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This, from a novel written in the late Nineties - about the real reason Apple and the Mac exists.

MARY R147

GO HERE if that link is overwhelmed

People do not expect this kind of thing, but it very well may be true on a completely different level, which exists beyond the thinking of most everyone else.

Is there any validity to this? If it is true, it changes everything, because it means that the current success of the Mac, iPod and OS X comes from a very unexpected place. You would almost have to watch HEROES to get a clue about where it comes from.

I know you may think this borders lunatic fringe territory, but you owe it to yourself to at least consider it.

~ 'Ro'ger 'Bor'n '' '''' '
"Glad to have gotten this off my chest. Your mileage may vary."

Global warming, that is one of the things that bugs me! Science is just a stupid political thing with no fundamental truth behind it, I bet we're in for a cold winter!
This guy is all over it!
You know a main greenhouse gas is H20 and that in the seventies scientisits were sure we were sliding into another ice age? RIght?

What did he do? Immediately go to Ives and say "We need a new, AIO, computer. I want you to throw out everything we've ever done. Design new motherboards, implement this untested third party standard from Intel and use it for the keyboards and mice, make the keyboards and mice completely different too, and make it look radical yet consumer oriented?

I remember a few years ago at an Apple user group meeting here in Cupertino, CA. I asked someone if he every tried Photoshop on Windows. "EEEEW! Intel" he screeched. "It's thegmented! Everything is tho thlow." (The lisp was a result of a tongue piercing.)

So here was a computer user who should only care about ultimate usability of a system (something Apple may have been better at!) who was "brainwashed" by the Apple crowd into reciting silly half-truths about Intel whenever the subject came up. Face it, a CPU that only has an XOR and JNZ instruction and dealt in 64K memory blocks would work just fine if it ran fast enough. How the CPU works is of no concern to someone who just runs Photoshop all day long....

'84 to '86 (< 2 years) isn't really a good proof of "well-established". I'm pretty sure you can find sales figures of how "well-established" Macintosh sales were too.

During '87s, the 65816 did outperform the 68000 clock for clock if you checked the synthetic benchmarks such as dhrystone. Have you ever tried to compile C homework between the Mac or IIGS? I did and the Mac Plus/SE was at least 2x slower and ram limited.

But of course, it's software, not hardware that determines the winner and yes the Mac was a much cleaner 32-bit architecture, but it didn't get its legs until a few more years later. Why did Apple need to disavow its own momentum and mindshare with the Apple II, unless it's because it wasn't Job's baby?

At this same time, there have been rumors of a 65C832 in development by WDC (vaporware) as well as a prototype ARM-Apple II that would've gave the obvious headroom, as well as a consumer friendly upgrade/migration path. There was also the Mark Twain ROM04 IIGS freshener project.

At the time, GS/OS did support up to 8MB of ram since '87. Matching that with the lower software bloat, it was quite head-n-shoulders above even the "business" game PCs which continued to be software limited to 640K.

Jobs of course wouldn't have wanted his Mac baby killed in the cradle, so any significant Apple II improvement that would have eclipsed the Mac would be stillborn. And that management bias probably continued to hold sway after Jobs left. It IS always better to concentrate on one product than split your resources.

Apple II sales did support the Macs into the 90s if just not into the late 90s... Wasn't Apple a dying company in the late 90s until Jobs came back? :)

So whatever, this still qualifies as an Apple flop. :)

You say the purpose of an encyclopedia "is to present information factually and to be explicitly aware of their own limitations." Anyone who knows even a bit about how Wikipedia works knows the pitfalls of trusting it as a perfectly authoritative source of information. Those that don't know anything about it might still see the "edit" button.

Where in the Encyclopedia Britannica are you going to see the same sort of warning? I guess we don't need one, because Britannica is perfect. It's not like they would ever edit their articles to avoid harming the reputation of some powerful group.

All "knowledge" comes with the explicit and implicit biases of the author, the editor, and whatever else enters into the process of bringing facts to a reader. Wikipedia is superior to traditional encyclopediae precisely because the process is open and the readers cannot help but be aware of the opportunity for fraud and bias.

There are a few other examples out there where they've molten the system alot more than the above example. Interestingly though, of all the Apples I've heard this story about, they all still work, with the seldom exception of the lcd screen being molten.

"Tiger is due out in the first half of 2005, so there's still quite a while to wait."

You may be right, but for what it's worth, this analysis (I won't vouch for its quality) at MyMac speculates that Jobs announced Tiger now so that developers can get on board with 64-bit apps by this time next year:

MyMac analysis

FWIW, I'm just glad that Apple is finally beginning to take advantage of the G5 architecture. Hopefully ubiquitous 64 computing is only ~3 years away now that the move's been made.

You can have the same name for two commercial ventures if they operate in different businesses: Showtime - a movie vs. Showtime - a softcore porn channel

Showtime also shows feature films. So we have Showtime - a movie from one studio vs. Showtime - a movie channel owned by another studio. Now they're both in the movie business; does this complicate your analysis?

Apple Computer - Apple Records

That was true for ten years, but in 1999, Apple Computer got sued and lost after the company "entered the recording industry" by introducing high-end audio functionality into the Power Macintosh line.

Bob spoke at a private Macworld Expo event this last January that I attended. One of the most interesting things about him is how he's built his career. If you really think about it, RXC is really just a guy who happened to do the right things at the right time (and I mean that with all due respect), and now he has the power to meet and interview ANYONE in the tech industry (and probably has already). He probably also gets to see most every new piece of software and hardware months before anyone outside of the company knows about it. His opinion is highly valued. I wouldn't be surprised if he knew about the new Apple G4 Cube waaaay before the Expo last week.

I wish I could go into the stories he told, but most of the stuff is either just expansion of what he talks about in his "I, Cringely" column, or it's just not for public consumption. :-)

Here is a good anecdote. Considering how high profile RXC is, think about how many other people with similar positions would do the following... not many I would guess.

The Macworld event that he attended? Basically a private gathering of journalists and webmasters from a few medium-sized Mac websites (MacOPINION [the site I used to run/own], Applelinks, My Mac).

How did we get Cringely to speak at our gathering? We just asked. Of course, we paid for his plane ticket, fancy dinner, and such, but that's it. He didn't charge any kind of outrageous fee or anything (afaik).

What a great guy. Everyone should have a chance to hear RXC speak, he is brilliant.

Ben