Mac vs. PC religious war claims

[Phillip H. Zakas]

Ok I'm honestly not interested in a religious war (your term).  I will
clarify my earlier comments.  For me this issue is really about developing
and keeping market momentum and the impact poor momentum has on the
evolution of a computer line -- if Apple were as big in the market as
intel-based stuff we'd probably have better apple hw and sw.  This is the
feedback loop problem in my opinion.

Putting up barriers to development makes no sense when launching a computer.
The $5K license I referred to was required as late as 1992 (when I purchased
one for an app I wrote and sold commercially), and yes was eventually
dropped.   But by then the damage of:

- going after the K-12 education market rather than the colleges and
business schools...
- focusing on 'cool' and the niche graphic markets...
- charging developers to develop and sell apps for the mac...

...had really taken their toll.  I'm not sure, but I don't think Apple ever
received more than 15% market share, right?  Apple had many innovative
products but they rarely evolved beyond the cpu and beyond simply adding new
features or network cards, etc. (except for the messagepad which evolved
quickly then suddenly died).

I think early policies regarding developers really matter in a computer
product launch.  In contrast to apple which always had a relatively closed
and proprietary system (if you remember, apple didn't release hw and io
details), IBM opened up the BIOS calls almost immediately leading to TSRs,
etc.  Plus apple always discouraged clones (except for a brief period), so
all innovation had to come from apple and the apple team is focused on
consumers and not on, say, scientists and data centers so
development/evolution was designed to please consumers. In contrast, the
intel platforms always enjoyed clones (esp. after ibm began to license bios)
and now we have dozens of specialty vendors creating motherboards, network
cards, memory busses, etc. for intel platforms.  There are way more vendors
supporting and programming for the intel platform than the apple platform as
a result (I think anyway).

As for the multitasking stuff, I agree efficient multitasking is handled by
the OS, but there's more to it than the OS alone.  Nice HW has the design to
handle several devices at once with the goal of efficiently interacting with
the OS/apps.  I might be wrong, but one environment this becomes clear is
not the home, but the data center.  My point of reference is this: I spent
months working with a TV network and Apple Computer trying to get a large
number of G3s to efficiently scale to handle a large streaming media event.
It didn't work very well because the Macs couldn't be strung together in the
way you can cluster other platforms; each machine couldn't handle their
ethernet interfaces very efficiently (less than 20% efficiency was common --
try it yourself on your laptops) and the units burned a lot of time
constructing/deconstructing tcp connections (which was likely a tcp/ip stack
and/or multithreading problem), and of course apple lacks an application
server making management and scalability pretty difficult.  I tried to pull
the G3s into service because i'm a fan of the open source release of the
Apple quicktime streaming media material (very nice quality).  And I was
disappointed I couldn't scale the G3s (despite the help from apple and
others).  Maybe things have changed in the last 12 months, but I'm not sure
about that (maybe my desgin for the streaming center was bad but the
alternative design works well today).

Look I hate the whole mac/pc debate because it's not interesting to me.  but
I do think there were mistakes/decisions made early on which have made apple
what it is today in the marketplace.  as for some of the technical
challenges I'm not sure this list is the right forum to respond but i could
provide concrete foundations for some of my generalizations (and I suspect
that would be terribly boring for the others on this list).
phillip
btw gag me with a spoon? :)

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-cypherpunks at Algebra.COM
[mailto:owner-cypherpunks at Algebra.COM]On Behalf Of Tim May
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 9:31 PM
To: cypherpunks at Algebra.COM
Subject: Mac vs. PC religious war claims



At 8:17 PM -0500 2/1/01, Phillip H. Zakas wrote:
>I completely concur there's a feedback loop problem, but its Apple's fault
I
>think.  I remember when the first MACs came out you had to pay $5K just for
>the privilege of programming for it.  What numbskulls!  The intel platforms
>were the first to encourage development because bios ref. guides were cheap

I don't buy this. I was at Intel when the first Macs came out, I had
many friends who programmed Macs, and I myself used some of the early
(c. 1986) tools like Lightspeed C. The 3-volume (then 4-volume, then
5, etc.) set of books on programming the Mac was widely available,
and was inexpensive.

If by "first came out" you only mean "early 1984," you are possibly
right. But this is highly misleading, as by late 1985 and into '86
the tools were widely available.

This all compares favorably with what was happening the DOS world
(where, by the way, the only tools in the first year or two of the PC
were the built-in BASIC, akin to what Apple was offering in the Apple
II in 1979, the p-system from UCSD (good luck!), and the CPM-86
system. Of the three, PC-DOS, the p-system, and CPM-86, only DOS
succeeded. Ergo, all "programming tools" were the scraps and pieces
of crud related to DOS. Which, for the first few years of DOS, were
execrable.

What was happening in the DOS world at this time, at the time of the
introduction of the Mac? Well, I also used to subscribe to the
various PC mags of the day, including "PC Technical Journal." This
was the "premier" PC programming journal of its day. (Other tidbit
sources being "Dtack Grounded" and other semi-underground pubs.)

Was the Mac harder to program? Probably. Was a Mac app more usable
(more capable, more consistent) than the equivalent PC app of the
day? One guess, and the only correct answer is "That's why MS came
out with Windows."

(BTW, I had Windows 1.0 before I bought my first Mac, a Mac Plus. Gag
me with a spoon. I also had Windows 2.0, only _slightly_ better. It
was not until Windows 3, particularly 3.1, arrived that Windows
became usable. Do the math on what had passed for PC programming
prior to this.)

>and most could afford the $100 of a pascal, c or asm compiler.  Plus the
>intel-platform hw (ibm, compaq, etc.) was really designed to handle
>multitasking and simultaneous networking/communications.  Apple only
>recently started to get the hint and improve the hardware.

This is nonsense. Where do I begin?

Multitasking is an OS feature, present in Windows only in recent
years. A PC with an Intel processor running DOS is no more capable of
"multitasking" than a Mac running an early Mac OS. The Intel line is
not magically more multitasking-capable than the Motorola line. Look
at the early Sun machines based on the 68000 and 68010 for but one
illustration.

As for networking and communications, you are out to lunch. Ethernet
has been available, at a price, for many years on the Mac. In the
last _several_ years, it has been the default on nearly all Macs.

And for routine usage, all Macs since the earliest days have had
usable local area networking. LocalTalk, MacTalk, whatever the jargon
of the day.

My Windows friends are thrilled when they get Ethernet cards working.
I've had it built-in for many years. All of my Macs have been
networked, first with LocalTalk, later with Ethernet, for many years.
Wireless AirPort is now built in to most new Macs.

My G4 Mac, my iBook, and my G3 Wall Street Powerbook all have built
in Ethernet (mostly 10/100). They also have built in IEEE
1394/FireWire, USB, all the usual stuff.

I don't like Mac vs. PC religious wars, but I cannot allow
misrepresentations like the above to stand unchallenged. You,
Phillip, should be ashamed of yourself.


--Tim May
--
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns