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Apple vs. Microsoft Myths Revisited
allgood2 writes "John Gruber at Daring Fireball has a great article exploring the myth that Apple could/would be Microsoft if only they had licensed their operating system. This myth has oft been purported in technology and business media."
In Q2 2004 Apple's market share was at 3.7%, while in Q2 2003 Apple was at 3.8%.
Apple's shipments, in fact, increased from 452K boxes to 495K, but the market grew at a rate of 10.9%, while Apple grew at the rate 9.3%, so officially they lost market share.
Actually, Sun does make desktops (that's what their workstation machines are, really. they stand alone quite well) and there are notebooks.
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http://solutions.sun.com/catalog.static/en_US/7
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
The IBM MDA card which the author refers to was a text-only monochrome graphics adapter with an 80x25 screen, technically with a 720x350 pixel size. However, you could not write directly to the video memory.
Most people with mono monitors installed Hercules clone cards, which were the same 720x350 but they permitted you to do 4 shades of [green|amber|white] monochrome graphics in 720x350 resolution. This was in fact greater than the video resolution of the Macintosh (512x384), though of different shape (The Mac had a far more square aspect ratio until the Mac II, when the video adapters adopted VGA dimensions) (640x480x16 colors/grayscales, initially)
The IBM Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) is not significant to this discussion - in addition to having only a monochrome 640x200 or color 320x240 mode, it had horrid snow problems when drawing or scrolling. You wouldn't even attempt to use a CGA card for a GUI. (Windows 2.03 had a driver - using it was quite funny)
The IBM Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) however, was 640x350 in 16 colors, with a 64 color palette. While this might seem anemic by today's standards, it was quite usable in 1986 or 1987. Most games back then played best in EGA mode (at least until VGA came into true vogue a year or two later).
How about ROM? Well, the first Macintosh came with 128K of RAM and a 64K ROM with the Macintosh toolbox on it. The first Mac II (first color macintosh) had a 256k ROM and 1MB of RAM. Your average PC in 1986 would have 512k or 640k of RAM in it. It might even have an EMS board in it, if it was a business system. Plus, it was expandable up to 16MB (if you wanted) of extended (assuming 286+ here) that you could actually run programs with, if you wished. It's almost certain the Mac OS would have been made into a protected mode program - it uses a very clumsy form of software memory protection (zones) on the 68k which didn't support memory protection in hardware.
The article author seemed to be at pains to suggest how those horrible PC clones back in the 80's couldn't run a GUI. This isn't absolutely true. If a better GUI than GEM or Windows 1.x or 2.x were available, more would have run one. It just didn't seem worth it with that kind of crappy ass software. When Windows 3.0 came out, people jumped on it fast, even though it was kind of sucky still. They wanted a GUI.
The author is somewhat full of shit is my point. He's being disingenous about the relative capabilities of the machines of the day.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The original Macintosh was a work of art. Both the hardware and firmware/software were optimized as well as possible. Read the interview, it's quite interesting.
BYTE Macintosh Preview.
BYTE Macintosh Team Interview.
I have a collection of most 68000 compact macs and play with them every now and then, they're quite fascinating little machines. I can feel the amount of bloat between every release. System 1.0 boots in 2-3 seconds from a floppy! (System 7 takes about a minute from a hard disk on the same hardware). Some of the difference is of course due to the few features but mostly it's the difference between compiled C and hand-tuned ASM.
"It's better to be a pirate than join the navy" -Steve Jobs
For those of you who weren't there, it's worth a look back at the early Lisa/Mac era. The Lisa was a usable machine, with a hard drive, a good GUI, and a protected mode OS, but it cost $10,000 in 1983. (Part of the problem was that Motorola was years late with the MMU for the 68000, and the Lisa had a MMU built out of register-level parts on a board. This ran the cost way up. Another part of the problem was that Apple's hard drive, the LisaFile, was both slow and unreliable.)
The original Mac, on the other hand, was a cost-reduced Lisa. One floppy, no hard drive, no MMU, 128K RAM. Most of the user's time was spent changing disks and looking at the "watch" icon. It was a failure in the marketplace. Not until the Mac was built up to a Lisa level (a hard drive and more RAM) did it sell. Apple actively resisted successful attempts by third parties to add a hard drive to the Mac. Being late with a hard drive was probably Apple's biggest mistake in the early Mac era.
The product that saved Apple was not the Mac; it was Apple's laser printer. That's what made the Mac a success and gave Apple market share in the desktop publishing industry.
It's also worth remembering that there were competitors to Apple other than the PC - and they ran UNIX! There were quite a number of UNIX workstations in the early and mid 1980s. Some of them were price-competitive with Apple's machines. (Anybody remember the AT&T PC?) In terms of price point, Apple was playing in the workstation market for a while.
The MacOS itself had more in common with DOS/Windows 3 than with a modern OS. Underneath, it was way too much like DOS - not reentrant, no threads, no processes, a dumb file system. The GUI part was fine, but the underpinnings were crude. This reflected the terrible memory limitations under which the original version was built.
On top of this was built, over time, something that looked like a multi-application OS, but wasn't really. Mac programmers knew this as the Mess Inside. (I've written drivers and applications for the Mac, so I know what I'm talking about here.) Apple actually tried to fix the Mess Inside several times before MacOS X. But the PowerPC transition set things back. Much of the OS was running in 68K emulation mode for years after the PowerPC transition. One big problem was that the MacOS was so low level that applications prevented interrupts. The PowerPC had a completely different interrupt model than the 68000, and making those play together resulted in some horrors.
Arguably, Apple would have been better off encouraging Motorola to develop bigger and better 68000 type machines. There's nothing wrong with the 68000 architecture; it could have been brought up to the speeds of today's machines. The whole PowerPC thing was an unsuccessful attempt to cut a deal with IBM. IBM was supposed to sell MacOS machines. Remember?
Another technical problem occured at the PowerPC transition. The 68000 had 80-bit floating point. The PowerPC had only 64-bit floating point, because IBM mainframes had 64-bit floating point. So, to avoid truly appalling benchmarks, Apple chose not to emulate the 68000 FPU on the PowerPC. All the engineering applications stopped working. (Yes, there was the third-party "SoftFPU" patch, but it wasn't enough.) The engineering companies dumped the Mac at that point. No more AutoCAD, no more EDA. Market share in the PowerPC era never reached that of the 68K machines.
Apple's third major attempt at an OS rewrite, Copeland (the original MacOS 8) hit a wall - Microsoft refused to rewrite their applications for the new OS. That's what resulted in the return of