ex-Apple CEO says they should've gone x86 in the 80's

alex get the xp command line version of winipcfg:
http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...pcfg_Setup.exe

it runs fine on xp
shockie B)

"Alex Johnson" wrote in message
...
Tony Nelson wrote:
It no longer matters, as all the things that made Macs worth using have
been destroyed by the NeXTies, at the same time that MS has made Windows
much better and nicer. It takes a real diehard to put up with throbbing
buttons, drawers, and the *nix command line, to name a few.

While I accept that Windows XP is much much better than all previous
incarnations, it is far from simple or user friendly. Macs DO have
windows beat hands down even with OS X, which I'd call a step back from
traditional Mac OS designs.

Read diehard, eh?
Throbbing buttons: When events happen in a window that does not have
focus, Windows throbs the task bar button.
Drawers: How is this different from "folders"? Or "directories"?
Different words from analogies with non-computer filing systems.
Command line: Not only is it often faster AND easier AND more flexible
to issue commands via a command line, but it is now mandatory for some
commands in Windows XP. I found out this morning that winipcfg was
removed from XP and you must use a command line version. From Win95 to
Win2k I've used the gui version because it required just two clicks to
release and renew, now it takes typing about 60 characters.

Alex
--
My words are my own. They represent no other; they belong to no other.
Don't read anything into them or you may be required to compensate me
for violation of copyright. (I do not speak for my employer.)

from wininfo:

This week, Apple revealed that it will ship its next minor OS
revision, Mac OS X Panther 10.3 on October 24. Panther follows a slew
of minor updates to the original Mac OS X, including 10.1 and 10.2,
each of which moved the OS closer to a finalized state (the original
Mac OS X was clearly a work in progress, to be kind). Mac OS X 10.3
appears to be the most refined version of Mac OS X yet.
After promising in late 2003 to charge customers for OS updates only
every 18 months, the company announced that Panther will cost yet
another $129, bringing the total cost of Mac OS X to about $400 for
those customers who upgraded each time--despite the fact that Mac OS X
10.3 follows 10.2 by only a year.

I consider a Service Pack in windows to be OS upgrades and last I looked
they were FREE downloads or you pay a minimal price for a cdrom......
shockie B)

"Alex Johnson" wrote in message
...
Eric Gisin wrote:
If Apple releases OSX for industry standard PCs, they will lose most of
their
hardware revenues. They may make it up if the can sell OSX for the price
of
Win 2k/XP Pro. They could get 10% market share this way.

Maybe I don't get what you are trying to say. From the manufacturer's
pages just now, OS X costs $129 while XP Pro costs $199 upgrade/$299
full. If you want multiple licenses, OS X leaps way ahead in lower
price. Either they sell at this price and probably take 10% market
share, or they sell at the higher Windows price and take 1% market
share. I don't see them raising their prices, even on commodity PCs,
and beating down Microsoft. I'd love to see them try, but I just can't
see it happening.

Alex
--
My words are my own. They represent no other; they belong to no other.
Don't read anything into them or you may be required to compensate me
for violation of copyright. (I do not speak for my employer.)

Yousuf Khan wrote:

Apple's ex-CEO John Sculley said that they were evaluating
Intel-architecture in the late 80's, and decided that it couldn't keep
against RISC processors, so they went the RISC route. They didn't count on
the evolutionary process eventually putting x86 on a par with RISC:

http://www.computerweekly.com/articl...rch =&nPage=1

or,

http://makeashorterlink.com/?P5CC21826

Yousuf Khan





bull****.

Aplle ****ed up - but not from the above. RISC was the best choice at
that time.

1. killed the clones (ie. Power Computing)...........that means kill the
marketshare of apple's RISC G3/G4. DUMB DUMB DUMB...........so what that
Power Computing offered a better PC at 1/3 the price of the Apple
quivalent!!.................case of cutting off nose to spite the face
here. (i.e. short sightedness)


2. killed BeOS.................a total wasted time of 3?4? yrs for OS-X
to be created and eventually equal what allready existed in full stable
form in 1998. Reinventing the buggy when you are in the red is not smart.


THOSE TWO ****ups is what got Apple in the boat they are in today
(irrelivancy...............eventual extinction (at least as a PC maker).


WHY - blind ignorant short sighted GREED!

Both or either screwups were enough to kill Apple, but I think killing
the clones was the worse one. Might as well just hand the market over to
x86 without a fight if you kill the other players who made up 1/3 to 1/2
of the new orders placed for g3/g4 systems of all types.


fools.....................they went the way of Amiga in the fall of 97 -
when they did #1 (august) and #2 (sept). Only they were too arrogant to
see that at the time. I did however. My roomy who worked for Apple did
not though. (he thought/thinks? Jobs was God).

Tony Hill wrote:


howdy Tony.........been at least a yr......maybe two. hope all is well.




I think you've got your dates off by a bit there. The 386 was
released in 1985,


I'm thinking 85/86 or so.



while the Alpha didn't come out until 1992 as best
as I can tell (though historical info about the Alpha has become a bit
tough to come by).



earlier i think. I remeber first learning of the Alpha in 92 - that one
was the 21164 chip. I shortly thereafter learned of the earlier 21064
chip - so since the 21164 was introduced in 92, the earlier one must be
around 89 or so (give or take a yr).

A friend of mine had a catalog of mobos and systems which one could buy
the older ship - the 20064 for the same price as the Pentium-100
mobos/systems at the time. Funny, it was just a regular retail catalog
like Crutchfields or something.

Remember Enorex?.............great systems Alpha 21164 based - twice the
speed of the Intel systems (just 20-percent over intel system prices) -
all running NT-4 and with software like Maya/3d-Max.



so sad.............Alpha was such a great chip ;-(.


The 21264 was released in 95?.................and I think they have a
21464 now (not sure..............I don't keep up with the walking death
platforms).

when Enorex went under (96?) and Win-2000 (NT) (hell so long age maybe
NT-4 dropped support?) no longer supported Alpha I knew it was "game over"




By the time the Alpha made it to market, the 486
was already a pretty mature design and the Pentium was just around the
corner.




about right. though I think the first Alphas may date to the time of the
486.





Of course, in the mid-80s, RISC was definitely the design of the
future, or so it would seem. The first commercial RISC chip was
probably a MIPS chip, circa '86, though I'm sure that there are many
other chips out there that claim to be the "first RISC chip" in one
way or another.


and most people rightly assumed that it
would be the first to reach the 1Ghz speed rating.


If it hadn't been for mass bungling and mismanagement at Digital,






INDEED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IBM and OS/2 anyone?????????...
"anyone"?




along with some pretty serious problems when it came to actually
MAKING the processors instead of just designing them, Alpha would have
been the first to reach 1GHz.


Little did they know that
an x86 cloner, AMD, would be the first to 1Ghz; and that the whole x86
market segment would be quickly undergoing revolutionary evolutions (now is
that an ironic phrase, "revolutionary evolution"). Within one generation of
the 386, they had the processors with FPU and caches onboard (486). Within
two generations, they had superscalar processors (Pentium). All the while,
all of this upgrade technology was being financed by the incredible volume
of the previous generations.


Pretty much. It's tough for companies to compete against x86 when
they have trouble reaching 1% of Intel's volume. AMD gets by with
about 1/5th of Intel's volume, and they haven't exactly done well
financially for some time now.



yes..............and Centuar (now Via) and Cyrix (now Via
also).............and Via (what is left of Centaur).


CX5 never showed up.........1-1/2 yrs late now.............CX6 is
late................


looks like VIA no longer makes CPUs. Their current chip is a Centuar
"winchip-2" overclocked to around 800, and dates to a 1998 design.

Winchip-2, I have one myself - equal to the k-6 (and better fpu under
DOS). I loved that little chip. Good value and good performance. Centuar
designed! Centaur - all of 1=percent of the market at their peak (with
the original Winchip - which was a doggy chip indeed!).


anyway the four (or six? - rise/transmeta) players sure look to be two
now. VIA is like Digital in regard to their CPU devision IMO.




Just think of how tough it has to be
for companies like Sun who only manage to sell something on the order
of 1 chip for every 10,000 that Intel sells.



Sun - like Apple is dead and too slow to know it.

20-yrs, we will be running Linux. Sun will be gone, as will SGI and
Apple. x86?.....maybe.....maybe not, but windoze will not be here, and
Linux will be the universal OS (or should I say SuSe) (IMO that is).





Even with dramatically
higher costs (and therefore profit) per chip it becomes REAL tough to
finance the development.


yep






-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca



peace.

Yousuf Khan wrote:

"Judd" wrote in message
...

Almost forgot that the AMD processor usurped the Pentium by a couple of

days

with an announced product that didn't even ship for weeks later. That's
history for you.


Are you talking about the Athlon or the Pentium @1Ghz? The Athlon was
available in full force almost right away, the P3 on the other hand was
available only on paper for several months. There a time when AMD was
shipping 12 times as many 1Ghz+ processors than Intel.


I'm not sure moving to the Intel platform would have made
them a more profitable company. If Sun moved all of it's hardware to
PC/AMD64, would it make more money?


No, for Sun the issue is not about making more money, but about minimizing
the hemoraging of their existing customer base to the low-end x86 world.
It's basically fighting fire with fire. Sun is finally making some decisive
noises about using Opteron servers now, after their latest record-breaking
losses this past quarter. What they're finding now is that the x86 server
market is encroaching into their low-end Sparc server market. Two processor
Intels were good, and four processor Intels were acceptable performers,
though they posed no threat at all in the 8P or higher realm. However, the
Opterons are definitely going to pose a threat at the 2P and 4P level and
may even be quite acceptable at the 8P level. This is irreversible, they
can't make Sparcs any more economically than they are already making them
right now, there simply isn't the volume, so cheapening the Sparcs isn't
going to help them. So they will have to concentrate on moving their Sparcs
even further into the higher end.



The writing is on the wall for the
Sparcs --


yes


move higher or die.

no matter, writing is on the wall. x86 kills their hardware, and Linux
kills their OS.


no hardware and no OS ..............and what can Sun offer me? nothing!


they are history.

in 5-yrs Linux will equal Solaris in all ways, and so will x86 chips.


at least Apple has the brains (though too late IMO) to diversify into
online music downloads and consumer electronics devices.



peace.

Yousuf Khan

Tony Nelson wrote:

In article
ogers.com,
"Yousuf Khan" wrote:


Apple's ex-CEO John Sculley said that they were evaluating
Intel-architecture in the late 80's, and decided that it couldn't keep
against RISC processors, so they went the RISC route. They didn't count on
the evolutionary process eventually putting x86 on a par with RISC:


All that would have been needed to make the transition to x86 practical
would have been an x86 processor that was a few times faster than any
current or near-term 68K processor, so it could emulate the 68K
processor with adequate speed. Otherwise, all existing Mac apps would
have run uselessly slowly on the x86 Macs.

Scully is famous for bad decisions, both business and technical. This
would be another one. No one counted on AMD forcing Intel to make
faster, cheaper processors 6 or 8 years down the road, not even Intel or
AMD.

Apple may still switch to x86. Without IBM's rescue, Apple might have
already started. The Mac market isn't large enough to support processor
development, and Apple killed off any other market for desktop PPC.

It no longer matters, as all the things that made Macs worth using have
been destroyed by the NeXTies, at the same time that MS has made Windows
much better and nicer. It takes a real diehard to put up with throbbing
buttons, drawers, and the *nix command line, to name a few.
__________________________________________________ __________________
TonyN.:'
'


for Apple to go x86 would have made them another Dell. that would ahve
killed them since the Os would not be the Apple one.


killing the clones and killing BeOs is what killed Apple.

Tony Hill wrote:

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 13:22:52 -0400, Alex Johnson
wrote:

Tony Nelson wrote:

It no longer matters, as all the things that made Macs worth using have
been destroyed by the NeXTies, at the same time that MS has made Windows
much better and nicer. It takes a real diehard to put up with throbbing
buttons, drawers, and the *nix command line, to name a few.

While I accept that Windows XP is much much better than all previous
incarnations, it is far from simple or user friendly. Macs DO have
windows beat hands down even with OS X, which I'd call a step back from
traditional Mac OS designs.


How in the hell could OS X be a step back from traditional MacOS?!?
Old MacOS was a ****-poor operating system! It was like Win3.x,
modified and patched all to hell to make it sorta, kinda work well.
It was WAY behind the times technically speaking. Absolutely useless
for anything but a desktop and lacking the sort of memory protection
that all non-Win9x operating systems had.


No, OS X is a HUGE step forward. It's the main reason why I consider
Macs to be a viable platform again (the new PPC 970/G5 really helps in
this regard to).


Read diehard, eh?
Throbbing buttons: When events happen in a window that does not have
focus, Windows throbs the task bar button.
Drawers: How is this different from "folders"? Or "directories"?
Different words from analogies with non-computer filing systems.
Command line: Not only is it often faster AND easier AND more flexible
to issue commands via a command line, but it is now mandatory for some
commands in Windows XP. I found out this morning that winipcfg was
removed from XP and you must use a command line version. From Win95 to
Win2k I've used the gui version because it required just two clicks to
release and renew, now it takes typing about 60 characters.


All good operating systems should have both a powerful GUI and a
powerful command line. There are simply some tasks that are easier to
perform in one, while other tasks are easier to perform in the other.
What I've seen of OS X suggests that Apple has it pretty much spot-on.
WinXP still forces a bit too much to the GUI, while Linux tends to
force a bit too much to the command line.

Unfortunately with Macs you have dick-all in terms of choice when
buying a new system and you pay a heck of a lot for even their
cheapest box.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca


OS-X will soon be redundant with SuSe-9 and other distro like them.


Ya ya I know Linux is still a PIA, but it is slowly getting there in the
GUI department.
Eeeeeeeevvvvvvvvveeeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn ttttttuuuuuuuuaaallllllllllly
it will get there and on one will want to pay 300 bucks for an OS when
it does.

IMO.

Tony Hill wrote:

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 10:58:59 -0400, Tony Nelson
wrote:

In article
.rogers.com,
"Yousuf Khan" wrote:

Apple's ex-CEO John Sculley said that they were evaluating
Intel-architecture in the late 80's, and decided that it couldn't keep
against RISC processors, so they went the RISC route. They didn't count on
the evolutionary process eventually putting x86 on a par with RISC:

All that would have been needed to make the transition to x86 practical
would have been an x86 processor that was a few times faster than any
current or near-term 68K processor, so it could emulate the 68K
processor with adequate speed. Otherwise, all existing Mac apps would
have run uselessly slowly on the x86 Macs.


Apple broke compatibility when they switched from the 68K line to
PowerPC anyway. It was simply that they felt that the design concepts
coming from RISC chips and being implemented in the PowerPC would wipe
the floor with that old CISC x86 design. Of course, these days AMD
and Intel's x86 chips are looking somewhat RISC-ish, and PowerPC's
instruction set is sufficiently large that it's tough to call it
"reduced". In the RISC hey-day of the mid-80s, I don't think anyone
would have thought that less than 15 years down the line the
difference between "RISC" and "CISC" chips would be essentially
non-existant.



with respect - I dissagree. The NextGen NX586 and PentuinPro were
released in 1995, and that was before the killing of BeOS and the Apple
Clones. Apple should have seen the writing on the wall and chosen Be and
allowed the clones to compete to increase their platform's market. Had
they, we would have an Apple compatable market of around 20-percent
today (IMO).




It no longer matters, as all the things that made Macs worth using have
been destroyed by the NeXTies, at the same time that MS has made Windows
much better and nicer. It takes a real diehard to put up with throbbing
buttons, drawers, and the *nix command line, to name a few.


With Win2K and now WinXP, Microsoft has moved forward a lot in terms
of the useability of their desktop operating systems. However, they
are not without their problems. Security continues to be a concern
with Windows, and MS has made some rather, umm, *questionable* changes
to their licenses. If you actually read the current standard MS EULA,
it says a number of things that most users REALLY wouldn't agree with,
like the fact that you're allowing MS to access your PC to modify the
software at any time and for any reason, without your knowledge or
further consent (agreeing to the EULA is considered sufficient
consent). Not necessarily that MS would actually do this, but to
install any new patches from MS you have to agree to let them do just
that.


yep thats why I still use win98SE..........and linux.





-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca


eventually I'll get XP and a hack to dissable the mothership call when I
get a computer that can use it.

peace.

Eric Gisin wrote:

The CPU was irrelevent. They choose an open CPU (PPC), but put it in a closed
system.

Apple has always used low cost CPUs in their entry level system. The problem
prior to the iMac was the dozens of system designs. Even after they went with
open interfaces and just four systems, they still cost more than comparable
PCs.

If Apple releases OSX for industry standard PCs, they will lose most of their
hardware revenues. They may make it up if the can sell OSX for the price of
Win 2k/XP Pro. They could get 10% market share this way.


too late. Linux is on the way. XP is still king now anyway.

"Eric Gisin" wrote in message
...
There is a winipcfg download from MS..

I see, interesting, wonder why they didn't just include this in the
distribution of Win2K?

Yousuf Khan