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.

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: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.

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: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.