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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.
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 was pushed by the AIM alliance: Apple, IBM, Motorola. The latter two developed and produced chips. Apple had some input. The goal was an ISA that made it easy to emulate both m68k and i386.
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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?
I was working very closely with Apple at the time, and unless everyone was being lied to, "IBM saved Macintosh" is a pretty serious mischaracterization. More like three companies working together to create a platform useful to all the contributors. 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.
if not better performing in some benchmarks
...some of which could perhaps be better described as"benchmarketing"
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
A much more elegant architecture than x86. Still have to give Intel credit their manufacturing prowess gave them the edge.
Right, so this is the infamous mac os 7 era right? Powermacs? Where motorola code was emulated to work on PPC? Apple being led by non-jobs? When Macs didnt just needed a restart every 24 hours (like windows did) but would outright ruin there system install every other week?
That was the most shitty Apple period ever.
Yeah, I supported macs for an ISP back in the day. Saw many sad mac icons.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
A much more elegant architecture than x86.
Elegance without performance is ultimately pointless. And the 68k platform seemed to be neglected by Motorola. I don't know if the problem was economic, technical or some other issue but Motorola was clearly falling behind the competition for whatever reason. The x86 architecture is ugly (to put it kindly) but it's generally good enough, fast enough, cheap enough and it benefits heavily from network effects. Plus Intel is without question the industry leader in manufacturing efficiency (including die size) so they have a real cost advantage that is hard to overcome for the types of chips they make.
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.
And Standard Oil saved more whales (kerosene is more convenient than whale oil) than Greenpeace ever will.
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Right, so this is the infamous mac os 7 era right? Powermacs? Where motorola code was emulated to work on PPC? Apple being led by non-jobs? When Macs didnt just needed a restart every 24 hours (like windows did) but would outright ruin there system install every other week? That was the most shitty Apple period ever.
The emulator was key in allowing users to use older 68k apps on the new PowerPC chips, until the software houses released versions built for the PowerPC. A lot of companies (including Apple itself) hurt the platform by delaying their PowerPC update releases. The OS did have some issues; I'm not going to sugar coat it. Apple also took a few journeys down dark alleys with poorly designed hardware during the '90s. Of course the alternative at the time was Windows 3.1, which wasn't a utopian dream either.
And yet, at the same time, the vast majority of PCs were still using DOS, because Windows was a fucking joke and all the software that ran in Windows was over-bloated garbage.
News flash: All PC options in 1993 sucked.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It sure seems like the M68k architecture could have been pushed forward more. Yeah, it was CISC, not RISC, but it was a very clean CISC. Modern x86 chips are really RISC machines internally, they just have a bunch of translation from the CISC instruction set to the 'real' ISA inside. If nothing else, that approach could have worked for M68k, right? Probably better, since the basic M68k ISA isn't so crufty and ugly like x86.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
G5s ran too hot for notebooks. IBM's manufacturing capacity for Power/PPC cores outside its own servers and workstations was eaten up by Microsoft for its XBox line. Apple was waiting too much on inventory. They switched to Intel not because their chips were more powerful, but because their chips were more available and could be used more flexibly.
The early 2000s (and 1999) also saw fierce competition between AMD and Intel. This happened after AMD stole the performance crown from Intel with the release of the original Athlon, which likely pushed Intel to actually make some improvements.
This eventually lead to the Pentium M (and later Core) microarchitecture which Intel has been building upon for the last decade or so.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
News flash: All PC options in 1993 sucked.
Ah, but what about the Amiga?
[Guru Meditation]
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So far most of the comments I am reading have to do with either an elaborate of the article, or an incorrect reinvention if history. Amazing!
Macs made USB!
It was very late in coming to Windows, and early implementations on Microsoft was horrible. They almost did the same thing to Firewire, and killed off the floppy long before it happened on PCs. SCSI implementation on Mac was also better. Mac tend to lead, PCs tend to "me too".
I have a theory on why this is, and it goes ... something like this.
Apple looks towards the future, and builds what will be "standard" in 3 years with their top of the line products. Things like USB, SCSI, Firewire, No Floppies, etc
Microsoft (and PCs) are always looking to build the least expensive product, and aren't very good at forward thinking. They wait for Apple to have "standards" they can use (USB) and the struggle to make those standards fit inside PCs. By the time PCs catch up, three years later, the re-announce "new" features that "just work" (sort of) that Macs had three years before, and thus become "standard".
Now it doesn't always work out that way, Apple has picked some horribly slick albatrosses along the way. Good ideas that never caught on (FireWire) But if you look at the "standards" today, almost all of them were "standard" on Mac long before they were standard on PCs.
I am not a Mac/Apple fanatic, I'll use anything you put in front of me. Computers are tools, and a craftsman uses any tool that's in front of him.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I remember the good olds days of theMotorola 68000 on Atari 520 ST and of the 68030 on the Atari Falcon 030. Would it be possible, today, with moderne technologies, to create a 68060 at 4 GHZ and a cool computer and operating system like a M68K Linux machine, not too costly ? The 68000 was so easy and so cool to program ! .
Right, so this is the infamous mac os 7 era right? Powermacs? Where motorola code was emulated to work on PPC? Apple being led by non-jobs? When Macs didnt just needed a restart every 24 hours (like windows did) but would outright ruin there system install every other week?
That was the most shitty Apple period ever.
Windows NT 4.0 never needed a restart every 24 hours, desktop systems maybe. If you had Windows NT servers that needed reboots that often, then you simply had bad Windows NT admins who didn't know how to resolve device driver, memory, or disk issues.
Macs didn't "make USB", they forced it on their users while giving a big "fuck you" to all of their old customers running anything else. It's not like the old stuff was horrible either (ADB, SCSI).
It was a little annoying that Apple made the jump all at once into USB, but really - a couple of RS422 ports was better? ADB was always only for mice and keyboards, and years of experience showed that for most users, SCSI was just too expensive and hard to set up. Or don't you remember "SCSI Hell"? For higher end Macs, you could retrofit SCSI, serial, and even USB cards if you really needed to. Some configurations even included a SCSI card.
As far as "USB was everywhere on PC's" that's just wrong. At the time Apple switched over, 99% of PC users had never heard of a USB port. I know, I was managing a computer store at the time.
They also made WiFi. I had it in my 1998 iMac. But I had to wait years until my PC neighbours would follow suit and stop laying cables all throughout the dorm.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
I'd still rather have a good blaster at my side
More music, fewer hits
Macs didn't "make USB", they forced it on their users while giving a big "fuck you" to all of their old customers running anything else. It's not like the old stuff was horrible either (ADB, SCSI).
The move to USB was a practical matter. One interface for low bandwidth connections: USB. One for high bandwidth ones: FireWire. It was about future proofing than legacy. And it had the effect that it brought down costs when you could use the same peripherals for Mac and PC if the drivers were there.
In the meantime, USB was everywhere on PCs. It just wasn't forced down everyone's throats. Even recent systems with USB3 quietly included will still include interfaces from the :"dark ages".
It also wasn't well supported until way after Apple made their change. Oh it was there. But adoption was poor. Drivers were non-existent or poor. Even Windows didn't have proper USB support til Windows 98. As for the dark ages, yes you can still get MBs with PS/2. I haven't used that port in a decade or more like I haven't used a serial or parallel port. I don't have a need.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I wouldn't exactly call USB support in Windows 98 "proper"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZQGRATlwA
The original PC, in 1981 ran on the 8088 - an 8/16 bit hybrid chip. By the time the Mac was released in 1989, the 486 was the chip of choice for the IBM PC and, more importantly, the clones.
Apple had a history and relationship with Motorola with the 6502 used in its Apple I and II lineup. When the Mac was released, the 68000 was a superior chip to the 386. And, there was the Apple vs PC war going on which helped solidify the choice - Apple was distancing itself from PCs anyway possible.
The 68K was a superior architecture to the x86 from a programming perspective. It's handling of memory was superior as well and was a dream to code in comparison to x86. But, frankly, it was easier to squeeze more performance out of the 486 and Pentium chips. Throw in a x87 co-processor, and my original PC seemed to outperform my original 68K based Mac when it came to number crunching despite the PC running at 4mhz vs the 16mhz 68 (yes, mhz). Even when I wrote assembly code (and, I was pretty good back then), the x86 code was still faster than comparable 68K code. Apple released subsequent versions of the Mac with the 68010/68020/68030 chips. But, so much was being done in software vs hardware on the Mac, especially, graphics, that the Mac seemed slow in comparison. The open architecture of the PC allowed 3rd party graphics cards and add-ons.
The Mac, with it's closed architecture, did not permit real 3rd party boards (unless you wanted to open the Mac and do a piggy-back board) until the Mac II and NuBus. NuBus never caught on - mainly, because Apple market share and developer constraints made it a real PITA to create NuBus cards. NuBus was pretty cool, though and was true plug'n play even before PC's got that ability.
At this same time, there was the debate over superiority of CISC vs RISC chips. Intel was CISC. Motorola stopped improving the 68K and focused on RISC. Apple went with RISC and, together with IBM and Motorola, developed the RISC PowerPC chip. It was, likely, easier, to port the 68K firmware and software to the PPC vs an x86 and it avoided the nightmare of admitting that IBM got it right when the went with i
Dwindling market share for the Mac (they still didn't permit clones to use their OS), heat (PowerPC was HOT and not suitable for laptops), and cost (x86 was cheaper than PowerPC, period and being produced by multiple vendors - nobody else made the Motorola designs), and Motorola doing much to improve the heat, power consumption and performance vs x86 took Apple down the x86 path.
Compared to Windows 95 it was worlds ahead. But that's not saying much. :P
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Is apple using PowerPC chips today? no.
All IBM did was derail the Motorola 88000 chip which was an evolutionary dead end anyways, but what it really did was kill the 68080 and beyond. The 68060 was more akin to the Pentium in design as the 68040 was to the Intel 80486. IBM stepped in and killed off Motorola chip fabrication, killing a bunch of 68000 based vendors including Commodore, Atari, NeXT and so on.
The fact that ARM has killed PowerPC in embedded space just speaks volumes to what a malaligned bone headed deal this was.
All IBM did was get other parties to help with fabbing newer POWER processors for the RS/6000 and to embed in new mainframes.
Apple uses Intel and ARM processors.
^^THIS. NeXTSTEP was portable at this point anyways, and the Intel port at this juncture was the most stable. Porting it to the PowerPC in hindsight was a complete waste of time.
Also it was IBM that screwed up 2Ghz G5's and couldn't (and wouldn't) deliver a G5 suitable for a laptop. Certainly nothing like a MacBook Air.
Even the PS4 and XBone use AMD x64's.
PowerPC is cooked.
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 was pushed by the AIM alliance: Apple, IBM, Motorola. The latter two developed and produced chips. Apple had some input. The goal was an ISA that made it easy to emulate both m68k and i386.
No. The goal was twice the performance at half the price of the x86.
Now Intel's CISC based x86 was certainly more difficult to work with in terms of improving performance but Intel was not exactly lacking in resources, human or financial. Even if it took 10x to improves CISC compared to RISC, Intel had the 10x. Intel pulled off friggin miracles with x86 performance, not one expected them to reach the clock rates they did.
It turned out that in general PowerPC had a 20% performance advantage over an x86 at the same clock rate, getting twice as fast was only achieved in very specialized circumstances. However Intel was able to achieve higher clock rates than PowerPC and maintain a general performance lead.
... the kernels (as Microsoft hired David Cutler to bring the VMS kernel with him to create Windows NT ...
Wrong on two counts. Cutler had worked on VMS but he did not bring it with him. NT was written from scratch. Also, he was not brought on board to rewrite Windows, he was brought on board to rewrite OS/2. While IBM worked on 32-bit x86-specific OS/2 2, Microsoft would in parallel work on the CPU architecture portable OS/2 3, aka "NT OS/2". Microsoft and IBM "broke up" and NT OS/2 was renamed Windows NT.
Too bad the PowerPC machines *couldn't run the damn games* or the requisite MS Office suites for students and business people to use them.
They ran Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo and World of Warcraft.
"Knowledge of how the hardware operates", "Things like CPU instruction set options, memory alignment, etc.", are the business of compilers and their creators.
Perhaps, but they fail at it. Game developers often **have to** make up for the deficiencies of compilers.
Compilers optimize code much much better than humans do.
Perhaps the average programmer, but those specializing in assembly language routinely beat the compilers. Assembly is merely less common today because of (1) cost and (2) CPUs are so overpowered for nearly all tasks we can live with less efficient compiler generated code.
You are assuming a game that was designed to be cross platform. In reality many of the games ported to PowerPC Macs were designed and written only for x86 Windows by their development team and porting to the Mac was done by a different team when the game is near completion or has already shipped.
True. I was astonished when I invested a decent chunk of change and bumped my 100MHz 486 from 16MB to 64MB of RAM. Multitasking actually became practical, especially running Mozilla alongside something else. Of course, the 68K Macs of the day weren't that much better at supporting 'a browser and something else'. The cooperative multitasking of the Mac OS helped reduce overhead, but it still took RAM.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
A coworker has a power mac that with just a battery replacement works fine to this day. The only problem is that the change to Intel means that no modern software will run on it. It still works with the old software though, and the old version of Garage Band is still very usable today.
Wait, there are updates for Windows?
Uh-oh.
You are welcome on my lawn.
yes ... that's sort of the point. windows servers and device drivers being stable has been a real problem even for fully supported hardware
You get what you pay for. If you did any research and bought supported components you never had a problem. It's companies that took the cheap route and didn't buy things like Adaptec controllers or offbrand system boards.
PPC Macs were awful because Apple wouldn't stop wasting time doing Photoshop shootouts with Pentuim II PCs.
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.
...which was what MkLinux ran atop ("Mk" for "microkernel", although how micro the Mach kernel is could be considered a "topic for discussion").
I'd suggest it was ARM more than IBM that saved Apple
The Newton saved Apple? (Remember, this isn't about today, it's about 25 years ago.)
I bet Google DOES use some moderate amount of assembly. I once worked for an audio-recognition company and we did indeed use about 100 lines of x64 assembly to perform the inner loop, which was some complex audio signal processing routine. Similar to an FFT.
This was easily 10x faster than the C version, which we had for reference purposes, even when using the Intel compiker with all optimizations turned on.
So, just because you never saw a Tapir in your life, does not mean they can't exist because their dick is longer than you can imagine.
Maybe you shouldn't have been using an AMD processor:
(Intel has been slammed for their compiler creating code that directs non-Intel CPUs to completely unoptimized code, not taking advantage of SSE, etc, even when present in the non-Intel processor)
http://www.agner.org/optimize/...
Section 2.3 of this:
http://download.intel.com/pres...
When Macs didnt just needed a restart every 24 hours (like windows did) but would outright ruin there system install every other week?
You MUST be confusing MacOS and Windows.
I have been using Macs since they were called Lisas (yeah, yeah, I know. Different OS (sort of)), and using Windows since at least version 3.1, and in all those years, I have only had to resort to an OS Reinstall ONCE on a Mac (68k or PPC). I cannot even begin to count the times I had to do a reinstall on Windows. That stuff didn't even BEGIN to abate until Windows 2000.
As far as having to restart, both OSes had their fair share of memory leaks. But when it comes to "outright ruin there[sic] system install[ation]", there is simply no comparison.
I've very rarely had to *reinstall* any OS (none I can think of except a hard drive failure), but from a Stability point of view, Mac OS was junk until OSX, Windows was complete feces until W95, and Junk until W2000. This is from an end user point of view. NT was relative stable before 2000, but it wasn't end user friendly.
Wait, there are updates for Windows?
Uh-oh.
That's why I just use Windows XP. I haven't been bugged for updates in a while.
I'd certainly be possible to get a modern 68060 to run at 4GHz if it ran with the memory that was used for those systems back then. To run it that fast, you'd need all of the RAM to be on the die, and it'd need to be the static, cache-style, blazing fast RAM. A 68060 isn't really a 68060 anymore if you'd add three levels of cache to it.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Motorola couldn't manufacture enough of the 68K CPUs, so Apple set up an alliance with IBM and Motorola (AIM). The first generation of the PowerPC was fast and easily manufactured.
Motorola sold Apple on AltiVec, the 128bit vector unit, and it was added to the PowerPC.
Once again, problems with the design and just sheer Motorola incompetence caused CPU production to fall behind. IBM, seeing the writing on the wall, bailed.
Apple, finally tired of Motorola's crap, ported everything to Intel, and left without looking back. Too bad it took them 20 years to realize this.
Motorola became synonymous with crap hardware and crap cellphones that would break. However, Motorola was great at the con game. They suckered Google into buying them, and then Google unloaded the Motorola unit at an $8 billion loss to Lenovo, probably for parts.
But whatever you feel about Apple, do not blame IBM. Motorola was the one holding back Apple.
Windows compatibility, then ARM. While the majority of Mac usage certainly isn't on Windows, the fact that it could be quite likely drove a large part of the surge in sales after the Intel switch.
NT 4.0 didn't appear to 1996, and wasn't really a W95 replacement.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Macs didn't "make USB", they forced it on their users while giving a big "fuck you" to all of their old customers running anything else. It's not like the old stuff was horrible either (ADB, SCSI).
I'm sure they were out there (probably writing anti-Mac magazine articles), but I didn't know anyone with a Mac who looked back from the introduction of USB. It was superior in every way! It was mere months before I had all the USB adapters I needed...the parallel->USB converter I still use to this day and never - not once since it was first used on my Blue and White "Yosemite" G3 Mac - have I needed to load a driver for it. :) (Oddly, it did come with a driver CDROM.)
[...]
As far as "USB was everywhere on PC's" that's just wrong. At the time Apple switched over, 99% of PC users had never heard of a USB port. I know, I was managing a computer store at the time.
Confirmed! It was a long time before the PC people I know grudgingly started switching to USB. GRUDGING! No respect for something that's actually superior. ;)
Which one of the posters in that link are we supposed to assume is you? I didn't see any APK's.
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You could have replaced that entire comment with a single sentence just telling me your username. If I wanted to turn my brain to mush reading pages and pages and pages of fiddly assembly bits, I'd just read the link.
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Oh. Missed the subject line that you didn't duplicate anywhere in the post. I don't change the subject 99% of the time on my posts so it's a blind spot.
I'm not going to deny that assembly CAN be faster, but my bullshit detector goes off whenever I hear somebody advocating using hand-tuned assembly as a general practice.
Have you heard of MenuetOS? I suppose the argument could be made that after 14 years, they have a leg up on HURD and ReactOS.
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