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Apple's First Flops
Sabah Arif writes "Apple began the eighties with two major flops under its belt: the Apple III and the LISA. Both machines were attempts at breaking into the business market. They were technologically advanced, but major flaws prevented their success."
FTFA:
>where he led a dozen engineers (including future Apple CEO Larry Tesler)
Larry Tesler was never CEO of Apple. He was Chief Scientist and VP.
Kinda makes me wonder about the veracity of the rest of the piece...
Apple's PCs never got a strong hold in the business market, but once upon it's most powerful machine did:
From Wikipedia: "The Apple LaserWriter was one of the first laser printers available to the mass market. Combined with GUI-based programs like Adobe PageMaker on the Macintosh, it is generally considered to have sparked the Desktop publishing (DTP) revolution in the mid-1980s.
Unlike models from HP, which had been introduced a few months earlier and used their proprietary PCL printing language, the LaserWriter included the PostScript page description language which allowed for far more complex graphics, high-resolution bitmap graphics, outline fonts, and generally much better-looking output.
The use of PostScript comes at a cost. Unlike PCL and other early printer control languages, PostScript is a complete programming language and requires a complete computer to run it. In the case of the LaserWriter this was a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 12MHz, making it the fastest machine in Apple's lineup, and the most expensive at $6,995 when it was introduced in late 1985."
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
If the X86 hardware is faster, then why doesn't it outperform the Xserve clusters using Mac OS X and standard Apple hardware? Don't mistake bad benchmarking for good data. Don't believe me, go to the Super Computer web site (http://www.top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2004&M=1 1) where 5 of the top nine are PowerPC hardware. Number 7 on the list is built by using stock Xserves ordered directly from the on-line Apple Store and running Macintosh OS X. And, there are even faster Apple clusters in the wild that didn't even bother to try to compete for a ranking.
These are not marketing ploys. These are very expensive machines that are optimized to go as fast as they can to get the job done. No political bias...just go fast. The only X86 cluster in the list above a ranking of 9 has nearly twice the number of processors as the Virginia Tech cluster. Maybe you should spend a little less time pounding out Visual Basic programs and do some actual research before making statements like that.