6 Jun
2014
6 Jun
'14
8:54 a.m.
On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 11:20 AM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
On 6/6/14 5:41 AM, Toby Thain wrote:
As we all know, they soon walked back on the Mac's incompatible
Wow, that is just incredible news to me. I don't recall any hint of that
ever being leaked to the "outside" back then. Of course, the PR spin to the
customer base at that time was that Apple was going industry-standard all
the way with PReP, PCI, CHRP... I thought I read a little story where Mac
OS was made to run on a CHRP machine in a lab, some machine with a parallel
port and PS/2 mouse and keyboard, running System 7... I for one was
definitely excited by the grand vision of usurping the antiquated x86
architecture as the standard on the desktop with a slick little RISC box
(PPC? MIPS? Alpha?) with common peripherals that could run any operating
system... Mac OS, UNIX, OS/2, Windows and all those hot new next-generation
operating systems, most of which never came, save for BeOS (how I miss
it...)
LOL. So much for the great leap forward. Ah, well, the industry has
developed interestingly in its own right, in the mean-time.
Of course, the Mac clones were not far away at this point... Was there a
change in CEO here somewhere, Sculley to Amelio?
I won't bother retelling the story of never being able to get enough
interfaces and added SCSI, Ethernet, later USB
and PCI, etc. (Third parties
provided other interoperability solutions.)
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...
company focus to replace the core OS.
Right? What ever happened to Copland? I always thought Apple would have
been better off grafting the Copland interface on A/UX, than buying NeXT
and rolling over NeXTStep, LOL. If not that, they could still have at least
saved BeOS. I guess Jobs' ego won the day.
Being PC compatible would not have made any sense for
Apple from a
Apple definitely had that attitude about products back then and there was a
lot of frustration in the user base because of it.
Best,
Sean
marketing perspective; their angle was
"being the alternative".
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.