Nearly 25 Years Ago, IBM Helped Save Macintosh

dcblogs (1096431) writes "Apple and IBM, which just announced partnership to bring iOS and cloud services to enterprises, have helped each other before. IBM played a key role in turning the Macintosh into a successful hardware platform at a point when it — and the company itself — were struggling. Nearly 25 years ago, IBM was a part of an alliance that gave Apple access to PowerPC chips for Macintosh systems that were competitive, if not better performing in some benchmarks, than the processors Intel was producing at the time for Windows PCs. In 1991, Apple was looking for a RISC-based processor to replace the Motorola 68K it had been using in its Macintosh line. "The PCs of the era were definitely outperforming the Macintoshes that were based on the 68K," he said. "Apple was definitely behind the power, performance curve," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. The PowerPC processor that emerged from that earlier pairing changed that. PowerPC processors were used in Macintoshes for more than a decade, until 2006, when Apple switched to Intel chips.

Comments

Re:Another misleading headline

[rmdingler]

Did IBM put more into it than the other AIM members? Probably. But they didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts.

There exists a noble, altruistic corporation that roams the lands doing the good work.

Mythbusted

Good work NE Altruism

[slashdice]

And Standard Oil saved more whales (kerosene is more convenient than whale oil) than Greenpeace ever will.