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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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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.
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.
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.
Spoken like someone who has no idea about the market at the time. The PowerPC was introduced in 1992, announced in 1991. At the time, Intel's flagship x86 part was the 486 but they were trying to kill the x86 line. They'd released the i860 (RISC, not x86-compatible) in 1989 and tech magazines were saying it would kill x86. Windows NT was originally written for the i860 and only later ported to x86, so even Windows looked like it might not be tied to x86 in the long term.
1992 saw the launch of the Alpha and MIPS R4K, and 1993 saw the SPARCv9 ISA. It didn't look like a 32-bit architecture that was hacked onto a legacy 16-bit ISA had much of a long-term future. IBM and Motorola were two of the biggest players in CPU manufacturing and they teamed up to produce something that would provide a migration path for m68k and i386 software. The PowerPC architecture was based on IBM's POWER architecture but extended to make it easy to emulate m68k and i386 at reasonable speeds. Microsoft was signed up to port Windows NT and it looked like you'd be able to run Windows and MacOS (the two most popular desktop operating systems) and possibly some of the other less-popular ones (most of which were m68k-based) on the same hardware. IBM and Motorola were both going to produce chips, so there was guaranteed to be competition, which would bring down prices, and they were soliciting other companies to produce implementations of the architecture. Within a few years, PowerPC would be faster and cheaper than x86 and would run more software. At least, that was the theory. It sounded quite plausible, but history didn't quite work out like that.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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You left out OS/2, which Lou Gerstner hadn't given up on yet (although the nightmare of the PPC port helped him make up his mind). IBM at this point still had hopes of re-conquering the desktop market, and the CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform, aka PPC hardware design) was part of that. Alas, it was not to be. I have booted exactly one machine in my life - a small tower RS/6000 running AIX - that came up and proclaimed itself to be a CHRP machine.
IIRC, either Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 did, in fact, ship with a PowerPC install on the CD, alongside i386, Alpha and MIPS. Whichever it was was also the last of the NT line to support multiple architectures until 64-bit came along.
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At the time, PowerPC chips were more powerful than x86 in terms of raw computing power. I believe that the G5 Mac was technically classified as a supercomputer based on an old standard of flops and could not be exported until the US government updated the definitions.
The reason for the switchover to x86 had to do more with power efficiency, customization, and logistics. While the PowerPC architecture did lend itself to better overall computing performance, it was lacking in power efficiency and heat. For a desktop that's not a major problem, but it is a problem for laptops. It's a problem that IBM never really solved as they never released a mobile G5 and Apple was stuck with mobile G4s until the Intel switchover. Here is one area where Intel was way ahead.
The two other related issues have to do with Apple's needs and IBM and Motorola's manufacturing logistics. Apple despite ordering millions of chips a year was always going to be a small customer in terms of volume. However Apple was going to need a heavily customized consumer PowerPC chip that required to be updated almost every year. Meanwhile most other PowerPC customers would want server/workstation chips that IBM used in their own products. Now these can be done but these factors cost time and money. I can see why Motorola and IBM (and also Apple) would be less likely to invest into new chips.
On the flipside, the Xbox 360's Xenon processor would be more the model of what IBM/Motorola wanted. Although it was heavily customized, the basic design has not changed in 8 years when the Xbox One was launched with estimated sales of 40+ million. This gave IBM enough time to do a die shrink to cut costs.
The change to Intel gave Apple many advantages. First of all, faster and more efficient mobile processors were available. Second, most of the features that Apple wanted were already in the x86 design as they were designed for consumer PCs. Third, any customization Apple requested from Intel, Intel could sell to competitors like Dell. For example, the first MacBook Airs used customized Intel Core processors in which the chip package had been shrunk 40%. Intel didn't mind investing the money for this customization as they sold them immediately to other customers. Many of the features that Intel got in the collaboration became part of the Ultrabook specification.
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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.
And later, it ran on PowerPC.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
... 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.
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.