The Mac inspired loyalty - was Re: Least PC-Compatible MS-DOS machines?

On 6/6/14 5:41 AM, Toby Thain wrote: That was Gassee opening up the Mac platform (he came from the Apple II world in France). Mac eventually supported MFM, but the proprietary 20 pin interface stayed until the end. PCI only happened because a senior director said it had to. The follow-on to the Nubus PPC machines were going to have a proprietary bus, which made no sense to third-party card suppliers but at that time we had a two business units (N&C and the Graphics group) making cards that they were afraid would be undercut by outside competition. He switched to PCI because he thought that the vendors would supply graphics cards cheaper than we would be able to make them. The problem was the BIOS. We decided to go with Open Firmware instead of simulating an x86 at boot time, so even though the hardware was the same, the firmware and drivers always lagged the Windows versions. In the end, graphics and networking was integrated into the ASICs so it the software was all pulled in house anyway. I won't bother retelling the story of never being able to get enough company focus to replace the core OS. The first project I worked on at Apple (1986) was a 16MHz 68000 that went into a PC AT slot. It never got past a proof of concept because marketing didn't want us to get into the PC Peripheral business. We had to have the Apple brand as a box on the desktop, and it CERTAINLY couldn't be FASTER than a Mac Plus.