Let's face It: Apple invented personal computers, mp3 players and smart phones

[enorbet]

Actually, despite what you may see in stores which tend to be PC-centric since Macs and their products are primarily sold in Apple stores, for professional audio recording and editing Macs still dominate but probably for one reason - ProTools. ProTools, originally Sound Designer, was invented by Mac users for Macs and was the basis for most high level audio work including the ground breaking Pixar and Industrial Light and Magic.

FWIW I am a dedicated PC user but I can't let that push me into a "Mine r0x, Urs sux" state of mind. Unfortunately I am more fluent in Apple/Mac history than current hardware, There was a time when the price difference was laughable but the joke was on PC users. Macs had server grade, 5 year warranty SCSI drives from the beginning and all the while PCers got crappy, consumer grade IDE drives with 1 year warranty. Mac users got FireWire, a true self-aware bus like SCSI, and we got USB which at 1.0 was a bad joke. Thankfully it has improved. These are but a few examples of why Macs were worth it.

Frankly I don't know why they are still priced higher than PCs these days, but I do know they are no joke. They work.

 

[OmCheeto]

Yep, issues of Byte could be pretty hefty. Even heftier were issues of PC Magazine when that publication got going. It was like picking up a new Sears catalog just for PCs and PC clones every month. I'm sure more than a few postal carriers got hernias delivering issues to subscribers. Eventually, the costs must have got too much, and there was much more competition in the computer magazine market. Byte slimmed down to a rather skinny shadow of itself before it ceased printing altogether in the late 90s, although it tried to maintain a web presence for a while. The same thing happened a little later to PC Magazine once the net exploded.

One gargantuan publication was a full tabloid size (Computer Shopper), and it featured a few review-type articles but was otherwise crammed with ads for everything from complete systems to discrete components. Each issue seemed to be at least an inch thick, with hardly any of the pages inside which were not covered in ads of some sort. Eventually, CS too ceased print publication, but I believe it lives on on the web.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Shopper_(US_magazine)

I remember those. Fortunately, I never got into the IBM clone market frenzy until the Pentium 1 came out(≈1993). My 8 bit toy(≈1981) could do pretty much anything I wanted. I already knew BASIC from high school, and quickly learned machine language. Interpreted languages kind of sucked when your computer operated in the kilohertz range. I think I mentioned somewhere, that it took 24 hours to render a full color* image of the classic Mandelbrot set. (@196x256 resolution. woo!)

I only upgraded once, to a Pentium 3. Which, in the end, taking 15 minutes to boot up, and 15 minutes to shut down, prompted me to go Mac laptop in 2007. I replaced that this year with a newer model, which can render the Mandelbrot set, pretty much instantly.

*By full color, I mean, it wasn't black and white.

 

[OmCheeto]

..."Mine r0x, Urs sux" state of mind. ...

Don't even get me going on that topic...
Wait.
I think that is the topic.
hmmmm...
Ok.

[Rant!]
About the only person that ever agreed with me that computer languages were all the same was my first semester "C" language instructor. By the time I'd arrived, I'd already learned a half a dozen languages. Everyone else I'd ever talked to was of the, as you said; "Your computer language sucks".

The most frustrating thing, was that it was the "IT" guys who were always going on about it.
I started out with BASIC. They told me it sucked. So I learned another 10 languages. 15 years later, I asked them what they were now programming in;
"BASIC. It r0x"

Hence, I hate IT people. Always have, always will.
[/Rant!]

They work.

Yes they do.

ps. A program I wrote for that class I mentioned above, developed into a database management & search engine where I worked. That was about 20 years ago. About 3 months before I retired, a new version of windows ixnayed it. Fortunately, a non-IT acquaintance was able to develop a fix before I left. It wasn't perfect. But, then again, neither was mine.

 

[SteamKing]

Macs had server grade, 5 year warranty SCSI drives from the beginning and all the while PCers got crappy, consumer grade IDE drives with 1 year warranty. Mac users got FireWire, a true self-aware bus like SCSI, and we got USB which at 1.0 was a bad joke.

Your memory on the early Macs is a bit faulty. The first Mac had 128 K of RAM and a single built in floppy. There was no FireWire, no SCSI bus, no HDD, no nothin' except what was in the box. None of these things was available until the Mac Plus was introduced in 1986, about two years after the initial Macs went on sale. The original Mac design was so closed that upgrading the RAM required the removal of the main board from the system and physically soldering in higher capacity RAM chips.

Frankly I don't know why they are still priced higher than PCs these days, but I do know they are no joke. They work.

When your only choice to buy a Mac is the Apple Store or the Apple Store, you have to pay what the Apple Store charges. In the PC world, there is intense price competition, with everybody and his brother trying to get a leg up on the next guy. In getting a leg up, if you can't beat them on price, then you introduce new features and new hardware.

The striking contrast in the 1980s was that IBM introduced an open design for their PC which stimulated a lot of third-party development, in contrast to their philosophy with their mainframes and minicomputers, which were closed off from the competition. On the other hand, Apple did an about face, dumping the philosophy of the Apple II with its open design and instead adopting the closed design of the Mac, which cost Apple the support and loyalty of a lot of companies which had made the Apple II a success. This attitude almost drove Apple as a corporation into the ground.

 

[rcgldr]

Macs had server grade, 5 year warranty SCSI drives from the beginning and all the while PCers got crappy, consumer grade IDE drives with 1 year warranty.

PC's had SCSI adapter boards that included bus mastering. The early Mac's (through at least the early 1990's) native support for SCSI required software polling for the first byte, then software transfer one byte at a time relying on a hardware handshake called blind transfer (which locked up the bus until the transfer completed or up to 16 micoseconds for a bus time out). There were third party SCSI adapter boards made for the Mac that had bus mastering, bit Apple didn't include this in the Mac, while the very first PC's included DMA (memory refresh, sound card, floppy disk, hard disk). The AT added a second DMA chip, but with one of the channels cascaded to the first chip, the end result was 7 channels, but they were 16 bit instead of 8 bit. By the time of the 386 clones, the controllers used a 32 bit width bus mastering scheme (including scatter / gather for paged virtual memory support).

 

[enorbet]

@SteamKing No my memory wasn't (in this case) faulty it was my unclear language, choosing a phrase like "from the beginning" Doh!
There was a period of over 10 years and iirc between ~1993 - 2004 in which the hardware of Macs was considerably superior to most PCs. They directly addressed vast amounts of RAM, had more Instructions per Clock, RISC instructions set and peripherals plugged in while running (early PnP) most often just worked. However I was most impressed by (and jealous of my Mac friends) for the default inclusion of SCSI drives around that timeframe.

One of the reasons I distinctly recall this is that in 1993 I purchased my first GUI which was IBM's OS/2 v2.1 and I desperately wanted SCSI drives having read that OS/2 could access multiple SCSI's simultaneously which would have been a huge advantage when, which was common back then on most OpSys/Hardware that a mere enthusiast could afford, in that if you didn't own an actual server system, swapfile usage was quite high and brought the system to a crawl.

Long story short I was appalled when I discovered the cost of SCSI so in a few years I just bought a SuperMicro server motherboard with beaucoup ram. This actually worked out well because I learned how to admin and got employment as a small business sysadmin. I deployed one system of just over 100 clients that remained up for 5 years without one single unscheduled reboot. Then I could afford SCSI but was a bit "late to the game" as IDEs "got good" and then of course Serial took over everything.

My memory of the "advantages" of DMA is however even more skewed by the many wasted hours manually setting IRQs, DMAs, and I/Os. It's truly a wonder I am not manually bald from all the "yanking" (and not I'm not referring to a city in China). I do recognize that they were an important step and that it was rather brilliant to serially lock two 8237s but man! they were a pita. It is a very good thing those days of "wonking" are gone, though even the pains are sometimes remembered with a little smile.

 

[rcgldr]

There was a period of over 10 years and iirc between ~1993 - 2004 in which the hardware of Macs was considerably superior to most PCs. They directly addressed vast amounts of RAM.

Windows NT 3.1 was released in 1993 (4GB flat virtual address space). NT 3.5.1 in 1995, then NT 4.0 in 1996, which switched from the Win 3.1 style GUI to the Win 95 GUI, and also when NT started to become popular. Win 2000 was released in late 1999. XP was released in 2001, but XP SP3 wasn't released until 2008, which spans the period from 1993 to 2004.

In the meantime, Windows 95 / 98 / ME were based on what was mostly a 16 bit kernel, but with 32 bit support. I don't recall the maximum memory size alllowed for a 32 bit application.

Win 3.11 had a winmem 32 bit interface, but only Watcom's C / C++ tool set (version 10.0 I think) included full support for it. I don't recall the max memory size for this either.

 

[enorbet]

Windows 95/98/Me were still 16bit and DOS-based therefore only addressed memory above 1MB virtually. Windows NT up to and including 3.5 was OS/2 rebranded with only a few minor variations. In fact MS OS/2 v3 NewTechnology became Windows NT v 3 with some load of nonsense about having come largely from a DEC employee, completely disregarding non-disclosure, but any bs story would have sufficed since IBM knew they could do nothing about it. Once again David kicked Goliath in the nether sector and all IBM could do was wince and grin. Even the NTFS was essentially the HPFS and is still to this day indistinguishable by many partitioning apps. IMHO Win2K was the first truly solid, advanced OpSys that while still owing a high percentage of code to their work on OS/2 was definitively a MS product and a very good one at that.

Obviously not each of all the superior items of both hardware and software lasted the full time I listed but the fact remains that during that period a number of very important hardware and software issues were superior on a Mac. Again, I am no Mac fanboi, but then I'm not a fanboi for anyone and certainly not Microsoft. I do try to "give the devil his due" regardless the source or name of that particular demon.

As regards this thread, Steve Jobs and Apple are extremely important in the development of modern computational technology but he and his company does not even begin to stand alone. He was just more visible and charismatic than most.

 

[vela]

When your only choice to buy a Mac is the Apple Store or the Apple Store, you have to pay what the Apple Store charges. In the PC world, there is intense price competition, with everybody and his brother trying to get a leg up on the next guy. In getting a leg up, if you can't beat them on price, then you introduce new features and new hardware.

Those aren't the only choices for buying a Mac, but the real question is, why do Macs sell at all given their higher prices? Your take on the market is simplistic, and you're comparing apples to oranges. Apple doesn't participate in the low end of the market, so comparing a $1000 MacBook to the $400 laptop you can pick up at Best Buy is misleading at best. When compared to PCs offered in the high end of the market, Macs are competitively priced.

 

[SteamKing]

Windows 95/98/Me were still 16bit and DOS-based therefore only addressed memory above 1MB virtually. Windows NT up to and including 3.5 was OS/2 rebranded with only a few minor variations. In fact MS OS/2 v3 NewTechnology became Windows NT v 3 with some load of nonsense about having come largely from a DEC employee, completely disregarding non-disclosure, but any bs story would have sufficed since IBM knew they could do nothing about it. Once again David kicked Goliath in the nether sector and all IBM could do was wince and grin. Even the NTFS was essentially the HPFS and is still to this day indistinguishable by many partitioning apps. IMHO Win2K was the first truly solid, advanced OpSys that while still owing a high percentage of code to their work on OS/2 was definitively a MS product and a very good one at that.

This is a highly imaginative recounting of the development of OS/2 and early Windows platforms, which doesn't seem to have any other sources of support.

OS/2 was a separate development project contracted to MS by IBM:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

Development of OS/2 started Aug. 1985 and was released in Dec. 1987. The original OS/2 releases lacked a GUI which was only supplied later. Windows 3.0 and later 3.1 were initially released in 1990, both with a GUI right out of the box. Both of these versions of Windows acted on top of the underlying MS-DOS operating system to give computers with 286 and 386 chips access to extended memory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Windows

The collaboration between MS and IBM on OS/2 collapsed in 1990, several months after MS had started to develop what would become Windows NT. Win NT was targeted at high-end computers like work stations rather than the more common consumer-oriented PCs. Win NT, unlike MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, was developed to run on other processors in addition to the Intel 80x86 family:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT

Windows 3.x was replaced by Win95 on consumer PCs, while Win NT was developed in parallel with the newer Windows. The various Windows families were finally merged when Win XP was introduced in 2001.

Dave Cutler and his team from DEC were instrumental in getting the original Windows NT off the ground in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There might have been some overlap between OS/2 and Windows/WindowsNT, but after the big breakup in 1990, OS/2 development was handled by IBM without any input from MS.

 

[SteamKing]

Those aren't the only choices for buying a Mac, but the real question is, why do Macs sell at all given their higher prices? Your take on the market is simplistic, and you're comparing apples to oranges. Apple doesn't participate in the low end of the market, so comparing a $1000 MacBook to the $400 laptop you can pick up at Best Buy is misleading at best. When compared to PCs offered in the high end of the market, Macs are competitively priced.

Since Apple is the sole supplier of Mac products, they also control the wholesale price at which any retail outlet can purchase systems. Apple long ago quashed any Macclones (one of the first things Jobs did when he returned to Apple in the late 1990s).

In the PC world, you can shop at Dell or any number of other outlets (including Best Buy, if you are so inclined), or you can buy the parts and put your own custom system together. You don't even have to get an Intel chip in your PC unless you want one. Like one sage said, "Some people will pay extra just for the name", even though the two systems (Intel and AMD) run about the same speed.

Bill Gates did Steve Jobs and Apple a huge favor when he convinced the latter to adopt Intel compatibility and make it easier to transfer data back and forth between Macs and PCs.

 

[vela]

Since Apple is the sole supplier of Mac products, they also control the wholesale price at which any retail outlet can purchase systems. Apple long ago quashed any Macclones (one of the first things Jobs did when he returned to Apple in the late 1990s).

Saying Apple is the sole manufacturer of Macs isn't the same as saying the only place you can buy a Mac is directly from Apple, which is what you claimed.

Bill Gates did Steve Jobs and Apple a huge favor when he convinced the latter to adopt Intel compatibility and make it easier to transfer data back and forth between Macs and PCs.

I have to admit this claim is a new one. I've never heard Bill Gates credited for the transition from PowerPC to Intel processors. I doubt it's true.

 

[SteamKing]

Saying Apple is the sole manufacturer of Macs isn't the same as saying the only place you can buy a Mac is directly from Apple, which is what you claimed.

When the Macs come from a single source, does it really matter if you are taking retail delivery from Best Buy, the Apple Store, or XYZ Computers?

I have to admit this claim is a new one. I've never heard Bill Gates credited for the transition from PowerPC to Intel processors. I doubt it's true.

When the Mac was initially introduced, Microsoft migrated some of its applications to the new platform from the MS-DOS environment. Since Gates was not in direct competition with Apple on the hardware front, he was shrewd enough to cultivate Apple as a customer for MS applications. When Apple's fortunes were at a low ebb in the late 1990's, just as Steve Jobs returned to the company, Microsoft invested $150 million in non-voting Apple stock, which investment went a long way to keeping Apple viable as a company.

By 2006, Apple had rationalized its product line and converted over to Intel CPUs from the variety of processors it had hitherto used. By touting compatibility of the Apple product line with Win XP and the ability to run other MS applications, it stretches credulity to believe that Jobs had come to this decision alone without some discussions with MS, if not Gates personally.

 

[vela]

When the Macs come from a single source, does it really matter if you are taking retail delivery from Best Buy, the Apple Store, or XYZ Computers?

Yes, since your claim was that "your only choice to buy a Mac is the Apple Store or the Apple Store." If you want to move the goalposts, then fine, but at least be honest about it.

By 2006, Apple had rationalized its product line and converted over to Intel CPUs from the variety of processors it had hitherto used. By touting compatibility of the Apple product line with Win XP and the ability to run other MS applications, it stretches credulity to believe that Jobs had come to this decision alone without some discussions with MS, if not Gates personally.

What strains credulity is to say that having discussions (if there indeed were any) is the same as Gates convincing Jobs to transition to Intel.

Jobs and Apple had grown dissatisfied with the PowerPC processor because its development stalled with the G4 and G5. It was expensive to develop processors, and the hopes of widespread adoption, that would have helped fund the development costs, were never realized. IBM was more interested in embedded systems and wasn't really interested in developing a power-efficient processor for laptops and desktops, which is what Apple needed. It turned out that Apple secretly had OS X running on Intel processors since 2000. The project was a fallback plan in case PowerPC performance stalled. When it did, Apple made the switch.

Here's an account of what happened from the wife of the engineer who did the initial port:

http://www.quora.com/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well/answers/1280472

 

[enorbet]

This is a highly imaginative recounting of the development of OS/2 and early Windows platforms, which doesn't seem to have any other sources of support.

It's not "highly imaginative" just because it comes from the IBM side rather than the MS side. If you never ran OS/2 then your side is left to imagine how the other saw it. I ran both Windows and OS/2 and perhaps saw a more balanced, if polarized series of events. I won't stoop to attempting to "discredit the witness" when you can't discredit the testimony. Examples follow -

http://os2news.warpstock.org/OS2History.html][/PLAIN] [/PLAIN]
1990 - The Schism

In 1990, IBM and Microsoft were still working together on the development of OS/2. Microsoft, however, had found that Windows 3.0 - released in May 1990 - generated more revenue for them and therefore allotted increasingly more resource to Windows and correspondingly less to OS/2.

By late 1990, Microsoft had intensified its disagreements with IBM to the point where IBM decided that it would have to take some overt action to ensure that OS/2 development continued at a reasonable pace. IBM, therefore, took over complete development responsibility for OS/2 1.x, even though it was in its dying days, and OS/2 2.00. Microsoft would continue development on Windows and OS/2 3.00. Shortly after this split, Microsoft renamed OS/2 V3 to Windows NT.

Since I only directly quoted one section, perhaps you would enjoy visiting the page which is rather mild compared to the FUD campaign and active sabotage that MS engaged into see a different perspective documented by IBM OS/2 developers to see the rest of my "imagination".

OS/2 was a separate development project contracted to MS by IBM:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

Development of OS/2 started Aug. 1985 and was released in Dec. 1987. The original OS/2 releases lacked a GUI which was only supplied later. Windows 3.0 and later 3.1 were initially released in 1990, both with a GUI right out of the box. Both of these versions of Windows acted on top of the underlying MS-DOS operating system to give computers with 286 and 386 chips access to extended memory.

Oops apparently need to show one more since the introduction of the x386 was a very serious game changer for everyone and IBM initially made the mistake of under assessing the adoption rate and resulting drop in cost, a snowball effect.

http://os2news.warpstock.org/OS2History.html][/PLAIN] [/PLAIN]
OS/2 2.00 - 1992
OS/2 2.00 was released in the spring of 1992. The first true 32 bit operating system for personal computers (and for years the only one), it met IBM's stated goal of being a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows. It did this through the use of Virtual DOS Machines (VDMs) which allowed OS/2 to run many DOS (and Windows) programs at the same time as though they were on completely separate computers. As far as the DOS programs were concerned, they actually were in separate computers. Windows programs run on IBM's licensed version of Windows 3.1 called Win-OS/2.

Because of this separation of DOS programs from each other, one Windows (remember - Windows is a DOS program) program which crashes can not crash any other Windows program. By placing Windows programs which do not play well together in Windows sessions in different VDMs, they can both run without interfering with each other. In addition the programs can still communicate through Dynamic Data Exchange and the clipboard.

The Workplace Shell (WPS) was also introduced in OS/2 2.00. The Workplace Shell is an object oriented user interface (OOUI). The IBM WPS takes the GUI to the next generation by integrating it much more fully with the rest of the operating system, including the file system.

Dave Cutler and his team from DEC were instrumental in getting the original Windows NT off the ground in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There might have been some overlap between OS/2 and Windows/WindowsNT, but after the big breakup in 1990, OS/2 development was handled by IBM without any input from MS.

Non Sequitur - As already shown above in the first quote IBM flatly stated that MS OS/2 v3 NT became WinNT v3 just as I originally stated in my "imagination". The differences were ridiculously slight and mostly bad like allowing apps direct access to hardware throwing "preemptive" out the window which was the birth of the BSOD... of which MS's "research" into double-fault GPFs should have been an important lesson. The most objective way to see that this is so is to have actually run them both to see for oneself instead of relying on the proponents and antagonists whose position varies according to who is telling the story.

Your very choice of words like "might have been" "some overlap" speaks volumes about your naive agenda and how it has colored what you think. So you suppose MS just wrote off man/years, thousands of KLOC and millions of dollars and moved on?

In the further interest of objectivity and disclosure, I never worked for either MS or IBM but only used both of their products. Would you care to tell us if you were ever employed by one of them?

It might also be good to explain how Dave Cutler managed to sidestep his nondisclosure agreement with DEC in order to allegedly make vast, sweeping changes in MS OS/2 v3 to warrant what I (and IBM) see as mere rebranding to MS WinNT v3, a common event in corporations who wisely don't wish to lose R&D expenditures and capitalize on everything remotely possible. Then, please, practice what you preached and back this up and flesh this out by listing the changes for which he was supposedly responsible.

In summary, I have no affiliation or even particular allegiance for Apple, Microsoft or IBM. I just respect that each of them have made extremely important advances in the field and give credit where it's due. I have no axe to grind in the matters in this thread and I think my posts, while revealing any biases I might have, have also shown that I am not guilty of single-mindedness, "Mine r0X, Urs sux" inane and unproductive pissing contests. From this post perhaps all can also see that I am not guilty of "highly imaginative recounting of the development of OS/2 and early Windows platforms, which doesn't seem to have any other sources of support.", while you seem to be wearing blinders emblazoned with "Made in Redmond".

 

[rcgldr]

In case it isn't clear to others here, the initial versions of OS/2 targeted 286 systems, so they used the 16 bit extended memory model. IBM never made a 386 based AT, and only released the 386 on it's PS/2 systems that used micro channel, while the PC clone vendors developed the EISA standard and did make 386 based "AT" clones. The later OS/2 2.0 supported 386 and 32 bit flat address virtual address space. Compounding the problem for IBM was that the marketplace assumed that OS/2 need to run on PS/2 and vice versa (the joke was you needed half an operating system to run on half a personal system, a reference to the /2 in the names).

As for Windows NT, it was always 32 bit only (386 or above), there was substantial changes made to the code in order to allow device drivers to run at ring 0 (this was done for performance). Microsoft later reduced the percentage of device driver code that ran in ring 0 with Windows Vista and again with Windows 7, which resulted in slightly slower performance, on my system, for the same game, same settings, frame rate is about 7% slower for Win 7 versus Win XP. These days, blue screens even with WIn XP are fairly rare.

I still have what could be considered a collectors item:

 

[OmCheeto]

Good grief. Someone remind me in the future, that discussing computer history is as pretentious as politics, religion, and driving, and that I should stray away from such threads.

 

[wukunlin]

Good grief. Someone remind me in the future, that discussing computer history is as pretentious as politics, religion, and driving, and that I should stray away from such threads.

If you look at the most loyal apple customers, their infatuation with apple products have certainly surpassed religion levels.

As for the reminder for these discussions, I think we had some sort of warning on page 1: :w

I see Mac hatred in many forms all over the internet and it is almost always that whole adolescent Ford vs/ Chevy mess, unworthy of any comment.

Seriously, when people get emotional with brands, the "discussions" always drive my palm to my face. An informed consumers quickly jump from brand to brand between purchases, except may return to particular ones for loyalty programs. I remember how I once told people to not touch a Dell computer with a 10 ft pole and less than a year later I bought a Dell laptop (the one I'm using right now) after seeing how efficient they carried out their warranty services in Auckland (a friend of mine had a desktop which motherboard kind of self destructed when still covered by warranty. He emailed them on the day, which is a Sunday, and on Monday 7 am, 2 technicians knocked on his door and fixed everything up and left well before 8 am).

 

[rcgldr]

I see Mac hatred in many forms all over the internet.

Most of that is historical. The current Macs are essentially PC clones, OS-X (user version was released in 2001) is a pre-emptive mult-tasking OS, so the main complaint is the pricing, and the restriction of what third party components that are allowed to be used in Macs (like memory upgrades). I don't know what the options are for components like video or sound cards on Macs.

IBM sold off it's PC division to Lenovo back in April, 2005, so the PC compatible market is now all clones, much of it for systems that cost less than $1000, and with laptop type systems being popular for the home, while desktops remain the key systems used by corporations.

 

[enorbet]

Good grief. Someone remind me in the future, that discussing computer history is as pretentious as politics, religion, and driving, and that I should stray away from such threads.

:) It is rather soap opera like (I think "contentious rather than so much "pretentious") and probably for good reason. With so much at stake and in an entirely new paradigm still being created this was nothing less than corporate warfare and the opponents were extremely passionate. There are reports of actual death threats being leveled on what was then social networking sites. As regards this thread one can see that much like national warfare, the victor gets to own the most widely known version of the history.

Many at IBM were so embarassed by being beaten a 2nd time by Billy and the Boys that they distanced themselves from OS/2 letting it "die on the vine". To them it was like being beaten senseless with one's own arm. This added to the not unfounded critique that IBM lacks good marketing ("If IBM bought a Sushi Business they would market it as raw, dead fish") was the demise of a truly Mission Critical capable OpSys... well not actual demise since they sold it off and it became eComStation but it's market share is substantially less than 0.5%.

I find it rather entertaining but would find it a lot more entertaining if fewer good ideas benefiting fledgling PC design were stifled during the conflagration in the interest of corporate profit to benefit shareholders, but like Lenny Bruce said "What is, is the Truth. What should be is a dirty lie".

I must agree however that History is not hard Science but rather considerably biased opinion, and that includes PCs and Operating Systems.

A PostScript - While IBM originally underestimated the adoption rate of the x386 and got stuck for a bit in x286 land (not able to switch on-the-fly from Protected Mode) OS/2's whole reason for being was to develop a single OpSys that (borrowing heavily from Unix design) could be deployed on all levels of computers from Mainframes down to PCs.

 

[rcgldr]

While IBM originally underestimated the adoption rate of the x386 and got stuck for a bit in x286 land (not able to switch on-the-fly from Protected Mode) OS/2's whole reason for being was to develop a single OpSys that (borrowing heavily from Unix design) could be deployed on all levels of computers from Mainframes down to PCs.

Well part of that was IBM's fault by tying the 386 to the PS/2's micro channel bus. I recall an early PS/2 with a 16mhz 386, that cost $10,000. 2 or 3 months later, it was 20 mhz 386 PS/2 for $8,000. At that price, the adoption rate would have been slow, but then the EISA 386 clones were released costing less than $3,000. As mentioned before there was a perception that OS/2 and PS/2 were somehow tied together, and I don't know how much of this was IBM's fault.

I'm not sure about IBM's planned usage of OS/2 or Unix on their mainframes. IBM already had OS/Mxx and VM/370, which eventually led to Z-OS, which includes virtual machine like features, being able to run Unix programs, and also legacy programs in 24 bit, 31 bit, or 64 bit addressing modes. I'm not sure how much existing Cobol / HLASM, Fortran programs, and database file structures were tied into IBM's existing operating systems.

 

[wukunlin]

I still don't understand why anyone take the apple "lifestyle" thing seriously.

 

[voko]

There was a period of over 10 years and iirc between ~1993 - 2004 in which the hardware of Macs was considerably superior to most PCs.

This sort of claim is meaningless, because "considerably superior" and "most PCs" are undefined, and perhaps undefinable, being purely subjective.

The PC back then was (and is now) an open platform and I am quite sure that any hardware the Mac had could in principle be matched and outmatched, given a formal metric. Since you singled out the SCSI thing, I can recall that in ca 1996 I used a Windows NT 3.51 system, with two Pentium Pro CPUs and a couple of SCSI HDDs organized into a stripe-set. Should I mention that it was a robust preemptive multitasking system, something that Apple fielded five years later?

But it is interesting that you also say "I was appalled when I discovered the cost of SCSI". That sounds right; SCSI back then was a lot more expensive than ATA (I am not sure that "ATA" existed as a term as early as 1993 though), so perhaps "most PCs" could just do without for much lower price?

 

[enorbet]

ping voko - I don't see that claim as meaningless at all since SCSI drives from 1993 - 2004 are demonstrably superior and in every single testable category compared to their closest rival EIDE/PATA drives. Some people may judge that the 5 year warranty (compared to 1 for ATA) alone was enough to justify the higher cost. Not only was bandwidth much higher but access times were around 0.10 of ATA. Unless you really want a comparison chart I think "considerably superior" is a safe assessment by anyone aware of the specs and/or has "felt" the difference in speed...as apparently you have and I am in a state of anachronistic jealousy :)

The term "most PCs" did lack a qualifier so I will append that now. There is probably no way to know how many Mom 'n Pop store PCs were put together and sold, nor the many homebrews, but I also think it is safe to deduce that the majority of PCs were bought from Dell, Compaq, Sony, IBM, etc. and they kept records, so I will add this qualifier, making it "most commercial PCs" the majority in use.

The OP wanted to delete this thread because he was "compromised" at the time and perhaps a little carried away with absolutes or hyperbole. That MS (with a huge amount of help from IBM) beat out Apple by 5 years on a fully developed, robust preemptive multitasking system might possibly be a surprise to OP I doubt many here find that surprising and some know it from experience.

I absolutely agree with "most PCs could just do without for a much lower price" as there is always a market for cheaper and with good reason. I know if my only choice was somehow just a crappy computer or no computer I'd opt for crappy over none in a heartbeat. Bottom line is that Apple has always aimed at the high end. They sometimes, if not often, hit that mark and in anything remotely resembling a free market higher prices are usually justifiable by those that want luxury or they go out of business.

That PCs have had a few star-studded benefits in the past is not in doubt at least by me. The sheer numbers of PC user/consumers has been a driving force only recently exceeded by wireless telephony, feeding back into lower prices and greater features/performance in leaps, and around again. So I understand why Apple used to be considerably more expensive, but I also understand why they had to come around closer to PC ways after around 2004 because the bang for buck, hardware wise, at consumer level was/is no longer there because those with the numbers flourished and the "also rans" faded. As some have pointed out here, when comparing similar features and specs, Macs are at least comparable in price now.

 

[voko]

I don't see that claim as meaningless at all since SCSI drives from 1993 - 2004 are demonstrably superior and in every single testable category compared to their closest rival EIDE/PATA drives.

SCSI vs EIDE, perhaps. But SCSI in a Mac vs an EIDE in a PC is not so clear cut. As mentioned earlier in this thread, Apple's (initial?) implementation of SCSI could hardly be characterized as superior to anything, which basically reduced the superiority of SCSI hard drives to "5 year warranty", which was as dubious a trait as it is now, if not more.

To make matters even fuzzier, Macs did use IDE back then.

Bottom line is that Apple has always aimed at the high end.

That is not true. Look at this baby: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Quadra_605 That was anything but high end in 1993.

I do not think it is possible to substantiate technically that the Mac ever was the superior platform, because it is simply not true. It enjoyed a cult status for a while, for largely non-technical reasons I believe, and even then it imploded, because "you cannot fool all the people all the time".

 

[rcgldr]

Windows NT 3.51 system, ... a robust preemptive multitasking system, something that Apple fielded five years later?

The MAC did have A/UX (Apple / Unix) as an option going back to 1988. As for OS-X, it was mentioned that a preemptive multitasking system would released with MAC OS 6, then 7, then 8, ... and it wasn't until OS-X that it happened. Part of this was Apple wanting near 100% backwards compatability, which apparently was difficult for some apps, and it got dropped when OS-X was first released.

IBM also made a Unix variation with windowing called AIX which could run on the PS/2 (1987), which some referred to as "AIX and panes".

 

[enorbet]

ping - voko
initial != 1993-2004. 5 yr warranty dubious? Personal experience - I had a 5 drive Seagate SCSI raid and Seagate drop-shipped not one, but two replacement drives over the course of the first year. They arrived at my door within 2 days of my phone call. By comparison, even with the same manufacturer, Seagate, it took just shy of 3 weeks to replace an ATA drive since I had to return the defective (in the original packaging I might add) drive before they would replace it.

Just because one entry model used IDE does not sufficiently make matters fuzzier in the overall, and verifiable generalizations. I see nothing low end in the model you linked for consumer use in 1993. For one thing it is not possible to compare CPUs just by clock speed. How many Instructions per Clock and the complexity of those instructions has to be factored in. There is a reason that Industrial Light and Magic, Pixar, and the majority of professional recording studios chose and still choose Macs, although of late both Windows and Linux PCs have made inroads.

As for imploding -

Again I am not a Mac fanboi so nothing I am recounting is even attempting to denigrate any sacred cows you may have. PCs dominate the numbers and that happened for a reason as well, and they just keep getting better although I have severe doubts about UEFI. However to attempt to write off Apple/Mac as overpriced junk is specious at best.

 

[Jamin2112]

The funny thing is a large chunk of apple product users would say the same thing you wrote in the OP when they are sober

The funny thing is that OP just interviewed for a Jr. Game Developer 6-month contract position at Microsoft and is waiting to hear back.

 

[russ_watters]

Those aren't the only choices for buying a Mac, but the real question is, why do Macs sell at all given their higher prices? Your take on the market is simplistic, and you're comparing apples to oranges. Apple doesn't participate in the low end of the market, so comparing a $1000 MacBook to the $400 laptop you can pick up at Best Buy is misleading at best. When compared to PCs offered in the high end of the market, Macs are competitively priced.

Assuming that's true, it explains Apple's perpetual lack of market share: PCs are offered at all price points while Apples are only offered at the top. That leaves PCs with sole possion of the bottom 80% (guess) and Apple and PCs splitting the top 20%.

 

[voko]

The MAC did have A/UX (Apple / Unix) as an option going back to 1988.

In 1988, it did. In 1996, it did not, just like I said. None of the Power Macs ever had it, either.

For the latter, there were MkLinux and Linux/PPC, followed by a slew of other Linux distros, and, later, BSD ports, but I would be very surprised if any of those ever gained significant traction with Apple's non-geek clientèle.

 

[voko]

initial != 1993-2004

I had a question mark after 'initial', because I did not know when the Mac got a proper SCSI implementation. Feel free to feel that in. All of that is moot, anyway, because bus-mastering EISA SCSI cards were already available in 1993, so it is simply wrong to say that SCSI was something that PC users could only dream about. Besides, Apple switched to PCI in 1995, from which point a lot of imagination is required to distinguish between "Mac hardware" and "PC hardware", CPU excepted.

Just because one entry model used IDE

Just one? Really?

I see nothing low end in the model you linked for consumer use in 1993

Then perhaps you could see that this statement of yours is drastically different from "Apple has always aimed at the high end"?

For one thing it is not possible to compare CPUs just by clock speed. How many Instructions per Clock and the complexity of those instructions has to be factored in.

As I said earlier, this sort of hand waving is meaningless. Give us something unambiguous and measurable; else, you might just as well be saying "Macs are superior because I say so".

There is a reason that Industrial Light and Magic, Pixar, and the majority of professional recording studios chose and still choose Macs

From 2006 on, all the Macs are PCs, hence the reason must have nothing to do with hardware superiority, real or imaginary, of Macs over PCs. Which strongly suggests it was equally irrelevant before.

As for imploding -

This diagram is irreverent for the period we have been discussing, and it is also irrelevant because the "Mac" there is a PC.

However to attempt to write off Apple/Mac as overpriced junk is specious at best.

I am not doing this. I, however, find the following claim subjective and misleading: "There was a period of over 10 years and iirc between ~1993 - 2004 in which the hardware of Macs was considerably superior to most PCs".

There were, as you admitted, "entry models" of Macs that were anything but superior to contemporary PCs. There were Macs that did not have "advanced hardware". There were even Macs during that period which did not support virtual memory because requisite hardware was simply not present in them; given that, how can you seriously speak of hardware superiority?

 

[vela]

Assuming that's true, it explains Apple's perpetual lack of market share: PCs are offered at all price points while Apples are only offered at the top. That leaves PCs with sole possession of the bottom 80% (guess) and Apple and PCs splitting the top 20%.

I'm sure Apple's screw-ups during the 90s had a lot to do with it too. ;) But after Jobs took over again, Apple has focused on the higher end of the market, where there's a lot of money still to be made. Marketshare isn't really important; profit-share is. The low-end of the market is not a very profitable segment of the market where a company has to compete on price, so margins are razor-thin. It helps explain why a company like HP wants to spin-off its PC business, despite having a comparatively high marketshare.

http://www.asymco.com/2013/04/16/escaping-pcs/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2691932/hp-reportedly-set-to-split-off-pc-printer-business.html

 

[enorbet]

@voko I'm not sure why it is that you don't see the overall picture as I have contained it. Extremely few commercial PCs EVER shipped with SCSI and there were numerous models that had SCSI by default by Apple. Why is it so hard to see that a company that concentrates on high end might have an entry level item? The bulk of their business has been high end. Clock speed x IPC IS measurable. Clock speed alone is spacious and indeterminate.

Even after 2006 it is not correct to say that "all Macs are PCs" and seems very much like the proverbial pot calling the kettle black. How many PCs, even now, but especially from 1999 forward had FireWire? Are you going to argue that USB even through version 2.0 was better in any way than FireWire of the same time period?

Regarding the Market graph, I didn't bring that time period up. You did when you said "it imploded, because 'you cannot fool all the people all the time'".

Yes you are doing this (re: overpriced junk). There it is. There's your bias right there. You are of the opinion that Mac buyers are pretentious, elitist, art students that got hoodwinked until they learned better, presumably from your point of view by trying the ALWAYS superior, in quality and price, PC. Apparently you are going to spin any data I show to twist it to your agenda and since "one convinced against his will, remains unconvince-ed still" I'll leave you with a quote from the Hal 9000

HAL: "Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye."

 

[wukunlin]

@enorbet May I asked in a civilized manner, hoping to fulfill my curiosity: For the typical PC users I know, mainly using computers for games, web surfing, multimedia, office work and occasional programming, would having SCSI and firewire have made our lives significantly easier?

 

[voko]

I'm not sure why it is that you don't see the overall picture as I have contained it. Extremely few commercial PCs EVER shipped with SCSI and there were numerous models that had SCSI by default by Apple. Why is it so hard to see that a company that concentrates on high end might have an entry level item? The bulk of their business has been high end.

"Extremely few", "numerous", "concentrates" and "bulk" are meaningless and subjective; this is a recurring problem in your argument. You need verifiable statistics corroborating your claims, not anecdotal evidence you have solely supplied so far.

The rest of your message is even less rational, with argumenta ad hominem and outright lies. Why so emotional?