[apichat]

Linus Torvalds: ARM has a lot to learn from the PC :

"I think ARM is a very promising platform," he said. "At the same time, the ARM community has never had the notion of a standard platform. ARM never had the PC."

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2220438/linus-torvalds-...

[mhd]

Nothing else ever had the PC. And IBM wasn't too happy that it happened to them, either.

[TheRealDunkirk]

It definitely makes Apple's decision to never allow generics seem wise in retrospect.

[mbreese]

But they did at one point in the late 90’s. I wouldn’t say that was the only reason why they nearly went bankrupt, but it certainly didn’t help.

[TheRealDunkirk]

Yeah, "never" was the wrong word. I forgot about that.

[mhd]

In a way, they themselves started becoming a manufacturer of "IBM compatibles", they just locked their OS to them.

A Jobs-less alternate Apple universe might've been interesting though. He both canned the licensed Apple clones and made OpenStep into the next major MacOS revision. If Copland would've been OS 8 or BeOS as OS X, there could be viable clones, and thus maybe enough critical mass to keep PowerPC alive a bit longer.

[uncledave]

We did actually but Acorn canned it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_(computer)

[guerrilla]

That's not what he means by PC. He means an open standard that anyone can build against with comparability between products.

[uncledave]

That’s exactly what it was. Two other vendors were going to launch as well.

[STRML]

The Phoebe's launch OS (RISC OS 4) was codenamed "Ursula". Unfortunately, shortly into its development, the Phoebe went on an (indefinite) break.

[rbanffy]

In 1998, it would be an excellent opportunity to use Linux. At the time, I was playing with Apple's MkLinux on PowerMacs.

[guywhocodes]

Very interesting, the reason for cancelling seems to largely hold true today.

[chung1905]

I'm curious, is there any reason that ARM doesn't have a standard platform? Or they are working on that?

[my123]

It does, and it's called Arm SystemReady.

UEFI + ACPI is required on Arm if you want to boot Windows or RHEL/CentOS, which do not even try to boot on non-standardised 64-bit Arm systems.

[Vogtinator]

Same for SLES/openSUSE, except for some platforms (RPi) where they use u-boot to provide EFI.

[coldtea]

They are different vendors, working on different products...