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Apple Nearly Moved to SPARC

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the we-that-woulda-been-interesting dept.

taskforce writes "Sun Microsystems Co-Founder Bill Joy claims that Apple nearly moved to Sun's SPARC chips instead of IBM's PPC platform, back in the mid-1990s. From the article: "We got very close to having Apple use Sparc. That almost happened," Joy said at a panel discussion featuring reminiscences by Sun's four cofounders at the Computer History Museum. An account of his entire presentation can be found on Cnet."

1 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Had the workstation vendors worked together. by dfghjk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's no reason to believe this at all. Adding more of the same level of engineeering expertise doesn't necessarily get you anywhere. Besides, it could be argued that all the processor groups you mentioned produced processors that were better than Intel offered at the time. They simply weren't enough better to make a difference. Odds are that combining the efforts of the competition would have made them all fail even sooner. HP joined Intel for IA64 and look where that got them.