Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

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By the time x86 was really competitive architecturally with 68k -- by which I mean non-segmented, 32-bit, etc -- it was already too late for Commodore and Atari. They were already pretty much dead financially.

Both sold PC clones, and I suspect if those lines had been very successful $$ wise they may have attempted to do something like what you said. Or more likely some kind of Amiga-esque runtime environment overtop of (choke, gag) DOS. We would have all screamed bloody murder about it though.

In any case, AmigaOS and Atari's TOS were pretty heavily tied into the 68k ecosystem. Switching ISAs would have really been starting over.

Moving from 68k to PowerPC almost killed off Apple, and they were many multiples the size of Commodore & Atari.

Myself I made the switch from 68k Atari ST to 486+early-Linux in 1992. At that point we were already doing Unix-like things on the Atari (MiNT with unix ports, or, on the 030/020 systems, full NetBSD Unix), so it felt like a natural jump. SVGA + a 486 was a pretty damn competitive workstation-like system at that point.

I dont think the platform move was.. a cause of Apple's troubles, it was mostly poor product planing, marketing and OS related issues (which were not really made better or worse by the ISA move)

I don't think it was a unitary cause, sure. But I think in retrospect it's clear Apple could not afford this kind of ISA move in addition to all the crazy OS work they were doing (and never finishing). It was half-baked until OS 8.

In 1996 I helped administrated a group of MacOS boxen, all PowerPC. At that point in time only half the applications were running native PowerPC, and it was buggy as hell. If I recall, even parts of the OS were still running 68k emulated.

In an OS with no memory protection or even proper dynamic memory allocation, it was just a shitstorm. Could not run FileMaker and Netscape at the same time without dying all over the place. I was shocked, because a couple years earlier I remember finding the 68k Macs I used extremely stable, even with Multifinder, etc. Limited, but stable.

IMHO Apple was lost in the wilderness for most of the mid-90s and a big part of it was just having too many balls in the air.

> But I think in retrospect it's clear Apple could not afford this kind of ISA move in addition to all the crazy OS work they were doing

You might be surprised. Apple did an x86 port of Classic MacOS, based on DR-DOS.

https://lowendmac.com/2014/star-trek-apples-first-mac-os-on-...

That is not the problem. Even emulating the apps isn't the core problem.

Drivers, and support for the vast range of x86 hardware, was the problem, and secondarily, using the underlying hardware and supporting an MMU, memory protection, and preemptive multitasking... those were the big problems, and in the end, all Apple's attemps to solve them failed, and it moved to UNIX.

That worked, but it needed to happen when it became viable to run the entire "legacy" OS in a VM, and that didn't come until around the turn of the century. That was not feasible in 1992.

> even parts of the OS were still running 68k emulated.

Up until MacOS 8.5 you could move some system extensions to 68K Macs and they'd work.

I had my Color Classic have MacOS 8 looks (even running on 7.5) that way.

Apple couldn't stay on the 68K though - Motorola was mothballing the 68K line and investing on their own 88000 and, being faced with an OS rewrite, Apple did the rational thing - find out who has the best chance of making something better.

> Apple was lost in the wilderness for most of the mid-90s and a big part of it was just having too many balls in the air.

I remember that, when MacOS 9x seemed like a dead end, Apple published MkLinux. It was my first Linux desktop.

But they had to do _something_, staying on the 68k wasn’t an option. It couldn’t compete with the Pentium and Motorola had effectively abandoned the series, focusing their efforts on the PowerPC.

Apple made a lot of bad decisions in the 90s, but I don’t see how the switch to PPC was one of them.

I don't think it was a bad decision, it was inevitable they had to switch as Motorola left 68k customers in the lurch. The actual bad decision was not investing in better OS development in the 80s.

Put it this way: the Lisa had an MMU, memory protection, and an OS with better multitasking. Yes it was expensive to make, but they could have scaled it down instead of building a whole other, competing system that was technically inferior from an operating system perspective.

The original Mac was built as if it was a one-off product, and they lived with the results of that for two decades. And these were Jobs' choices.

> the Lisa had an MMU, memory protection, and an OS with better multitasking. Yes it was expensive to make, but they could have scaled it down

Yes and no.

I mean, the Mac is a cut-down Lisa. But you're right, cut down too far.

(Aside: the Lisa was a 68000 as well, I am fairly sure. No MMU, but it did have multitasking.)

I think the problems were in scaling it down far enough to get the price down to vaguely reasonable.

That meant:

• 128kB RAM (same as the Sinclair QL, which launched 2 weeks earlier)

• No hard disk. Keeping a full multitasking OS when running from 400kB single-sided double-density floppies -- indeed, from one floppy -- would have been significantly hard.

Before an outraged Amiga fan jumps in: yes, I know Amiga did it, but that was 2 years later, with 4x as much RAM and floppies holding 2x as much data. Tech was moving fast in the 1980s.

A 512kB original Mac with 800kB floppies was technologically doable in 1984, I suspect, but instead of costing $2500 when it launched (~1/4 of a Lisa), it would have been $5000 or something, and I strongly suspect it would have flopped too, as a result.

The Lisa had a custom MMU, if I recall. There were other 68000 based systems that were similar.

My key point is around the operating system. They had a system in LisaOS that had multitasking, memory protection, proper dynamic allocation, etc. It was a better OS than what was shipped on the Mac. It was unfortunate they threw it away. Likely due to personal & organizational politics more than technical and cost reasons (Jobs hated the Lisa). A few years later they were running Mac OS on old Lisa hardware.

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