Re: Apple II seen on PBS

[nathan@parka.winternet.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <swjackso-2406962202120001@dd08-049.compuserve.com>,
Steve W. Jackson <swjackso@sprynet.com> wrote:
>Whoever thinks "Macintosh, Inc" will kick the bucket any time in the
>foreseeable future doesn't know the future:  RISC.  It's here to stay. 
>And the CISC architecture of Intel is dying out.  

   And if you think that Macs will be resurrected simply because of
RISC then you're a number of years behind the computer marketplace.
Most workstations (Silicon Graphics w/ MIPS processors, DEC Alpha
based boxes, Sun Sparcs, HP 9000s7xx and more) have processors based
on RISC designs, and sales of them are increasing quite well, some
even better than macs. 

   Further, the P6 (successor to the Pentium, also known as the
Pentium Pro) does _better_ at the 32-bit RISC instructions than CISC
instructions. So much better that for equivalent processor speeds, a
P5 beats a P6 for 16-bit CISC code. That's probably one of Intel's
ways of getting everyone to go to RISC type code. This has all been
plotted out for quite a while.

>NT is not a bad OS, but it has that UGLY Windows face.  Fortunately,
>this will change with the pending release of 4.0.

   Since when does user interface have _ANYTHING_ to do with what
type the processor is? You can put a crappy or an elegant interface
on a processor with a few thousand lines of C, and it's the compiler's
job to make the processor able to run it.

>And Apple is licensing NT for use on its PowerPC (RISC!!!) servers!

   So fragging what? When it was first released, NT was available for
x86 and DEC Alphas, which only happened to be the first real popular
and powerful 64 bit RISC processor around. [And they're still some of
the fastest production chips around, by the way-- 300+ Mhz versions
available. And DECs doing a pretty good job selling Allpha based boxes
too.]

   If you'd look around the computer industry once in a while, rather
than putting your mac-only blinders on, your views might match up with
reality.

Nathan Mates
--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~nathan/      <*>
# And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the
# Kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in
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