6 Jun
2014
6 Jun
'14
11:29 a.m.
On 6/6/14 10:19 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_Reference_Platform
There were some Mac clones built to this, but they were due to appear
right about the time that Steve Jobs returned to Apple and killed off
the MacOS licensing programme. The best of the PReP clones were the
Motorola ones; as soon as Motorola learned of Jobs' return, they
killed the development programme.
PReP was quite a bit earlier, and had ISA slots and a memory hole.
Apple never did any work on getting MacOS to run on PReP.
CHRP was the one that MacOS ran on, and had Apple I/O ASICs speced
but NT didn't run on CHRP.
The clones were either
derivative designs based off of the original Nubus PPC ASICs,
the Tanzania 603/604 Apple Design, or the clone maker's own
ASICs.
Clones were dead as soon as Steve refused to license MacOS upgrades.
In the end, it wasn't NeXTStep that saved Apple in the late 90's, it
was Steve putting buzz back in the brand and making interesting LOOKING
products. The guts were essentially the same well into the 2000's
when OS X was stable enough to sell.