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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.
Errr, yeah, but they could have just used Intel chips like everyone else. Ultimately it would have given better performance, saved themselves a lot of pain in switch over, and put themselves ahead of the curve selling to people who wanted to dual boot. So did IBM save them or cripple them?
As a result, Apple had the more POWERful chips for many years. They avoided the Pentium debacle completely. Pentium M was the first sane chip that Intel produced, and Apple got in with the Core Duo - just when the whole world was screaming how for ahead AMD was, and just before Intel turned things around.
This is technically true. Windows NT was originally designed to be OS/2 version 3.0 and at first they targeted the i860 which never did well, so they changed to the MIPS platform. Prior to release Microsoft decided to make it their next Windows platform and the rest was history.
What made Windows NT unique at the time was the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that allowed Microsoft to target multiple processor platforms. At release, Windows NT supported i386 (called IA-32 at the time), Alpha, and MIPS.
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Actually, I was surprised how solid Mac OS 8 was after going through Mac OS 7 and the trials and tribulations of unimplemented trap errors (hallmarks of 68K emulation). As long as you didn't have to go crazy on extensions, you could expect your Mac to keep on working. It didn't have any of the conveniences we have now with OS X, but it was far better than most of the Windows experience at the time (remember Plug and Pray?).
Besides, if you were really serious about running a server with Mac hardware, you loaded up MkLinux or bastardized AUX implementation. Hell, there was even a Mach kernel implementation for Mac hardware. And as you got further along into PPC architecture, you selection of Linux became even better (Yellow Dog was a favorite of mine). Apple's closed architecture made it fairly easy to target device drivers for almost all the peripherals. And the early adoption of USB made it easier as well.
The most obvious example is the byte-swapping load instructions. There are some other examples if you can find the papers by the VirtualPC authors, which explain them in detail. It's been quite a few years since I paid attention to anything PowerPC related.
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