Re: Wozniak vs Jobs

[toddpw@ugcs.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)]

supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) writes:

> The reason behind this comes from the
>fact that the ARM can be used to emulate a 6502 on one hand

No ARM chip yet built can execute 6502 instructions. You are
reading way too much into the "make 6502 emulation easy" goal.

Pretty much everything inherited from the 6502 (NZVC status
flags, ALU ops) were considered to be good things in early
32 bit chips, and for the same reasons (helping programmers
from 8/16 bit chips make the transition). Thus, both ARM and
68K had those features. SPARC does too.

If Apple really wanted to emulate 6502 instructions, they could
have done it just as easily with 68K. They did not need ARM.

>and the fact that the ARM was more powerful than a 68000 on
>the other.  Thus, the ARM A2 could run old A2 software and it
>also had more power than the 68000 so it could have easily
>implemented the "Mac" GUI.

Since the ARM was designed for the Archimedes, a very Mac-like
machine in spirit (co-op multitasking, GUI in ROM, but it had
BASIC too!) I agree that the ARM could easily have run a GUI.

However, it is not clear that the ARM was sufficiently more
powerful than the 68K to be worth considering. The ARM had
very lazy growth and no visible corporate backing, whereas
Motorola was going to be pushing the 68K up-and-up no matter
what Apple did. The Macintosh was not the most important 68K
customer until after the 68020 era. More 68060's went into
telecom products and Amiga emulators than into Macintoshes.

Your argument that Apple should have championed the ARM carries
about as much weight as the similar historical argument that
Apple should have bought a chunk of WDC and forced them to think
hard about making fast 65816's, not to mention the fabled 65032.
I was an intern at Apple two summers, and I spent both of them
working on the CAD library files for Apple's custom chips,
standard parts, and grunt logic... they made an incredible number
of Macintosh motherboard controller chips and peripheral
controllers, but it never occurred to anyone high up that the
65816 was easily less complicated than some of the things they'd
designed. However, the whole industry mindset is that if you want
leading edge CPU performance you buy a "real" CPU from a company
that makes them ... only recently has the ARM business model (own
your CPU and license it) become viable in America for anyone other
than MIPS (who actually has been part of SGI off and on, over the
years, so they are not pure fabless whereas ARM always was).

BTW I made the "Apple should buy out WDC" argument back about the
time of the Apple //f paper... by then things were too far gone.
Apple severely needed to focus their efforts on the Mac, and it
would have been better if they had had the guts to say "sorry,
it's not forever, here's how we're going to phase out the II" and
just ended the whole pathetic vigil.

>This is 180 degrees from what Jobs wanted...that the A2 and
>Mac lines remain very separate.  This guy was even upset
>that the IIgs used a mouse and GUI!  Thank God he wasn't
>there during the 68k Mac to PowerMac transition!  He would
>probably have wanted the 68k world and the PPC world
>separate...and repeated the same mistake!

Please take your hatred of Steve Jobs and do something constructive
with it, like starting your own software company or something.

Jobs was not alone in wanting the computer families to be separate;
such products are vastly easier to market, sell, and support. The
other good model (which Sculley pushed for and mostly got) is to have
everything use the same peripherals, so CPU's are chosen for power
and compatibility and Apple sells you the same peripherals for both.

Things did not get that much better for the A2 when Jobs was ousted.
If he is so much to blame, why did those who carried on after him
do much of the same with regard to the A2 ??

>By the way, did you hear Jobs killed the StrongARM powered
>Newton.  He wants to make a MacOS PDA...which of course
>will NOT be able to run Newton software!  Jobs does it again!

Jobs killed Newton because it was not profitable enough and Apple
desperately needs to focus its resources -- same reason he canceled
the Mac Clone market. Try browsing www.news.com for the ongoing
coverage of Newton, you'll find that Apple is trying to recycle
the technology even as the Newton market is trying to get Apple to
sell the technology.

As for the PDA, if they can port MacOS to StrongARM, they will do
it, because StrongARM is much,much,much better for PDA's than any
powerpc yet fabbed. If they try to sell a stripped down PowerBook
then they will ship on time but it will be heavy and have lousy
battery life. If they do it right, it will be more of a Windows CE
type rework of the MacOS running on Newton-derived hardware. That,
probably, is why Apple refuses to sell off Newton; they need to
recycle too much of it for the PDA product.

Personally though I think Apple is foolish to compete with PalmPilot
and WinCE. Unless they have something up their sleeve, it means they
are getting ready to cash-cow the desktop Mac, so I really hope that
the new PowerMacs become the Linux box of choice so that people
defecting from Win95/NT are tempted to buy Mac and run Linux on it
(I am, when they have a copper-PPC PowerBook that is).

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ ugcs.caltech.edu