[fredoralive]

Well, compared to the first wave of 68000 machines, which were generally high end workstations from the likes of Sun and Apollo, a $2500 Macintosh is cheap. Apples belief in this whole “profit margin” thing did mean it couldn’t compete on price with the Amiga and ST though…

[cmrdporcupine]

I mostly jest. In the late early 90s the prices of 68k Macs actually dropped into the very affordable range. The II series were great machines, priced well, stable, etc. The shift to PowerPC ruined the classic Mac, IMO.

In that era I had a 486/50 running (early) Linux and my mother had a Mac LC II. I actually really enjoyed using that machine.

[markus_zhang]

Just curious why do you think the shift to PPC ruined the classic Mac? I never owned a Mac before but I did buy an iBook G4 because I somehow got fascinated by the PPC machines.

[cmrdporcupine]

The PPC architecture is fine enough. The problem was their "operating system" was written as a 68k OS with no memory protection and a weird memory model generally, and for almost a decade they ran with 68k emulation in order to make it all work.

And it crashed constantly. Very unreliable machines.

They did crash here and there in the 68k days, but overall they worked pretty good. Albeit cooperative multitasking, etc.

But in the mid-90s, with System 7.6, it was like walking through landmines. e.g. I helped admin an office with a bunch of them and you couldn't run Netscape and FileMaker at the same time because they just wrote all over each other's memory and puked.

System 8 and 9 improved things markedly but the reputation was still there.

Meanwhile they had these grandiose OS rewrite projects that all failed until they ended up buying NeXT... and then spent 5 years turning NeXTstep into OS X.

In retrospect Apple could have skipped the whole PPC era and done much better for themselves by just switching to x86 (and then ARM as they've done now) after a brief foray through ColdFire.

Or just jumped straight to ARM instead -- they were an ARM pioneer with the Newton! -- rather than betting the farm on the IBM/Motorola PowerPC alliance, which ultimately ended falling badly with power hungry chips that couldn't keep up with x86.

[markus_zhang]

Thanks for sharing. I never used one before so don't know how good/bad it was. My iBook runs OS X so it is pretty good.

It's a bit embarrassing as the 68k emulation was part of the reason that I got fascinated. But I just want to learn binary translation, not really use them, anyway.

I think Apple in the early 90s threw things on the wall and hope something stuck. Bad for consumers, nightmare for admins but good for engineers who managed to make the throw.

[cmrdporcupine]

Early 90s Apple was a bit like Google today, maybe. Big and ineffective at actually delivering, but with a history of innovation and illustrious past and a lot of smart people working there.

The problem with PowerPC was Motorola folded and IBM didn't have any real long term interest in the consumer PC CPU market.

So they just fell further and further behind.

[markus_zhang]

Interesting. I wonder if their interview standard fell during that period (because many engineers may leave or refuse to join a dying company). Same for Google in the near future.