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Have a search for 'osx86 project' on google..

well, I just had to grab this thread again... though it's actually a pointless contribution, let alone a useful one... but still I was mighty impressed tonight.

there's some tidy up needed in the office and that spoilt sunday afternoon plus the evening and '...of course' took a few hours longer than appreciated

my 'problem' was the 'emergency isdn server', the thingy which gets engaged once the internet or a customer's email system fail and a deadline is threatening.
This requires cards with a slot system called Nubus and I have only 2 machines in the office featuring this bus: a Quadra 650 with Motorola 68K CPU and a Powermac 6100 with PPC Cpu.
The server lets people on the LAN use the ISDN connection as if the workstation had a direct ISDN connect and it runs a receiving service so someone can call from outside and drop files in a folder. For this story it's not really important to know what exactly it's doing, but anyone who has setup a similiar service in Windows knows that it's not the most simple thing

So I plugged the ISDN card into the PPC, moved the Quadra's harddisk to the PPC and booted the machine.
Message: Connected to ISDN - and the 'active users' log window showed up
that's all folks...
and that was the way programming was done at Apple when they talked business, not 'i'

cheers, Tom

agreed...that's indeed rather cool.

I told you...

no hubird, that's how it USED to be.....

exactly Gary - it did happen, but it's not not gonna happen again...

I've been used to that type of system for years - an install was usually to copy an existing disk to another machine, and in fact we really sold at least 10 times the amount of software than our PC collegues.
Mac customers had quite a high moral standard in that regard...

my point is simply that it's very well possible to have an OS run on any hardware without bothering the user.
Those machine I referred to were as different as can be, except for the slot bus - even the machine code on the CPU is different.
Yes, of course the PPC (66MHZ) had to emulate the 68K (33MHZ) instructions, but thanks to it's faster IO system - the application starts significantly faster.

anyway, Apple achieved this by rigorous programming guidelines.
within your bounds you could do whatever you liked, but in particular any communication on system level had to precisely fulfill all those requirements.
Otherwise it wouldn't run on the next release of the OS or on the next machine.
Apple even refused to promote software that wasn't written according to their specs.

Call it tyranny - yet it achieved software with a remarkable level of sophistication and it's the true source for the still lasting rumor Macs are better

cheers, Tom

rumor?

so...they are not better at all?

an apple a day keeps the doctor away

they were better without the slightest amount of doubt in the days before OS9
they ruled in the days of MacOS 7
(anyone remembers his or her PeeCee between 1990 and 1995 ?)
today Macs still have the better 'usability', but below the surface there's almost the same stuff as anywhere else.
Apple has had painful experiences regarding deceasing business figures while user satisfaction increased...
they didn't turn to Open Source for no reason, let alone for social concerns or community aspects
the replaced machine I in the story before is from 1993, the replacement is from 96
I forgot to mention that the main reason was the more convenient case of the PM6100, the Quadra would easily make another 5 years...

btw Mac OS was free of charge until Version 7.6 in 1997
soon after this the mess started with OS8 and USB...
the early versions of OS8 are still pretty stable and usable, but from then on it was clear that the fate of (the original) MacOS was sealed

cheers, Tom

stardust wrote:they are better

there, now you've said it!

Hi,

I do recall that time, where we had PCs connected to a network of SUN worstations running on 68020, which were working perfectly because we used the PC NFS stack instead of Novell more oriented toward IBM!
I also do recall of the Apple Lisa ....
and I also remember DEC micro Vax which was pretty goods at running Euclide CAD/CAM software ...

and then! Gates foreseen PCs being a mass market product which in turn allowed the increase of performances we are seing nowadays.
There are drawbacks to this approach, but I prefer it to the elitist one from Apple.


cheers

Michel

MD69 wrote:and I also remember DEC micro Vax which was pretty goods at running Euclide CAD/CAM software ...

got two of them rotting in the basement still, right next to the sparcs...

-greetings, markus-