlier days of System 7). This is possible because of the underlying architectural decision to use unique application "creator" types and filetypes that aren't part of the filename, and the higher-level objects and tools that are built on those concepts (bundle resources etc).

    It's also not true that there aren't absolute paths stored - there are. But they're a fallback, and they're not stuck with silly drive letters (or with changeable mount points, which is weakness of absolute symbolic links on Unix): Changes can be repaired automatically because file aliases and "alis" resources store multiple, redundant methods of finding a target, and the Alias Manager tries them successively when one fails. There are open file ID's (somewhat equivalent to inodes), folder IDs in the B*tree (equivalent to pretty much nothing on UFS or ext2fs), volume names, volume partition IDs and device types for when a volume has been renamed, and file names, type/creator info, and yes, paths for when the other methods fail. If something changes and a file can't be found the other methods are used to find it, and when that succeeds the alis resource is updated with the new, fresh information (so the path or whatever was used won't be needed next time and redundancy is restored).

    All of this means that I can rename a file and the link doesn't break, because paths aren't the only method or even the first one used - but alternately I can trash a file or an entire application folder (say with an upgraded version of an app) and replace it with one of the same name *in the same path* and the link still doesn't break, even though the old file ID is gone (the path is used to find the new one). Only when all of these tricks are exhausted with no joy do you have to see the "delete/fix manually" dialog. It's a pretty good system, but it's not yet fully clear how some parts of it will work under Mac OS X and on UFS filesystems. NeXT-style app and folder bundles can provide a lot of it, and there was an interesting article by Fred Sanchez linked to from slashdot on the subject a while back.
  • Now I understand what you were saying. My apologies for the misunderstanding.

    I'm not sure that Java is a bad choice for Apple. It's been around long enough that I think it might not be a passing fad -- though I'm not saying I'm sure. Anyway, I'm under the impression that pushing obscure languages works better for monopolies, while underdogs want to stress compatibility, interoperability, and openness.

    As for their decision to drop ObjC support: I can see why you're offended. That seems like a typical Apple foot-shooting bit.

    Oh, one other thing -- about the cross-platform OS. Of course one shouldn't base any plans on the emergence of a cross-platform OS from Apple, but that doesn't mean there's no chance for the future. Maybe they just don't want to piss off Microsoft yet.

    --

  • If Apple had released something like that, Microsoft would have just pulled the plug on Microsoft Office for the Mac, and guaranteed that people would have stuck with them anyway. They've done that sort of thing before when they threatened to kill Office for the Mac if Apple didn't adopt Internet Explorer.

    Not only that, but back around 1984-1985, Microsoft threatened to pull the plug on Excel for Macintosh if Apple went ahead and released some kind of " Visual Basic " avant la lettre for Macintosh, which would have made developping visual, event-driven apps for the Mac very easy.

    Apple killed the " Visual Basic ". And "got" Excel.

  • I've got a novel idea. Linux is open source, which means it's possible to tinker with or modify the OS and many of its apps as one sees fit. The real strengths and beauty of MacOS has been its consistent and well thought out interface, its robust way of dealing with metadata and configuration files, and the fact that most mac programmers put a value on UI design and easy of use that most programmers simply don't have. Technically, there's really nothing preventing anyone from taking all these OS and UI design ideals from MacOS and modifying GNOME and linux code to the extent that it copies these ideals. Or in layman's terms, porting MacOS to Linux. For example, if there's were some hypothetical source file for some hypothetical GNOME feature called Gnome App Helper, which provides a hypothetical default framework for creating really crappy ripoffs of the crappy windows UI, one could hypothetically modify that framework to create default UI's resembling MacOS'. Any GNOME program that linked against this new version of the GNOME library could hypothetically produce programs with mac-like interfaces. To duplicate the highly robust mac metadata model, one could hypothetically create some modified version of ext2 that generates resource and data forks. Certainly all these things seem hypothetically possible.

    The million dollar question is--is this all just hypothetical?

    Long live Clarux the PengiunCow!!!
  • That's why Apple should go with IBM (for non-alitvec ppc's) or Compaq (if they did happen t owant to go alpha) for their chips...

    They should buy chips only from companies that use those chips themselves, and therefore have incentive to make progress with them. I don't know how Motorolla got into the PowerPC alliance in the first place, except they probably were used to selling apple's chips, so they wanted to continue doing so, no matter what.

    Motorolla's very intent on capturing the embedded markets, while IBM is thrusting the Power architecture into workstations, servers, and I believe mainframes. Which company is shoing more commitment to going down the roads that apple wants to travel down?
  • Apple machine that I would work with
    ------------------------------------
    2 500Mhz G4
    512Meg SDRAM
    2 36 GB Hard drives
    NO DISPLAY
    DVD-ROM
    2 Rage 128 PCI cards (about the same price as a Matrox dualhead..)
    No Modem
    Standard keyboard, mouse, software, etc.
    Support
    =================
    TOTAL = $6248

    Dell machine that I would work with
    -----------------------------------
    Dual 800Mhz Xeons
    512 Megs RDRAM
    Matrox G400 Dualhead
    2 36Gb HD
    Windows 2000 (no option to not select!)
    No monitor
    12X DVDROM
    Service, keyboard, mouse, etc.
    ==============================
    TOTAL = $6027

    I guess I was overzealous in my attack on Apple. Hehe.

    Rami
    --
  • Even better, if Mac were running on x86, you could use vmware to run both simultaneously.
  • Quality comes at a price. When you buy apple you pay for the brand. If apple were a software only company, they would be making software for x86, simply because it is a larger market. The reason why mac users are so fanatic is that you have to be a bit fanatic to pay the fee for a mac.

    I have a limited budget, and a continuing desire to upgrade my system. That rules out apple because apple hardware is much more expensive than x86 hardware. Using a mac for anything else than graphic design is a luxury I (and many others) cannot afford.
  • You guessed right.
    I am a coder.
    I actually even consider myself as an artist.
    As a passionate guy, I consider coding an artistic manneer and thus like to do it a creative way.
    I then find it quite frustrating to have to fill tons of papers (not a euphemism). It calms down my coding frenzy.
    I don't think I am a corporate parasite though and I still believe that, unlike my former company's spirit, technical skills are more valuable than negociation skills, especially when you are a coder.
    In the former case, technical skills make the others respect you, especially if sou share them.
    Negociation and leadership bullshit just make you motivated for the wrong reasons. BTW it also make people fear you, not respect you.
    finally I still think that straightforward development will give better resaults even though I agree witht the documentation thing which anyway seem to have been taken into account by Sun witht he inclusion of JavaDoc (automatic Java programs documentation).
    --
  • I've got an "ancient" Power Mac 7100 running Mac OS 8.5 without a hitch. I've also got a 180 MHz 603e Umax clone running OS 9, again, no problems. And Apple's been very public in stating that OS-X will definetly run on all Apple branded Mac's that ever shipped with a G3 or G4 chip. And since the intitial developer builds required an 8500, 8600, 9500, or 9600 and ran on 7500 and 7600's as well, there's been a lot of speculation that once Apple had OS X complete feature wise, they could probably just flip a couple switches and deliver it for all the 604 based PCI macs as well.

    Which OSes of theirs haven't run on the machines they currently shipped at the time of their launch? Besides maybe one instance of an overlap between the last 68K mac and Mac OS 8.5?

    Apple's always been great about preserving hardware investments. With System 7.5, you could build a hard drive that would boot anything from a Mac Plus through a Power Mac 9500. The complete OS, not just DOS prompt, as Microsoft can do with 8088's through P3's.
  • Unfortunately, MacOS has this nasty tendency to not run on even all the Mac's available at their launch. Forget running a new MacOS on anything but the latest hardware. That upgraded NuBus Mac won't run OSX nor will those PCI Macs. Nor, for that matter, will the G3s or some of the G4s. Funny thing. You'd think Apple wanted you to buy a new computer...
    Strangely enough, I can't run Solaris 8 on my Sun 3x, HP-UX 11 on my HP300, or Windows 2000 on my '286.

    This is a ridiculous argument on it's face simply because MaxOS X is a completely redesigned OS based on Mach and BSD, not the original MacOS codebase. That Apple isn't (formally) supporting older PowerPC hardware is no surprise, though I bet that getting the core OS to run on most PowerMacs won't be terribly difficult. Look, I've never bought a Mac. The last computer I bought from Apple was a II/e, so don't think I'm biased in Apple's favor -- but I think your argument simply doesn't hold water.
  • That being said, I think Apple wasted a lot of time being slave to its oddball processors. And on a related topic:: Just think how much money they would have saved, for example, if they supported PC standard Mice and Keyboards? They could have leveraged CHEAP chipsets and still slapped their own nice case on them.

    I have to point out that as of two years ago, Apple has been working to gradually remove all non-essential non-standard hardware from their computers, beginning with the mice and keyboards. If I take the mouse and keyboard from my iMac and plug it into a Win98 box, it'll say "Windows has detected new hardware and is installing drivers", make me click a dozen OK buttons, and then it'll work just fine. Only one button on the mouse, and the Alt key is in a slightly odd place, but otherwise it's fine. Similarly, I could take (say) a Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer, plug it into my iMac, download and install the driver s [microsoft.com], and go play Unreal Tournament.

    Apple has removed their non-standard ADB interface, their non-standard 8-pin mini-DIN serial ports, and their DB-15 monitor connector, and (unfortunately) the on-board SCSI controller that most Windoze lusers wouldn't recognize if it bit them. They've added USB (marketed heavily by Intel and Microsoft), FireWire (IEEE 1394, compatible with Sony's i.Link), AirPort (IEEE 802.11b, compatible with Lucent's WaveLan), switched to standard HD-15 SVGA, switched to an ATAPI DVD-ROM and ATA/66 hard drive (to be ATA/100 in a few months), and they come with a v.90 modem (a real Linux-compatible hardware modem, unlike most PCs these days) and 10/100 Ethernet (with gigabit optional). What's non-standard about that?

    --

  • I thought that originally Apple wanted developers to use either Java or Objective C to code for Rhapsody/OS X, but when they balked, they (Apple) focused on cleaning on the Mac OS API, which ended up creating "Carbon". Correct?

    Correct. Apple's previous management wanted companies like Adobe to rewrite all their software in Objective-C. Jobs (perhaps with influence from people like John Warnock) realized this was a Bad Idea. Apple then canceled Rhapsody, took what was left of it and shipped it as Mac OS X Server/Darwin. Around the same time, Apple announced Mac OS X and Carbon.

    Apple would love people to use Cocoa (Java/Objective-C) APIs, but Apple had to build a brige for people that had 15 years of Mac OS C code lying around. That bridge is Carbon. Carbon is basically a cleanup of all the Mac OS APIs. Apple has bolted this subset of APIs onto Mac OS X/Mach. According to Apple, most Mac apps are already 90% Carbon compliant. That extra 10% are old, crusty APIs that should no longer be used. Once an application is Carbon compliant, it can run "natively" on Mac OS X, as well as Mac OS 9.x (and perhaps 8.x) if CarbonLib is installed.

    - Scott

    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • or Windows 2000 on my '286

    I know you were making a point, but I certainly hope that you CAN'T run Win2K on a 286. That would mean that the distributed Windows 2000 binaries are compiled without 386+ optimizations, which also would mean that Win2K would be optimized for a 8(maybe 16?) bit chip.

    Plus, I have Win2K installed on a P133 at work, and it crawls. I'd HATE to see it on a 486, much less a 386 or 286.
  • You're actually going to install an entire Linux distribution from floppies? Isn't Slackware the only distribution that even supports that anymore (and even Slackware only lets you do the base series and half the networking series from floppies, and unfortunately has not yet been ported to PPC)?

    VMWare is x86-only, but there are other emulators for other platforms (such as SheepShaver for PPC, inside of which you could run VirtualPC on Mac OS).

    --

  • It is unfortunate that in order to use a nice friendly Apple OS, I have to buy one of those expensive and downright ugly i-whatever machines. I would much prefer to run MacOS on a nice beige desktop machine.

    The new $799 iMacs are out; more expensive than a comparable PC but the cheapest Mac Apple's ever released.

    If you REALLY like beige, simply buy an old beige G3 from someplace like PowerMax [powermax.com], or get a newer G3 or G4 and transplant it into a standard ATX case.

    --

  • Personally, I think Apple is wrong to believe that hardware sales would be incredibly hurt w/ a port of the OS to intel. Certainly they may shrink a little, and almost certainly wouldn't grow, but there are a lot of users like myself that would continue to buy it because we need that power and that stability.

    Did you sleept through the clone years when Apple almost disappeared from the planet? Which one was it, Amelio or Spindler, that thought that the clones would actually try to grow the market, rather than take the last of least resistance and target Apple's own customers? That's what happened last time, and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again.

    During that period as well, Apple showed that it trully needs the revenues from it's hardware to fund OS development. They were taking massive hits since they were only receiving $150 to $300 per clone sold in licensing fees as opposed to double that if they shipped the computers themselves.

    Apple sells a complete package that's worth a lot more than the sum of it's parts. That's not bashing Apple, that's just saying that they couldn't continue to sell upgrades to their OS at $99 a pop if that's the only revenue the OS "division" recieved. And there'd be no point to them shipping Intel machines, because the margins in the intel world just aren't suitable for them to continue the path thy've been following/creating.

  • The reason apple doesn't port their OS is because that would kill their main source of revenue: hardware sales. Technically there's no reason why we can't run Mac OS on a PC (just like why there's no technical reason why we can't run windows 2000 on a G4). So the reasons why we can't do that anyway are of political/economical nature.

    This is not true. In theory any hardware can run any software. In practice its much more complex than that. On problem is endianness - Intel and Motorola processors store bits in different orders in memory. Unfortunately traditional Mac OS has thousands of hardcoded assumptions about the endianness of its processor. Changing these in a consistent fashion is a huge task, and even if you got it all right, it would introduce incompatabilities with existing software. This is just one example of the sort of problem you'll face porting Mac OS to different hardware.

    The bottom line is that porting an OS and maintaining binary compatibility with applications is prohibitively expensive (thus the failure of the Star Trek project). This is genuinely a technical barrier.

    None of this applies to Mac OS X, which is designed from the ground up to be portable between platforms. In that case the reasons Apple won't port it are commercial, not technical.

  • Except Mac's trully do have a much longer lifespan than PC's. Is yours 3 years old? Time to get rid of it, else run Linux on it... Is your Mac 6 years old? Still running without missing a beat, most likely. 68040 Macs' could be upgraded to PPC 601's. Nubus powermacs can become G3's and G4's. 1st gen PCI macs (except the 7200) can be upgraded to G3/G4 status.

    The OS is just much less "bloated" then Microsofts OSes... Or maybe not, as in the memory requirements continue to spiral, but once you've got the necessary memory, your machine ceases grinding to a halt. Compare that to a P200 running Win 98/IE 5.5 or heavan forbid WinNT... It's just not a pleasant experience...
  • My favorite bit (Score:2)
    by mirko (mirko@myfamilyname.org) on Mon September 04, 9:11 EST (#47)
    (User #198274 Info) http://www.vidovic.org/mirko
    > The project ballooned from 18 people to 50,
    > and most were forced to write detailed
    > specifications and white papers >>instead of concentrating on writing code. Even though reducing Mac hardware sales could have been a decisive reason not to carry on the Star Trek project, I still think it also lost much of its inertia because of such a constraint.
    >Big projects usually involve lots of Quality Insurance features which have a negative impact on people's motivation

    Do you do Development or Quality Assurance? I suspect the former.

    I've noticed some developers look at QA engineers with the same fashion management looks at unions. That is not good teamwork. Some developers may be so deadline challenged that it seems OK to not document your process, comment your code and provide written specifications. That's just bullshit, and indicates a problem between said developer and their manager, who sets the schedules.

    All too often, I've seen the results of charging ahead with unclean development and test environments, oral specifications, and all these Bad Development Practices that eventually bite the project in the ass... often after said engineer has left the company. Rapid growth without well thought out specs, QA, and code review presumably is the reason Netscape Navigator (on any platform!) is such a piece of shit. Such shittiness is so pervasive it cannot be the result of any one developer, but on the project lead for not maintaining process.

    Of course, over-process is as bad as under-process. Over process is generally never an issue with standard commericial software - it's for the realm of critical stuff like medical and defense software.

    Now, if Apple wanted lots of documentation from these people it's only fair: software is company property and it is not much use if an employee who knew the code left without documenting it. If the developer can't be bothered, hiring an intern to help with the little tasks may provide some relief - skipping process just dooms the project.
  • Speed Doubler was an enhanced 68K emulator for PowerPC. Not all Mac apps would be open-source; they'd have to run 68K binaries some time (68K Mac binaries were very common back then before the age of PowerPC). This Intel-based Mac OS would require emulation of the 68K CPU in order to run popular Macintosh software.
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]

  • Re:Also (Score:3)

    by jilles ( 20976 ) on Monday September 04, 2000 @03:17AM (#807345) Homepage
    The reason apple doesn't port their OS is because that would kill their main source of revenue: hardware sales. Technically there's no reason why we can't run Mac OS on a PC (just like why there's no technical reason why we can't run windows 2000 on a G4). So the reasons why we can't do that anyway are of political/economical nature.

    I think it's a pitty mac os X will never run on intel. I'm unhappy with both linux (no decent UI) and windows (decent UI but unstable). Mac OS X seems like a winner in this area, stable, decent UI from the company that practically invented the concept of a UI, runs MS Office (killer app for any desktop environment), runs internet explorer (note I'm actually writing this in a mozilla nightly build) and runs unix apps and development tools. However, should apple ever port Mac Os X, there would be no technically sound reason to buy apple hardware anymore (at least not at the prices they currently sell it).

  • 20/20 hindsight and all (Score:3)

    by sg3000 ( 87992 ) <`sg_public' `at' `mac.com'> on Monday September 04, 2000 @03:20AM (#807350)

    That's easy to say that Apple lost "world domination" if they had only shipped the Mac OS on Intel. I'm sure Microsoft would have sat back and let them do it, too. If Apple had released something like that, Microsoft would have just pulled the plug on Microsoft Office for the Mac, and guaranteed that people would have stuck with them anyway. They've done that sort of thing before [infoworld.com] when they threatened to kill Office for the Mac if Apple didn't adopt Internet Explorer. Then Apple would have been left with having to compete their hardware platform with commodity hardware from Intel clones without Microsoft's tepid support.

    I'll admit that putting the Mac OS on Intel would have gone a long way towards acceptance of the Mac because people wouldn't have to invest in hardware to try out the system. However, Apple would have suffered the same problem as they did with the later clones. The Macintosh is an integration between hardware and software, and running the software on generic hardware waters down the Mac quite a bit. With that, the Mac would lose a lot of its distinction, and I don't that would have helped Apple's business any.

  • MacOS on Intel would have failed (Score:5)

    by maynard ( 3337 ) on Monday September 04, 2000 @03:23AM (#807352) Journal
    And it's a damn shame, but the article alludes to why in this paragraph:
    Armed with the executive staff's approval, Mark Gonzales, the project marketing manager, made the rounds of PC clone vendors to gauge their interest in bundling Star Trek on their systems. Most were intrigued, but argued that they couldn't afford to pay much for it because their contracts for Windows 3.1 forced them to pay a royalty to Microsoft for every computer shipped, regardless of what operating system it contained. (This anti-competitive practice eventually landed Microsoft in trouble with the Department of Justice.)
    Apple didn't stand a chance on the Intel platform, and they knew it. Yes, it was anticompetetive behavior on Microsoft's part which was responsible. Yes, by all rights Apple should have had an opportunity to compete on a fair playing ground, just like Novell should have had their opportunity. And yes, Microsoft has yet to pay the piper for their past wrongdoing...

    MacOS was clearly superior to Windows 3.x. Hell, MacOS 7 was superior to Windows 95/98 in just about every way imaginable. That it was never ported and sold as a product may be a success and notch in Microsoft's belt, but it's one of the best examples of how Microsoft's (mis)behavior hurt consumers, and in so doing damaged the American economy. When your clueless office-mate asks you "how did Microsoft's practices hurt me?" you can point to the MacOS on Intel that never was and say "here's something you might have wanted that Microsoft made damn certain you couldn't get."

    And that's NOT a level playing field...

  • Re:MacOSX Server on x86? (Score:3)

    by Draoi ( 99421 ) <draiocht@@@mac...com> on Monday September 04, 2000 @03:26AM (#807354)
    [Replying to my own postings .. pfeh!]

    I'd almost forgotten about MAE - the Mac Application Environment. This was a MacOS 7.5.3 emulator for HP-UX, and was around in the early-mid '90s. Apple officially dropped it in 1998. OK - it's not x86, but it *did* run on PA-RISC
  • there were sparc laptops, the sparcbooks
  • Consider that it was Bill Gates, in 1985, who approached Apple management first about them needing to enter the clone market, and he had several big manufacturers lined up. Apple Refused.

    Microsoft then started work on Windows, and eventually succeeded in creating a graphical environment within which to run their applications.

    Furthermore, Gates prefered the Motorola architecture, which explains that statement.

    Make no mistake about it - it was Apple's arrogance that created Windows, so to speak, more specifically John Sculley's lack of brains.

    Harry
  • I did try BeOS, nice OS but to bad that none of the kind of apps I need are available in a sufficiently evolved state (browser, wordprocessor, email client). I will retry it if a new version comes out or if more apps become available for it (mozilla hint hint).
  • I'd bet that Apple's 68K Emulator was used heavily in Star Trek. MacOS is laden with non-portable 68K assembly and pascal code. In the early days of the PPC switch, 90% of the OS was running in emulation, including such critical bits as the SCSI and Networking subsystems. Even today, they haven't shipped a 100% native OS, and won't until OSX.

    If you thought System 7.1.2 on a Performa 6100 was slow, now imagine it on the average low rent 486SX-33 of the day. Ow.

    Of course, doing a FAT-style transition to x86 would have been possible, but from a marketing standpoint it would be stupid. "Port to Intel", "Port to PPC", "Support the 68K installed base". Most software companies would probably have done nothing, and Apple would have been forced to make 060 machines.
  • Short answer: Speed.

    However, should apple ever port Mac Os X, there would be no technically sound reason to buy apple hardware anymore (at least not at the prices they currently sell it).

    Answer: AltiVec. The PowerPC G4 processor used in all current desktop Macintosh computers (Power Mac, Cube, iMac) is twice as fast as Pentium II/III even without AltiVec, but AltiVec provides a sh*tload of 128-bit vector power for Photoshop filters. And there's no x86 frontend overhead on the PowerPC (like there is on the Pentium II/III and Athlon, both of which run x86 in hard emulation) so more of the die can be used for power instead of bassackward compatibility.


    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • The only problem with this is that right now, MS makes software (in the case of IE5.5, fscking good software) for the MacOS. I don't remember seeing apple on the list of claimants(sp?) bring suit against MS. I don't think that we will, simply because MSOffice and IE for the MacOS are some very good pieces of software and that Apple would lose out on a lot of customers if MS just *happened* to decide to not continue porting the new releases to Apple hardware/software.

    Don't laugh, MS is vengeful in a market of hyenas. All it takes is a tiny bit of legal scorn, and you may find yourself on the wrong side of a very big player in a very liquid market.

    Rami
    --

  • As the article hints at, it would make no sense for Apple to release an Intel version of the MacOS, because all of the existing Mac software has been compiled for a PowerPC (or a Motorola 68K series). The Star Trek project mentioned in the article is source-compatible, not binary-compatible, so every software manufacturer would have to recompile all of their code for the x86, and some would have problems, and many just wouldn't bother. The biggest issue would not be with the major applications like Photoshop and Excel (I have no doubt Apple could talk Adobe and Microsoft into supporting any new type of MacOS they come out with) but the thousands of free, shareware, or small commercial applications that people wouldn't bother to recompile.

    When Apple switched from the 68K to the PowerPC a few years ago, not only was the PowerPC many times faster and able to emulate the 68K in real time, but it was the only significant change to the hardware, so many programs which accessed low-level MacOS hardware on the 68K still worked on the PowerPC. Also, Intel/PC hardware is too varied. Remember how long it's taken Linux to get support for all of the different PC hardware out there?

  • If Apple had released something like that, Microsoft would have just pulled the plug on Microsoft Office for the Mac, and guaranteed that people would have stuck with them anyway.

    Not necessarily. Star Trek was during the Windows 3.0/3.1 days when Windows was just barely starting to actually work (remember the old Windows, which was essentially the Solitaire Shell?). Back then, Office was still selling like hotcakes (this was before the Office 4.2 "bastardized Windows on Mac" debacle).


    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]

  • We need real choice in hardware (Score:3)

    by TheInternet ( 35082 ) on Monday September 04, 2000 @01:49PM (#807384) Homepage Journal
    If Apple had continued to develop this, improving stability and porting more software to the platform, then M$ may not be in the dominant position it is today. This would also mean that the whole personal computing world could be focused on cheap x86 technology, rather than being fragmented betwen two different architectures

    We would also have a lack of real choice. The beauty of nice, standardized Mac hardware is that it is far more likely to just work then hardware in the x86 world. I like to have that option available to me rather than being stuck in a situation where you have to buy x86 if you want a computer.

    Besides, look at all the standards that Apple pioneered and eventually brought to the x86 marketplace: 3.5" floppy drives, built-in ethernet, SCSI, affordable/practical wireless networking, software power control, FireWire. Heck, it even did a lot to popularize USB for Intel. It's amazing to me that even to this day that most x86 machines don't come with ethernet built in, yet almost all Apple machines (even laptops) have had that for years and years. Additionally, Apple's now shipping gigabit ethernet standard on the MP G4s.

    No, I contend that it's a good thing we have the Mac hardware platform. It's brought real choice and innovation to the market.

    - Scott

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    Scott Stevenson
  • Just running the PPP dialer and netscape was enough to crash it every few hours of use. Now its running linux, and its rock solid, so it evidently is not a hardware problem.

    I would expect this type of behavior out of Mac OS 7.x, or perhaps even 8.x. I would certainly not expect it out of Mac OS 9. Assuming you are running some Mac OS 9.x version, and you are consistently crashing "every few hours," then there is something wrong -- and I don't think you should be so quick to assume that your experience mirrors that of the rest of the userbase. If my G3 crashed every few hours, I certainly wouldn't be using it.

    I'm not saying Mac OS 7.x-9.x is as stable as Linux, but I routinely have it up on my G3 or PowerBook for several days at a time before shutting it down overnight.

    - Scott

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    Scott Stevenson
  • Blue box equalled MacOS apps on Rhapsody PPC(now carbon)

    A believe Blue Box was more akin to the Mac OS X "Classic" environment -- basically Mac OS 8/9 in emulation.

    Carbon, however, being an API rather than an environment, can actually take advantage of Mac OS X's modern features (protected memory, multitasking, multiprocessing, etc), whereas Blue Box could not. This was largely why Rhapsody was a bad idea, and why Carbon was created.

    - Scott

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    Scott Stevenson
  • More details on the Star Trek project can be found in Jim Carlton's Apple book [fatbrain.com]. It makes sickening reading, but it's one of the most interesting reads I had in quite a while. It's really quite unbelievable to see just how many times one company can keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

  • Apple's cross platform future (Score:3)

    by droleary ( 47999 ) on Monday September 04, 2000 @03:53AM (#807402) Homepage

    Apple's past maps directly to their fututre, it seems. When they bought NeXT, they got a nice multi-platform system, not just at the OS layer, but at the application layer as well. Since then, the have reworked it into Mac OS X, which has become increasingly Mac hardware specific. Darwin might run on Intel, but that's like having the Linux kernel cross platform but no libraries or applications. Just like its NEXTSTEP predecessor, the first developer preview of Mac OS X had an Intel version, but Apple dropped it after that. Now they say they're no longer supporting application-level cross compilation to Windows (aka, Yellow Box). They're also dropping Objective-C, their most useful foundation technology in my opinion, for future versions of WebObjects.

    In the early 90's I ditched Apple for Linux because I needed a base OS that actually worked well. In the late 90's I went back to Apple (but not for my server! :-) by way of NeXT with every hope that Apple would have the resources to take the NeXT technology in the right direction. Here I sit in the early 00's looking again at Linux and being pleased with how far GNUstep has come.

    The nature of the application market requires cross platform support these days. Apple continues to snub their developers when they make these kinds of decisions. Unless they start making better decisions, they may well end up as the "Also Ran" that some people have been calling for the last 15 years. Sad but true.

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