Hacker News Reader

Comment by 082349872349872 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for the tangent but the phrase, "Think with IBM or Thwim with someone else" has lived in my head for a very long time.

I never knew about this slogan.

But I'm curious if this was the real origin behind Apple's infamous "Think Different" campaign. IBM was the big competitor at the time and Steve Jobs didn't have a high opinion of them. Was he familiar with this slogan and decided to play on it while also backhanded criticize it with the "Think Different" slogan for his own company?

The Wikipedia article[1] cites a few sources which support “Think Different” as a reference to IBM’s “Think”. But IBM was one of Apple’s biggest business partners at the time, as part of the AIM alliance[2].

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different

2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance

While AIM could be seen as a failure—PowerPC never threatened x86’s dominance—its legacy, RISC, later became ubiquitous with the shift to mobile via ARM.

Doesn't ARM predate PowerPC by quite some margin?

You are correct: 1985 vs 1991. My bad. I just heard about AIM at the time, whereas ARM was relatively unknown (well, at least to me ;) until the rise of mobile.

Edit: It’s a bit confusing because ARM the architecture is older than ARM the company. But yes, both precede AIM/PowerPC.

My main point was that mobile made RISC ubiquitous.

If you consider the evolution IBM 801 -> ROMP -> POWER -> PowerPC then you might say the that the roots of the PowerPC are from 1975, or 1982, or 1990 or 1991 and you would have a valid point in all cases.

But it is very reasonable to consider ARM older than PowerPC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com