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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."

5 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. Fine dining by Mostly+a+lurker · · Score: 5, Funny
    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.
  2. SPARC was the dominant chip at the time. by CyricZ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
  3. Alternative Headline by Bloater · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  4. Good decision by lordholm · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    "Civis Europaeus sum!"
  5. 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.