back to article The Mac at 30: Hardware and software wars – again and again and ...

The countdown continues as we step through the 10 most important events that have shaped the evolution of the Apple Macintosh over the past 30 years. Click here for Part 1... or read on. In this episode: the return of the prodigal son, the attack of the clones, the invasion of Chipzilla, and how an old enemy came to the …

COMMENTS

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  1. bigphil9009

    Wikipedia?

    Much as I hate to belittle a frankly excellent series of articles, was that a link to a... a Wikipedia article I saw??? That must have hurt :-)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Wikipedia?

      And a damn good Wikipedia article it is – they do occasionally exist, y'know?

      1. DaneB

        Re: Wikipedia?

        Ha ha... true! (or in the case of wikipedia, maybe true).

  2. Glenn Amspaugh

    Time travel

    Heh. Over the holidays, dug out my Quadra 650 and fired it up. I ended to scan in some blueprints (USS Enterprise blueprints) on my old Agfa Tabloid Scanner (scsi, no USB/FireWire adapters for modern iMac). Man, was weird but fun. Still had Photoshop 2.5 installed, as well as original Marathon by Bungie.

    Scary thing: Base model Coffee Cup Mac Pro costs about what I paid for Quadra 650 (12 MB RAM/230MB HD/ CD drive) and monitor in 1993.

  3. Mike 16

    OS X on multiple platforms?

    If they had really been compiling OS X on Intel for five years, why all the endian problems at the switch? And why is "programmer view" in the Calculator still broken on Intel? Ah, I see, they _compiled_ it for both platforms, but didn't actually run it.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: OS X on multiple platforms?

      What's wrong with the Programmer view in Calculator? Seems to work just fine on my Intel-equipped Mac.

    2. ThomH

      Re: OS X on multiple platforms?

      What endian problems? Third-party software hadn't been built for both platforms, obviously. Everything inside the OS worked fine.

      See the documentation for the byte-order utilities — https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/CoreFoundation/Reference/CFByteOrderUtils/Reference/reference.html — search for the text "Available in OS X v10.0 and later" and you'll see it's every single function in the document. Including "CFByteOrderGetCurrent" that "Returns the byte order of the current computer." and a whole bunch of other functions that do things like "[convert] a 32-bit integer from big-endian format to the host’s native byte order." or "[convert] a 32-bit integer from little-endian format to the host’s native byte order." (all of which compile as no-ops if your host architecture is the type you describe).

      That's the C stuff. The Objective-C classes like NSNumber required no special handling because their storage is opaque anyway.

    3. Justin Clements

      Re: OS X on multiple platforms?

      >If they had really been compiling OS X on Intel for five years

      I can well believe they did because NextStep/OpenStep was already complied for Intel, Sparc and Motorola iirc, and I'm sure I remember programmes on the Next machines being binary for 2 or 3 of those regardless of what you ran them on.

  4. robert lindsay
    Meh

    Power Computing

    One other thing about the buy of Power Computing, their staff was used to help apple set up their first online store.

  5. Irony Deficient

    share price comparisons

    Rik and Shaun, if you’re going to compare share prices, please take stock splits into consideration. An original Apple share represents eight current shares; an original Microsoft share represents 288 current shares. The closing price of MSFT on 18th September 1987, the last business day before its first split, was $115; that would be the equivalent of $33,120 for the same share representation today.

  6. cheveron

    A mention for Jef Raskin would have been nice

    Given that the Mac was his idea.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/28/jeff_raskin_obituary/

  7. J.G.Harston Silver badge

    The iMac's not a computer - it's a monitor which you'll chuck away when you get a better monitor. Where's the computer? Where do I plug it in?

    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      The same could be said for laptops and tablets, so I don't suppose they'll catch on either.

    2. Squander Two

      Wow. My band recorded our first album on a monitor? How the fuck did we manage that?

  8. ecofeco Silver badge

    Steve Jobs? That wanker?

    Having just read an article on PandoDaily about how the entire tech industry in Silicon Valley openly conspired to drive down the wages of engineers wages (and continues to do so), I'm afraid that I will NEVER have respect for those bastards or their products, ol' Stevie included, again.

    http://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Steve Jobs? That wanker?

      I understand that these agreements are not good, but was it really such a big problem?

      It only covered actively soliciting employees from other companies. However, if someone was not happy at company X and applied for a job a company Y then that would still work. Also many jobs are found via friends which would still be possible.

      I mean yes if you are happy at company X and company Y comes with an offer. Then you could try to use that to get more money from company X, but you can just as well ask for more money if you think you deserve it.

      In the end it cannot have been having such a big impact otherwise there would be all these protests over IT workers earning too much and driving the housing prices up ;-)

  9. Nosher
    Stop

    "seeing as how the iMac was quite unlike anything that the personal computer market had seen before"

    Oh, apart from maybe 1983's C/WP Cortex - released some 15 years before: http://www.nosher.net/archives/computers/az_personal_computers_1984-10_001 (with apologies for pimping one of my own pages but it's the only advert reference I could find. old-computers.com also has a small article on it: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=899&st=1)

    1. Squander Two

      I see what you mean.

      Yes, that's almost exactly the same.

  10. suspicious-mind

    Did a text search on 'Woz' and 'Jobs' in each page of this and the part 1 articles.

    Result, roughly, each time,

    'woz' - 0

    'jobs' - 30

    Seems people with monster egos who contribute diddly-squat beyond self-ego-masturbation out-score people who do stuff, again.

    Plus ça change.

    1. FartingHippo
      Devil

      You're either a programmer or hardware engineer. And you clearly have a boss with pointy hair.

  11. Mark .

    The Macintosh is 30 years old, but it's not 30 years of the Macintosh

    The Macintosh is a device of the past - today "Mac" on the other hand is a brandname for their x86 PCs, similar to Dell's Inspiron or ASUS's Transformer. Different hardware, different software (and is only the same platform as much as Trigger's Broom is the same broom). I would say only the name is the same, but even that's not true - Macintosh was finally dropped as a brandname some years ago.

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