Apple Nearly Moved to SPARC

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."

Comments

SPARC was the dominant chip at the time.

[CyricZ]

For serious workstations, the SPARC was basically the dominant chip at the time. Indeed, it was at the top of its game. Even now we still see it used for mission-critical and high-performance tasks. So it's really no wonder that Apple would have considered such a switch.

Re:SPARC was the dominant chip at the time.

[fitten]

Heh, the rumor was that SUN, before opening up the SPARC CPU, took it to Motorola and asked if Moto would build it. Moto looked at it and said, no, but we can make you something better, and showed SUN the 88k. Unfortunately, the 88k died but at least its bus lived on in the first PPC processors.

Had the workstation vendors worked together.

[CyricZ]

There has always been much speculation as to what the computing landscape would look like today had the non-Intel vendors worked together to produce a superior chip.

Indeed, the combined talents of the Alpha crew from DEC, with the PA-RISC developers from HP, the SPARC group from Sun, those behind the MIPS at SGI and MIPS Technologies, and the PPC people from IBM, for instance, could have come up with a CPU that completely trumped what Intel was putting out at the time.

Re:Had the workstation vendors worked together.

[dfghjk]

haha, Alpha had the grimmest, most threadbare instruction set imaginable. It's strength was it's ferocious clock rates that were enabled by abnormally deep pipelines and instructions that did relatively little (no integer divide!). The characteristics that Alpha had that caused it to be so loved are the same ones that cause the P4 to be so hated; relatively poor IPC, very deep pipelines, very high clockrates, huge caches to cover it's design weaknesses, and excessive power consumption. The love of Alpha was a cult. Yeah it was fast and 64-bit but it was a tremendous power hog for it's generation. No need to love Alpha. No one did but DEC.

BTW, Intel didn't steal anything from Alpha for the x86's. It's owned the team at the time. Cutler didn't steal anything from DEC either. A person owns the knowledge and experience inside his head. I'm sure if there was evidence of theft it would have been dealt with. DEC was a dinosaur that wasn't showing any signs of interest in Cutler's continued work. He left to take up his projects at a company that was interested in pursuing them.

Re:Had the workstation vendors worked together.

[ACMENEWSLLC]

>>Indeed, the combined talents of the Alpha crew from DEC, with the PA-RISC
>>developers from HP, the SPARC group from Sun, those behind the MIPS at SGI and
>>MIPS Technologies, and the PPC people from IBM, for instance, could have come up
>>with a CPU that completely trumped what Intel was putting out at the time.

ROFL - that is hilarious. Can you imagine the politics in a chip like this? By the time the chip meets everyone at these companys requirements you would have a horrific chip.

And as we all know, the chip itself really makes no difference. Look at x86 for example with all it's legacy routines that continue to haunt it. What makes the difference is marketing.

Had any one of these chips had the proper marketing department and sales force, Microsoft would have an OS for it. I have an NT 3.5 for Alpha CD somewhere. They did write 3.51 for PPC and reportably SPARC, but didn't release SPARC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT

Novell 4.11 with NDS has features that Windows 2003 AD still doesn't have. For example, while I can mark a drive compressed on both OSes, on Netware I can configure it to compress the file only after not used after x many days. And I can tell the OS to leave a file uncompressed after use for y many days. I can mark a file as executable or not, such as with *nix. I can do bulk operations on the directory which I still find difficult with Active Directory. With some lesser known options, I can put the same user in multiple leafs in the tree to associate the same user with multiple departments leafs, applications leafs, or what have you. In AD if I put my user objects in department leafs, I can't associate GPO's to groups of users such as managers from each department. I have to create a subcontainer leaf and put managers in there and associate the GPO to each of these leafs. What a pain.

Active Directory is still not where Netware NDS was 10 years ago. But that's not what matters. Marketing is paramount.

Re:Had the workstation vendors worked together.

[IntlHarvester]

Adding more of the same level of engineeering expertise doesn't necessarily get you anywhere

It has nothing to do with engineering expertise -- it's FAB investment. None of the RISC companies could afford to keep up with Intel in process technology, and the enormous cost of designing and producing your own chip basically sunk DEC and SGI.

I agree that it was probably politically infesible, but the RISC crowd invested far too much money into niche CPUs and it killed all of them (except IBM).

Advanced Interface Design

[DaveRexel]

-TFA-
"McNealy added that he went to Steve Jobs' house to try to hammer out the user interface agreement. The Apple co-founder and CEO was "sitting under a tree, reading 'How to Make a Nuclear Bomb,'" with bare feet and wearing jeans with holes torn in the knees, McNealy said."
---

From just this one anecdote one does get the feeling that Steve might have taken over Sun eventually. The disappointment expressed by Bill Joy over the failed "close encounters" with Apple does indicate that they would have followed Steves leadership.

On a more serious note, the clash of the raging CEO egos would not have been beneficial for either company.

Speculation that SGI would buy Apple.

[CyricZ]

There was a lot of speculation in the early to mid 1990s that SGI would buy Apple. SGI was doing quite well at that time, considering they had just released their very successful Indy line. Considering that both provided workstations for the same type of applications (multimedia-related, desktop publishing, and so forth), the systems from Apple could have offered a solid low-end line to complement SGI's more powerful systems.

What could have happened is an infusion of IRIX with Mac OS. We could have seen Mac OS on the MIPS, for instance. Not only that, but it would be a situation very similar to what we have now with Mac OS X: an excellent GUI built upon a solid UNIX-based core. Except in the SGI case the UNIX core would be IRIX, rather than a BSD/Mach conglomerate.

Lots of processors considered?

[RetiredMidn]

I seem to recall seeing a demo of a Mac with a Motorola 88000 RISC processor running my 68000 binary code (Lotus 1-2-3) under emulation, a predecessor to the PowerPC effort.

Oops, I may be in violation of an NDA...

/. sure is a good place for dredging up obscure technical memories.

Re:Lots of processors considered?

[RetiredMidn]

Wasn't the "Star Trek" Intel port done at about the same time?

Now that you mention it, yeah. We were given a separate presentation at Lotus about Star Trek, including a demo. (Damn, there goes another NDA.)

To be honest, I remember thinking at the time that Star Trek wasn't really thought through. Certainly the execs at Lotus didn't get it (which says more about the execs than it says about Star Trek). DOS/Windows apps were not going to run under Star Trek (certainly not with the desired user experience). "Porting" these apps to the Mac OS APIs wasn't going to be all that easy. And converting Mac applications of the day, many of which were written in processor-dependent ways, to a new processor architecture would be much more difficult than the conversion of more modern applications today.

It was neat technology, but it didn't solve a problem people thought they had.

I kinda went off topic there; please don't hurt my karma.

Re:Lots of processors considered?

[RetiredMidn]

I always had the impression that Star Trek was dry run of their 68K emulator technology

Interesting thought, but I really don't think so. AFAIK, Star Trek was not emulation; it was the Mac OS APIs recompiled and re-hosted on a different platform. I've seen conflicting reports about how it was really implemented, but (forgive me), Cringely's is the most credible, IMHO. It is possible they learned a thing or two that helped them with the PowerPC platform transition.

And I suppose you could argue that if they were going to switch to Intel eventually, they should have done it sooner rather than later.

Personally, I've never believed that. I worked closely with both the 680x0 and 80x86 architectures in the 80's, and, form my perspective as a user of the instruction set, I found the 68K vastly superior to work with; the only thing the Intel platform had going for it was the fact that IBM had made it a de facto standard.

Architecturally, the Pentium started to close the gap, but the power consumption issues were pretty significant. My five-year-old fanless PowerBook G3 is still a pleasure to use over the Dell laptops my last employer supplied me with.

IMNSHO, Apple's Intel switch wasn't inevitable, it just makes sense at the moment. And I harbor a suspicion that Apple won't necessarily stay mono-architectured. Mac OS X binaries, by design, can accommodate multiple (not just two) processor architectures. Apple will pursue the direction(s) that make the most sense as things play out over the next few years.

Back in the day..

[turgid]

...late '80s/very early '90s there was something called the ACE Consortium.

This was formed by the likes of DEC, Compaq and SCO at the time when IBM had not long brought out the dreadfully underpowered, expensive and proprietary PS/2 line of personal computers running the pathetic MS-DOS and mediocre OS/2.

Most people were running PeeCees which were essentially 16-bit with a single user, single tasking operating system running on dreadfully slow CISC (8086, 80286, 80386) processors will pitifully small amounts of RAM (512k-1MB) and nary a GUI.

The ACE consortium was designing a MIPS-based (32-bit RISC) open specification for a replacement to the IBM-PC and PS/2 architectured which would run a UNIX SYSVR4 derivative and a nice GUI (was it with X?).

The project died a death. I can't remember why.

When I was 15 I longed for a RISC UNIX workstation in the house instead of the 12MHz Compaq SLT/286 we had (for business use).

MIPS lived on in post-VAX pre-Alpha workstations at DEC and then at SGI. itanic Kool Aid all but killed off MIPS. The only two major RISC architectures from the era which survive are SPARC and POWER/PowerPC, and for a couple of years it looked like SPARC was dead too.

The spirit of Alpha lives on in Athlon and Opteron.

Re:Sun should port x86 Solaris to intelMac

[turgid]

The main problem x86 Solaris faces is providing driver support.

That problem is being addressed and started with the Solaris 10 project many years ago. Solaris 11^H^H Nevada will again be a vast improvement.

Solaris 10 x86 runs better than Linux on modern laptops. Solaris 10 rules.

Wouldn't Have Made a Big Difference

[Alon Tal]

Most probably, the only difference today would have been that we would be reading about Apple dumping _Sun_ for Intel, rather than dumping IBM for same. Reminds me of an Isaac Asimov story called "What If-", in which a newlywed couple meets a man who owns a gadget that can show them alternate realities, if key events in their past had taken a different course. For example: Would they be married had they not accidentally met on a train ride, etc. They keep going back to different points in their past: The day they met, the date of their wedding, and of course, everything is radically different, which aggravates the wife to no end ("This marriage is just based on chance, an accident..."). Right before everything gets really ugly, the husband deparately says: "Show us what we would have been doing at this very moment, had we not met on that train", and, surprisingly, they see themselves, exactly as they are right now, sitting together, happily married.