UNIX V7

2009/6/11 Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com>: That's just not realistic. They needed a new OS, not only for their new hardware, but for the millions of existing PowerPC machines they had out there. What's more, they also had thousands of existing PowerPC applications that they needed to run, too. In 1996 when Apple acquired NeXT, the lackluster Pentium Pro was the state of the x86 art. A migration then would have been disastrous - the PPro was not even that competitive with the best PowerPCs, certainly could not have emulated the PPC effectively. PowerPC remained highly competitive with the Pentium II, PIII and trounced the wretched Pentium 4. And OpenStep was portable - it already supported MC68K and x86-32 in shipping versions, and as you say, SPARC in the labs. I don't recall a PA-RISC version, but I'm sure you're right. The x86 move, though disappointing and removing much of the distinctive uniqueness from the Mac, was a good one, but they did it at the right time - just as the x86 world was going to x86-64. At the time Apple announced it, the high ground was held by the AMD "Sledgehammer" chips, the Opteron and Athlon64. But Apple must have been party to Intel's plans for the forthcoming Core and more significantly Core2 chips, which not only trounced the PPC G5, they have also nearly killed off the AMD x86-64 chips. They couldn't have done it any earlier. Indeed, I think it would almost have been better to have gone straight for x86-64 throughout the range, and for Apple to have skipped the handful of early Core 1-based models, which are 32-bit only. But Apple *had* to wait until the bulk of its userbase and developers and apps were on OS X, happy to move to a new version - the first version to officially support x86 was 10.4.5 at the start of 2006. The other enabling technology was Transitive's QuickTransit PowerPC emulator, so that the millions of users could still use PowerPC OS X apps on their new Macintels. QuickTransit wasn't around 'til 2004 at the earliest. In summary, no, I entirely disagree. Apple jumped at just about the right time, and could not have done it much earlier. Before the Core processors, the performance advantage just wasn't there, and before 2006 or so, too many people were still running Classic applications, which wouldn't work on OS X/86. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508