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

Fine dining

[Mostly a lurker]

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy had to be wined and dined at a Silicon Valley McDonald's before he gave up his reluctance to help launch the workstation maker in 1982

History does not record which of the many fine vintages available at McDonald's was selected on this illustrious occasion.

Re:Fine dining

[Neo-Rio-101]

So that explains the "Happy Meal Ethernet" driver for Linux on SPARC systems....

Re:Fine dining

[Megane]

Actually, "Happy Meal Ethernet" is the 100Mbit sequel to the 10Mbit "Big Mac Ethernet".

static void happy_meal_tcvr_write(struct happy_meal *hp,
unsigned long tregs, int reg,
unsigned short value)
{
int tries = TCVR_WRITE_TRIES;

ASD(("happy_meal_tcvr_write: reg=0x%02x value=%04xn", reg,
value));

/* Welcome to Sun Microsystems, can I take your order please? */
if (!hp->happy_flags & HFLAG_FENABLE)
return happy_meal_bb_write(hp, tregs, reg, value);

/* Would you like fries with that? */
hme_write32(hp, tregs + TCVR_FRAME,
(FRAME_WRITE | (hp->paddr ...

almost ?!?!?

[TTL0]

almost only counts in horseshoes and handgrenades.

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.

Alternative Headline

[Bloater]

Sun Microsystems Boasts "We're not quite good enough."

Good decision

[lordholm]

The SPARC V8 is quite clean and nice to work with, and is farley sane, with the exception of tagged arthmetics, the trap model and the visible pipeline, and missing standard interface to the MMU (yes I know of the ref-mmu).

On the other hand, the SPARC V9 is a horrendeus monster thar is just plain scary when dealing with supervisor level code. IMHO the PPC64 is much nicer than the V9, in many aspects.

But, on the other hand the PPC, has gone out of order, while the SPARC has stayed in order, making the CPU a hell to compile code for.

Architecturally, the PPC is a slight bit nicer than the SPARC, and as a plus, the PPC64 was defined exactly the same time as the PPC32 was, and thus they (PPC32 & 64) are very similar.

In my eye, it was a good decision to go for the PPC.

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.

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]

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.

Re:Had the workstation vendors worked together.

[dfghjk]

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.

a company of "almosts"

[penguin-collective]

Sun almost created several great desktop window systems. Sun almost set a standard for web-based application delivery with Java. Apple almost picked Sun's SPARC architecture. Sun almost set the standard for server operating sytems. And then there are things that Sun achieved, briefly, and lost, like dominance of university departments.

I leave it to others to diagnose the exact causes of Sun's repeated failures. I can say this much for myself: I won't buy another Sun product again, ever, nor will I ever trust any of Sun's promises again.

Re:a company of "almosts"

[Animats]

That's very insightful.

Someone should write a book on how Sun blew it with client-side Java. They gave the product away and spent tens of millions marketing it. In a marketing sense, they succeeded; everybody has a Java interpreter on their desktop. Yet almost nobody uses them any more. Why?

Part of the problem is that Sun's top technical people, including Joy, never really figured out GUIs. Sun went through three bad in-house window systems before finally giving up and going with X-Windows. Then in the Java era, they went through the AWT and Swing eras, both of which combine complexity with poor performance.

So Sun ended up as a "server company", the place SGI went after they failed to survive the transition to low-cost graphics.

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: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.

Isn't that...

[Black Parrot]

Isn't that kinda like "I almost got laid"?