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Windows NT for Power Macintosh

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Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#181

Post by scarface_74 »

karlgkk wrote: post #171
jmb99 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I really hope they get the price down Very much agreed. I get why it’s expensive and I’m no stranger to the apple tax (and usually don’t mind it all that much), but I got the email today that it’s now available in Canada and $5k for a headset is… steep.

For what it's worth, the entry level PowerBook 100 in 1991, when adjusted for inflation, cost about $5500 USD. An entry level iBook in 2003 would cost about $2700 USD. Yeah, it's expensive, but it's also astonishing how much prices have come down.

We don’t even have to adjust for inflation. I (well my parents) paid $4000 dollars for a Mac LCII with a //e card, a crappy 12 inch monitor, a LaserWriter LS printer, a 5-1/4 drive for the //e card and SoftPC. It had 10MB RAM

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#182

Post by qingcharles »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #157
hylaride wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect if Apple and NeXT never "merged", the phone market would be RIM vs (a very different) Android, but we'd be worse off. Blackberries were OK at the time, but my god RIM was so culturally conservative and Google at the time had no design sense that we'd probably be 10 years behind where we are now - and if we even had software keyboards they'd be terrible.

Nokia would still be around

They probably would still be the #1 phone manufacturer, still making terrible Symbian phones with terrible developer support. I was working for Nokia (and a shareholder) on their future phones c. 2004-2005 and it was horrible all the way down. Apple deserved to eat everyone's lunch.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#183

Post by qingcharles »

monocasa wrote: post #93
nailer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTC G1 the original Android phone, was basically another sidekick. We’d have this shitty Android and WinMo for a decade longer and eventually things would get good.

The slate form factor was already being explored by other manufacturers before the iPhone came out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Microsoft had been doing it since 2000 but never made it cool. Here's one from 2004:

https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/03/review_hp_ipaq_6340/

I had one since 2000 as a daily driver and I loved the thing, but the app library was horrible.

The funny thing is, iPhone launched with no support for 3rd party apps. It took damned near a year for the first apps to arrive.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#184

Post by qingcharles »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #148
temac wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how cancelled projects are somehow making people almost more "nostalgic" than projects that actually shipped. One of the reason may be that cancelled projects don't need to be completed, to ship with a reasonably good quality, to have an easy to use interface, to be sustainable for a long enough period of time, etc.

I rather see a reason that many such cancelled projects had very elegant architectures/structures, which is something that hackers love. If you want to ship a product so that it becomes commercially successful, you often have to "deeply taint" this clear vision to make the product compatible with the multitude of very inelegant (industry) standards that customers expect/require. Thus the nostalgia is not about shippi…

Right. Most cancelled projects are beautifully architected and discount tons of installed products with all their decades of cruft.

Then you start trying to bring the New Thing(r) into the Real World(tm) and there are 5000 edge cases the original project dealt with in a 42-page if/else block for 270 different OEM patches that were sold by some JV team in another building who have never written a line of code in their lives.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#185

Post by randkyp »

DaoVeles wrote: post #180
snakeyjake wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple would have died. I love BeOS. I love BeOS more than you. I love BeOS more than Jean-Louis Gassée. BeOS wasn't ready. I was there I used BeOS as my daily driver on a maxxed-out Power Macintosh 6400. I have, today, that machine still running BeOS. I also have a second dual-PII running BeOS. BeOS wasn't ready. Apple was making a decision in 1996 for a deal that had to be struck and struck fast (1997). I started us…

I have a spare machine to do some offline work on running Haiku OS, the open source successor to BeOS. Even today it simultaneously feels 20 years ahead and 20 years behind. Good example, the interface is incredibly snappy but no Wifi. I love the vision of BeOS but it probably would have been the death of Apple if they had gone with it.

Haiku does support WLAN adapters (even USB ones), through the support isn't as extensive as Linux or the BSDs. You might want to use the current nightly builds instead of the latest beta version, though, which was released in December 2022.

https://hardware.besly.de/index.php?hardware=Wireless_Networ... https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/support-for-realtek-usb-wifi-...

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#186

Post by qingcharles »

karlgkk wrote: post #171
jmb99 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I really hope they get the price down Very much agreed. I get why it’s expensive and I’m no stranger to the apple tax (and usually don’t mind it all that much), but I got the email today that it’s now available in Canada and $5k for a headset is… steep.

For what it's worth, the entry level PowerBook 100 in 1991, when adjusted for inflation, cost about $5500 USD. An entry level iBook in 2003 would cost about $2700 USD. Yeah, it's expensive, but it's also astonishing how much prices have come down.

It's so easy for people to look at the dollar figure for something they bought in the 80s or 90s and not account for inflation and make a pithy comment, but when you back-calculate the actual price my parents paid for some things, it blows my mind how cheap technology is now.

$5500 for an entry level laptop! You can get an M2 MacBook for $800 today, and I couldn't even begin to describe how much more tech is inside that thing for 20% of the price.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#187

Post by randkyp »

pavlov wrote: post #81
Damogran6 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I LOVE LOVE LOVED BeOS. It resonated with me and it was a great experience...it wasn't multiuser and didn't have some stuff that I forget, but seemed necessary for a system to have long-term success. But mam did it cut out the cruft and wring out ALL of the HP of the hardware of the time.

Why was multiuser so important? Apple’s most successful operating system in the Jobs 2.0 era isn’t multiuser either. BeOS would have been a fine foundation for smartphones and tablets. But of course it’s an open question whether Apple could have got that far in the 2000s without the return of Jobs. I suspect the company would have been acquired or merged with some unsuitable suitor like Sun.

Heh, funny you mention that, considering Be's pivot to BeIA. Some Be engineers also worked on the (unreleased) Palm OS Cobalt, and eventually, Android. (And then Fuschia, but I don't think that OS will ever hit smartphones.)

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#188

Post by hjdiiokjs »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #98
lizknope wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A/UX was still a licensed version of Unix. This post says the licensing fee was $1,000 per seat. https://www.reddit.com/r/Apple_AUX/comments/11wks6i/what_was... I remember the AT&T / BSD lawsuit in 1992. Maybe Apple looked at NeXTSTEP and since it is based on the Mach microkernel and BSD that they would be able to fix the 10 or so files to avoid the AT&T / Unix System Labs licensing fees like Free/NetBSD did. In the…

> Why didn't they push this instead of the very limited MS-DOS? Hardware requirements. For a (quite long) while the plan was to keep DOS for microcomputers and Xenix for the serious stuff. DOS gained some extensions that made it very Xenix/UNIX-like (like subdirectories, pipes, "-" as command line switch char, device files in "\dev" instead of a global namespace, etc.).

While MSDOS had subdirectories, pipes were not supported at the kernel level. It was simply a convenience of COMMAND.COM that simulated pipes by running each command sequentially. The command switch character was the slash (/) until the end, with the exception of a few non-standard third-party softwares insisting on the dash. Device names were always global namespace and \dev never existed in any form.

Did you copy-paste an hallucinating LLM?

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#189

Post by adamomada »

jmb99 wrote: post #94
karlgkk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tired of hearing "Tim Apple's Apple Can't Engineer". VisionOS has some of the most incredible, coolest engineering I've seen in a long time, from top to bottom. Even if you're not interested in AR/VR, the writeups and sessions about the dual processor OS layout they've used, the scene and room graphing technology they've built, and the challenges of building ultra low latency pass through scene reconstruction and…

> and I really hope they get the price down Very much agreed. I get why it’s expensive and I’m no stranger to the apple tax (and usually don’t mind it all that much), but I got the email today that it’s now available in Canada and $5k for a headset is… steep.

Hey you could have got the PowerBook G3 Lombard mentioned in the OP instead for $5k. pretty lucky you can get a magic headset instead eh

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#190

Post by adamomada »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #98
lizknope wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A/UX was still a licensed version of Unix. This post says the licensing fee was $1,000 per seat. https://www.reddit.com/r/Apple_AUX/comments/11wks6i/what_was... I remember the AT&T / BSD lawsuit in 1992. Maybe Apple looked at NeXTSTEP and since it is based on the Mach microkernel and BSD that they would be able to fix the 10 or so files to avoid the AT&T / Unix System Labs licensing fees like Free/NetBSD did. In the…

> Why didn't they push this instead of the very limited MS-DOS? Hardware requirements. For a (quite long) while the plan was to keep DOS for microcomputers and Xenix for the serious stuff. DOS gained some extensions that made it very Xenix/UNIX-like (like subdirectories, pipes, "-" as command line switch char, device files in "\dev" instead of a global namespace, etc.).

Hmm I remember switches always had to begin with “/“ in DOS
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