MacIntel: the lost first series

  • Thread starter Thread starter Yousuf Khan
  • Start date Start date
Yousuf Khan said:
The first time that the MacOS was ported to x86!

Star Trek: Apple's First Mac OS on Intel Project
http://lowendmac.com/orchard/05/0613.html

Yousuf Khan
Click to expand...

Jim Carlton's book covers this episode too. Seems a perfect storm of
attitudes and events conspired to kill MacOS on Intel. Apple wanted too
much money from Novell, hardware advocates saw any deviation from the
proprietary path as jeopardizing the "golden goose" (and it would have
taken a huge effort to write all the device drivers for Intel
hardware), good ol' Moto's inability to produce a decent 680XX chip was
hastening the need for PowerPC (thus a whole other rewrite). Pink had
failed, Taligent was doomed for failure, etc.

Apple had a lot of initiatives back then that never saw the light of
day. And those high prices we paid bankrolled each and every one.
 
Craig said:
Jim Carlton's book covers this episode too. Seems a perfect storm of
attitudes and events conspired to kill MacOS on Intel. Apple wanted too
much money from Novell, hardware advocates saw any deviation from the
proprietary path as jeopardizing the "golden goose" (and it would have
taken a huge effort to write all the device drivers for Intel
hardware), good ol' Moto's inability to produce a decent 680XX chip was
hastening the need for PowerPC (thus a whole other rewrite). Pink had
failed, Taligent was doomed for failure, etc.
Click to expand...

And it's not likely with the tools available at that time would have
made portability very easy. These days you just make a "fat binary" with
the executables of several platforms all combined into one big file. You
have lots of disk space to store these fat binaries and lots of other
things.

I think overall that the switch experience these days would be a lot
less hassle than it was back then.

Yousuf Khan
 
Yousuf Khan said:
And it's not likely with the tools available at that time would have
made portability very easy. These days you just make a "fat binary" with
the executables of several platforms all combined into one big file. You
have lots of disk space to store these fat binaries and lots of other
things.

I think overall that the switch experience these days would be a lot
less hassle than it was back then.
Click to expand...

Not to mention emulation. Given the speed of current hardware, we
should be able to run legacy applications from any old OS from any old
machine and most likely achieve performance superior to the original
box.
 
Craig said:
Not to mention emulation. Given the speed of current hardware, we
should be able to run legacy applications from any old OS from any old
machine and most likely achieve performance superior to the original
box.
Click to expand...

Well, the original hardware would be ancient history by that point.
What counts is what percentage they are in relation to current
hardware.

Yousuf Khan
 
YKhan said:
Well, the original hardware would be ancient history by that point.
What counts is what percentage they are in relation to current
hardware.
Click to expand...

Not really.

What started this thread was someone claiming that they'd be lost
without some particular application if they upgraded to a new computer.
To make them happy, all that you'd need is for the new hardware to run
their application faster than the old box (since the alternative being
considered is to keep the old box).

Clearly, if you have access to a native version, that's better. But some
apps will never be updated, so as long as they run faster than the older
hardware, it's sufficient.
 
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