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

Pairing?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Pairing?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Wintel" wasn't even a thing in 1991.

That is extremely wrong and revisionist. Wintel was fucking huge in 1991. If you bought a machine with an x86 chip it very likely came with Windows "free" even if you never started it. Windows was everywhere; most people just didn't happen to like it.

Windows was still a graphical DOS shell that couldn't compete with the earliest versions of the Macintosh system.

No, it was inferior to most other OSes, but it also crushed them all, too. Whether preloads count as "competition" or "not competing" was something plenty of people argued about back then. But from an installed-base PoV (i.e. how an app developer would look at the potential market for their apps) it unambiguously "completed" and won.

Also, MacOS was horrible in 1991. That was the one relatively-popular OS that Windows could nearly compete on merit with.

And I have no idea why you bring up MS Office. The word processor back then was WordPerfect.

Gotta agree with you, there. It would be several more years before I ever saw anyone with MS Office, and a few years after that, before I had to have some way to read MS Office files. Fucking lusers, you tell em "save in a standard format," and the blank stare-backs were just priceless .. yet also very frustrating. It was almost like being trapped in the novel Catch-22, where you wanna laugh at the fuckwits and yet their actions also really mattered and were dooming everyone, so laughing just wasn't quite the right response. Dark, dark times. 1991 was bad, but not nearly that bad, yet.

NO, he is correct WINTEL was NOT big in 1991. In 1991 MS released Windows 3.0. Win 1.0 thru 2.1 were pretty crappy and the PC industry was leary of 3.0 and had not really jumped on it. IBM PC and PC juuior came standard with DOS 6. You would have to go purchase Window separately. It wasn't until 1992 when Win 3.1 and 3.11 came out that IBM and Compaq started shipping PC's with Windows on them. That is when the Intel based "PC Clones" ( HP, Packard Bell, Compaq, and a littel later Dell , Gateway, etc) started really hitting the market and the WINTEL hold began and solidified when Windows 95 came out.

Another misleading headline

[scotts13]

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.

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

Re:Another misleading headline

[dfghjk]

At that time, Apple had plenty of RISC choices, all of which had better floating point performance than x86 and better performance overall. They could have chosen Alpha for its performance or MIPS as MS had done with the NT reference platform. They could have chosen SPARC or 88K and had more direct involvement with the future of their processors. Instead, they bought into IBM's claim that they would take over the x86 with equal performance at lower cost and lower power and got saddled with Motorola's processor design ineptitude.

It's a gross mischaracterization to say that IBM helped save the Macintosh. IBM led Apple to make a poor strategic decision that they had to rectify a decade later.

Re:Intel

[gnasher719]

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.

Re:Intel

[TheRaven64]

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.

Really miss the 68k

[Crashmarik]

A much more elegant architecture than x86. Still have to give Intel credit their manufacturing prowess gave them the edge.

Re:Intel

[Bill_the_Engineer]

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.

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.

Re:PPC macs were awful

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Good work NE Altruism

[slashdice]

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

Re:PPC macs were awful

[David_Hart]

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.

Re:Intel

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Intel

[UnknowingFool]

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.