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 :-)
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 …
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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/
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 ;-)
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)
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.