The Old Licensing Question

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[shamino]

I wish reporters would do their homework. It really isn't that hard.
For thirty years now, many have bemoaned Apple's refusal to license its operating system back when it was the market leader.
The Mac was never a market leader. The Apple II was a leader in its day, but I don't think Apple would be any better today if they had licensed any of the operating systems used by that platform.

Microsoft slipped its latest delivery date for Vista (Can you still call it a slip, if the delay is now going on year four from the original timetable?).
Four years? That's news to me. The earliest announcement I remember hearing was 2004. If there was an announcement for a 2002 release, I'd love to see a link to a record of it.

WRT the rest of the article, we've heard it all before. I'll avoid reposting the same old arguments, since we've all heard them a thousand times before.

[Nermal]

Four years? That's news to me. The earliest announcement I remember hearing was 2004. If there was an announcement for a 2002 release, I'd love to see a link to a record of it.

Four years prior to 2007 would be 2003, and I do remember hearing about a 2003 release. It was supposed to be an interim release before Blackcomb (now called Vienna) in ~2006.

[RacerX]

The earliest that Apple could have licensed a version of the Mac OS to PC makers would have been some time after the release (and adoption) of the 486 (possibly the 386, but highly unlikely). Before that PCs just didn't have what it would take to run a GUI like the Mac OS. Even the (relative to today) simple GUI of either System 6 or 7 was far more advanced than what PC hardware could handle.

The main reason that pre-95 versions of Windows had such a bad GUIs was that that was all the hardware could really support at the time.

In the late 80s all the graphically intensive platforms were using Motorola's 68k processors (Apple, NeXT and SGI). And all the PC clone makers were building systems that were designed to copy IBM's PCs for running DOS... so literally, there was no one to license the Mac OS to in those early days. No PC made by these companies could have run such an OS.

[peharri]

The main reason that pre-95 versions of Windows had such a bad GUIs was that that was all the hardware could really support at the time.

In the late 80s all the graphically intensive platforms were using Motorola's 68k processors (Apple, NeXT and SGI). And all the PC clone makers were building systems that were designed to copy IBM's PCs for running DOS... so literally, there was no one to license the Mac OS to in those early days. No PC made by these companies could have run such an OS.

That's not really true. Digital Research's GEM was considered an almost equal to Mac OS (the only major difference between the two was that GEM needed, for compatability reasons, to use DOS's horrible 8.3 non-metadata supporting file system. Implementing a Mac like FS wouldn't have been a problem.) GEM supported colour before Mac OS did too.

Windows was an entirely different type of GUI. Microsoft was playing with certain ideas and was fairly convinced its stodgy, business-oriented, customers were unhappy with mice and graphical UIs. The first two versions of Windows only used icons to represent minimized windows, for example.

The major problem back then wasn't that IBM PCs of the era weren't capable of running a Mac like OS, it was that Windows was actually more powerful than a Mac like OS but was stuck in 640k of RAM. Windows was multitasking and had already developed some sophisticated object oriented data sharing subsystems. To make matters worse, like GEM, it was built on top of DOS, requiring DOS be in memory when a more efficient set of libraries could have been implemented that supported a better underlying environment. So it was Windows, not Mac OS, that pre-1990 PCs had problems with.

But the decisions about the GUI itself didn't figure into that. The problems with the GUI had to do with conservatism on Microsoft's part, not a lack of resources. GEM proved a Mac like environment was very simple to implement in the PC environment. And remember: compared to early Macs, only the CPU speed was poorer. PCs had 640x200 colour (CGA), 640x350 colour (EGA, usually by default on 286s and better) and 720x384 monochrome (Hercules) screens, compared to 512x384 monochrome on the Mac, they generally shipped with 512-640k of RAM, rather than 128k-512k. Higher end versions came with hard disks, early Macs had to have any hard disks hooked up via the serial port and couldn't boot from them.

Finally, by 1990, PC manufacturers and owners were crying out for a decent operating system. DOS was stuck in 640k as was Windows 2. OS/2 1.1 was having difficulty making headway, being bloated (for the time) and not exactly elegant. Meanwhile PCs were shipping with 80286s, 386DXes and 386SXes, they could all support megabytes of RAM, VGA had taken over from CGA and EGA pretty much completely. In every sense, pretty much all the PCs generally on sale were technically as powerful as, or more powerful, than most of Apple's range. It ended up being Microsoft who stepped into the void with Windows 3.

[Mainyehc]

Finally, by 1990, PC manufacturers and owners were crying out for a decent operating system. DOS was stuck in 640k as was Windows 2. OS/2 1.1 was having difficulty making headway, being bloated (for the time) and not exactly elegant. Meanwhile PCs were shipping with 80286s, 386DXes and 386SXes, they could all support megabytes of RAM, VGA had taken over from CGA and EGA pretty much completely. In every sense, pretty much all the PCs generally on sale were technically as powerful as, or more powerful, than most of Apple's range. It ended up being Microsoft who stepped into the void with Windows 3.

I remember this particular time, as it was by then I started using PCs, back in 1992 (I was 7 years old :cool: ). Our first PC was a GoldStar with a ~40MHz (I'm not sure about its frequency) 386SX processor, a 40MB HDD, 1MB of RAM, 3.15'' floppy disk drive, 13/14'' screen and VGA graphics. It originally ran, as I recall, DOS something and Win3.0, and ended up running DOS 6 and Win3.11... Yep, it was a nice machine, but I do remember also being very impressed with a friend's Macintosh Colour Classic running System 6 or so, even with its teeny weeny 9'' screen... :p . I was, thus, the only person I knew of besides him that by 1995 realised that Win95 was a blatant ripoff of Apple's OS (and by the way, that fact alone was crucial in my decision of switching in 2003 when I got my iMac G4 - the advent of OS X and Apple's gorgeous hardware was just the icing on the cake. The OS really impressed me, but I could care less about the PowerPC architecture, even though the fact that it was somewhat "exotic" made me a little smug :D . Nowadays, I'm severely p*ssed about having spent €300, €150 and €60 on a 1GB RAM stick, an iSight and a MightyMouse to put my Rev.A iMac G5 as on par as possible with the new CoreDuo offerings :( . I'm commited to the platform, though, and I'm already looking forward to get a MB or MBP in the near future ;) ).

When I tell people about the history of Apple, I refer to those early to mid-nineties as the "Dark Ages", when Apple had a somewhat nice OS but overpriced hardware... On could only imagine what Apple's market share would look like today if they actually offered truly affordable hardware (then again, our first PC was by no means cheap :eek: ). Anyway, I'm impressed on how Apple managed to keep afloat all these years... Their gear is damn sweet and as competitively priced as it's never been, so if licensing wasn't necessary to Apple's survival (and even detrimental to it, as the failed licensing program leads us to believe) during those "Dark Ages", it'll certainly be pointless and useless now that Apple's going through this "Renaissance-like" period ;)

Just my €0,02 :cool:

[RacerX]

That's not really true...My understanding of the technologies of the period was that Motorola's 68000 processor (which was 24 bit) could access up to 16 MB of memory while Intel's 8088/8086/80286 were 16 bit which limited both memory and storage access.

At the time of the release of the original Macintosh, 128k was twice that of other PCs on the market (high end PCs were running at 64k in 1983/84). Even then 128k was far too small and Apple jumped to 512k right away.

To my knowledge there were no PCs (technically called microcomputers at the time, as PCs were generally home or small office systems) shipping with more than 128k of RAM that were under $5000. Any shipping with 512-640k would have been making the Lisa look like a bargain.

Add to that the fact that the operating system was too large for floppy disks back then forcing Apple to not only move to Sony's 3.5" floppy design (at 400k originally) but also making Apple put much of the operating system into ROM on hardware itself (64k).

And remember... these Macs were way over priced compared to other PC hardware on the market. I'm not saying that there wasn't higher end products back then... but they came with a higher end price tag too.

At about the same time that Intel released the 386, Motorola released the 68020 and 68030 series processors. Apple and SGI jumped on the 68020 right away while NeXT (still working out both hardware and software issues) would move forward with the 68030 about a year later. And when SGI finally made the move away from Motorola, they sure didn't head for Intel... they moved to MIPS processors (starting with the R2000/R2010 as I recall).

And even with the 386 on the market (and populating some systems) the rest of the hardware was limited because it was being force to run MS-DOS (Microsoft would first get called by the DoJ for forcing PC OEMs to only install MS-DOS on their hardware or face penalties and reprisals).

And yes at this point (the introduction of the 386) we started seeing IBM and Microsoft pushing OS/2 (I own OS/2 2.0, OS/2 Warp 3.0 and 4.0 as part of my OS collection) to take advantage of the new hardware.

Now, while NeXT was getting ready to pull out of hardware... NEXTSTEP was running on 68030 and 68040 based systems. But NEXTSTEP could never run on a 386 system, and was quite limited on a 486 system (and was still faster on a 68040 system than any PC). Was that just NeXT crippling the port? By the time they had released NEXTSTEP for 486 systems, they had already shut down their hardware plant. And NEXTSTEP ran great on Sun and HP processors... but wouldn't shine on PC hardware until the release of the first Pentium processors.

And on the subject of displays... Apple took a large leap forward with the Macintosh II by, frankly, not including built in video support. You could not only run a Mac II with 24 bit color, you could run it with up to six 24 bit color displays (this was 1987, Microsoft wouldn't support more than one display until the release of Windows 98). Even the Macintosh SE and SE/30 could work with multiple displays (internal and external).

NeXT took a different approach... they wanted true WYSIWYG, so they worked with Adobe to create Display Postscript. Infact, NeXT laser printers had no internal Postscript hardware, they used the operating system's display rendering engine to print as well.

Honestly, PCs were not up to the standards of other hardware until after the start of gaming.

As I recall, there was no PC game that could match Hellcats over the Pacific as a flight simulator (both in physics and AI) and even DOOM was developed on NeXT hardware and ported to DOS.

And as late as 1994, I knew of no one doing any real work (in the areas I was in) on PCs. I was doing mathematical research and we used NeXT, SGI, Sun and Apple systems (with a single PC for playing with an early version of Linux). Even my friends in the graphic design industry only used Macs (even though there was ports of Photoshop, Illustrator and PageMaker for PCs by then).

The first time PCs (as they were made by PC makers back then) started showing promise was around the time of the first Pentium release (though no one I knew would have touched one of those things thanks to that floating point hardware problem).

There were a lot of GUIs around... and screenshots sadly don't tell you the whole story. Seeing these things in action, that tells you the difference. I would happily pit any Macintosh or Macintosh Plus against any comparably prices PC of the same period using any OS available at the time.

No one would match (or surpass) the Mac GUI until the first NeXT computers (which were made by many of the same people who developed the first Macs), and those systems were using the same Motorola processors that Apple was using.


At any rate, that was my take on the hardware for those periods... and why a Mac OS couldn't have run on PCs of that time.

[peharri]

My understanding of the technologies of the period was that Motorola's 68000 processor (which was 24 bit) could access up to 16 MB of memory while Intel's 8088/8086/80286 were 16 bit which limited both memory and storage access.

The 80286 could address 16Mb of RAM using a flat addressing model too, which is one of the reasons why early versions of OS/2 worked fine on it. Windows 2 came in a version called Windows 286, also designed to use the extra memory.

At the time of the release of the original Macintosh, 128k was twice that of other PCs on the market (high end PCs were running at 64k in 1983/84). Even then 128k was far too small and Apple jumped to 512k right away.

The Macintosh was released in 1984. Very few, if any, PCs were shipping with only 64k at that time, the vast majority had around 128k-512k as standard. The only time PCs came with 64k was right at the beginning when the original cassette tape based IBM PC was on sale. The XT, the second version of the PC which replaced the former model, and was released in 1983, came with 128k as standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_XT). This was soon upgraded to 256k. The smallest capacity PC AT, released in 1984, came with 256k (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=185), with 512k also being available. Those, of course, were the official (over priced) IBM models. The Compaq portable, launched in 1983, came with 128k of RAM as standard.

To my knowledge there were no PCs (technically called microcomputers at the time, as PCs were generally home or small office systems) shipping with more than 128k of RAM that were under $5000. Any shipping with 512-640k would have been making the Lisa look like a bargain.

Nope! Hell, if we're including all microcomputers, rather than just PCs (IBM PC clones), then there's the Sinclair QL, launched in 1983 (albiet delayed till '84) which came with 128k of memory, for a whopping GBP399 (that was about $600 at the time); the Compaq portable, FWIW, started out around $3,600. Outside of cassette based computers, I think you'll have difficulty finding a single machine sold in 1984 that didn't have at least 128k of memory, if not far more.

And even with the 386 on the market (and populating some systems) the rest of the hardware was limited because it was being force to run MS-DOS (Microsoft would first get called by the DoJ for forcing PC OEMs to only install MS-DOS on their hardware or face penalties and reprisals).

Nah. The hardware wasn't limited by MSDOS, it was underutilized by MSDOS. Let's be clear about this: The IBM PC AT was capable of running Xenix, a bona-fide version of Unix. That's a machine launched in 1984. MSDOS sucked, but the machines that run it weren't poor performers, especially the 80286 based models. I'm not suggesting the 80286 was better than the 68000, which is one of my favorite processors, but it was more than adequate. (The amount of power we're looking at isn't that large - the Lisa had a 5MHz 68k and multitasked.)

Honestly, PCs were not up to the standards of other hardware until after the start of gaming.

Well, yes and no. You could get a more powerful computer than a PC for a lower cost throughout most of the eighties, but that wasn't the Mac. The Mac II was a little expensive. The Mac "Classic" (Mac 128k/512k/Plus) was ridiculously underpowered with an awful, cramped, display. Most PCs were specced better by 1985. In turn, the PC wasn't as powerful as, say, the Commodore Amiga, and it didn't give as much bang for your buck as, say, the Atari ST.

In the meantime though you could get a very powerful machine that, had Apple chosen to port the OS to it, would have ran "Mac OS 86" very well. As I said, GEM was pretty much it, the Mac interface, running on the 8086. Only the file system - limited by DOS, not by hardware - was inferior. It wasn't until System 7 (or, arguably, System 6 with Multifinder - but we're still looking at 1990 for that) that Mac OS overtook DR's alternative.

Think I'm kidding? Apple sued. DR and Apple settled out of court, with DR getting rid of the Finder-like shell and changing it to two fixed windows. GEM1 is considered superior to GEM2 for that reason, and it's GEM1 that appeared on the Atari ST. Apple clearly thought GEM was good enough to pose a significant threat.

As I recall, there was no PC game that could match Hellcats over the Pacific as a flight simulator (both in physics and AI) and even DOOM was developed on NeXT hardware and ported to DOS.

Never heard of HotP. NeXT hardware was frickin' expensive. Even so, Doom was early nineties, not late eighties, and it was the NeXT operating system more than the NeXT's hardware that made for a pleasant development environment. If it had been the hardware that required Doom be developed on NeXT boxes, then Doom wouldn't have been able to run on PCs!

And as late as 1994, I knew of no one doing any real work (in the areas I was in) on PCs. I was doing mathematical research and we used NeXT, SGI, Sun and Apple systems (with a single PC for playing with an early version of Linux). Even my friends in the graphic design industry only used Macs (even though there was ports of Photoshop, Illustrator and PageMaker for PCs by then).

The first time PCs (as they were made by PC makers back then) started showing promise was around the time of the first Pentium release (though no one I knew would have touched one of those things thanks to that floating point hardware problem).

By the early nineties, Apple had started the Star Trek project which, by all accounts, worked well. The reasons why Star Trek was aborted are reasonably well documented, and the hardware not being up to it isn't one of the reasons. In all honesty, the above is ignoring the issue here. I can tell you that most of your friends were using Macs for this, that, and the other, not because the hardware ruled, but because the operating system worked for them. And that's the subject under discussion. Whether Windows sucked in 1994 isn't really at issue.

Your original assertion was that IBM PC hardware wasn't capable of running good GUIs until some time around the release of Windows 95. That's just not true. When DR released GEM, it proved that IBM PCs could run GUIs that were better than Apple's, and Apple sued to stop them.

No one would match (or surpass) the Mac GUI until the first NeXT computers (which were made by many of the same people who developed the first Macs), and those systems were using the same Motorola processors that Apple was using.

GEM says otherwise.

(And personally, I prefered the Amiga UI to the Mac, GEM, NeXT, or Windows UIs, but YMMV)

[RacerX]

The 80286 could address 16Mb of RAM using a flat addressing model too, which is one of the reasons why early versions of OS/2 worked fine on it.OS/2 1.0 (as shipped) was a 16 bit OS.

Also, by the time the 286 was shipping, Motorola had the 68020 on its way. The 68020 was a 32 bit processor which (when System 7 was released and with the inclusion of a PMMU) had only the physical limits of the hardware to deal with... in the case of the Macintosh II, that was 68 MB. The other II series systems generally topped out at 128 MB, but those were using 68030 processors.

The Macintosh was released in 1984.But the Lisa was released in 1983.

Very few, if any, PCs were shipping with only 64k at that time, the vast majority had around 128k-512k as standard.Really?

At the time of the release of the original Macintosh IBM's PC Jr. was selling with 64k standard (for around $700) or with a 128K and floppy option (for around $1,300). IBM's Portable PC came with 256k (for around $4,200) The TRS-80 Model 200 was running about $1,000 for a system with only 24k of RAM (that maxed out at 72k). HP had a great little system that came with 272k (for $3,000). And the Apple IIc shipped with 128k (upgradable to 1 MB) around the same time.

In reality, the vast majority of systems in use around that time had 64k of RAM (or less). And only the higher end systems shipped with 128k or more.

You can't call a $3,000 plus PC standard back in 1984. The PC Jr. was the first to bring that type of memory pre-installed (as an option) to PCs in the last half of 1984.

You really can't argue this, it's history.

The only time PCs came with 64k was right at the beginning when the original cassette tape based IBM PC was on sale.My family had an IBM PC (ca 1983) which didn't come with cassette tapes but did have two floppy drives... and 64k of RAM. And my family had the money to spend on computers back then (that was my sophomore year in high school).

The XT, the second version of the PC which replaced the former model, and was released in 1983, came with 128k as standard. This was soon upgraded to 256k.... and sold for $5,000. :eek:

The smallest capacity PC AT, released in 1984, came with 256k, with 512k also being available. Those, of course, were the official (over priced) IBM models.What was the PC Jr.? Unofficial?

And the PC AT came out in the second half of 1984... at the same time as the Macintosh 512k. And it was running almost $6,000!

You can't call a $6,000 computer standard... and then later complain that NeXT hardware was frickin' expensive. The highest end PCs of 1984 are not the standard for PC configurations of the time. That would be like someone sighting Apple's highest end G5 as the standard configuration of Apple computers today.

Nope! Hell, if we're including all microcomputers, rather than just PCs (IBM PC clones), then there's the Sinclair QL, launched in 1983 (albiet delayed till '84) which came with 128k of memory, for a whopping GBP399 (that was about $600 at the time); the Compaq portable, FWIW, started out around $3,600. Outside of cassette based computers, I think you'll have difficulty finding a single machine sold in 1984 that didn't have at least 128k of memory, if not far more.It really wasn't that hard. :D

Nah. The hardware wasn't limited by MSDOS, it was underutilized by MSDOS. Let's be clear about this: The IBM PC AT was capable of running Xenix, a bona-fide version of Unix.16 bit Unix sold by Microsoft.

Besides, you didn't need high end equipment to run Unix... it was designed to run on the lowest end stuff and be scalable. And you could run A/UX on a Mac II in 1988 (http://www.aux-penelope.com/AUX_1.0.htm)... and A/UX was a bona-fide version of 32 bit Unix.

Well, yes and no. You could get a more powerful computer than a PC for a lower cost throughout most of the eighties, but that wasn't the Mac. The Mac II was a little expensive. The Mac "Classic" (Mac 128k/512k/Plus) was ridiculously underpowered with an awful, cramped, display.But the Mac SE (released shortly after the Mac II) had the ability to power very nice displays (I had professors using Mac SEs with full page external displays).

...It wasn't until System 7 (or, arguably, System 6 with Multifinder - but we're still looking at 1990 for that) that Mac OS overtook DR's alternative. System 6 came out in 1989... MultiFinder was introduced in 1988 with System 4.2.

Think I'm kidding? Apple sued...That really isn't saying much. It doesn't take much perceived infringement for Apple to take such actions.

Never heard of HotP.It's the foundations of Warbirds.

NeXT hardware was frickin' expensive.Not compared to those standard PCs you brought up earlier!

But lets take a look at the expensive pricing of NeXT systems compared to Apple systems of the same period...NeXTstation (68040 at 25 MHz, 8 MB of RAM, 105 MB hard drive, 2 bit (black & white) 17" display, Ethernet) $4,995.00
Macintosh IIsi (68030 at 20 MHz, 5 MB of RAM, 80 MB hard drive, 8 bit 12" display, LocalTalk) $5,097.00

NeXTstation Color (68040 at 25 MHz, 12 MB of RAM, 105 MB hard drive, 16 bit (color) 17" display, Ethernet) $7,995.00
Macintosh IIci (68030 at 20 MHz, 4 MB of RAM, 80 MB hard drive, 8 bit 13" display, LocalTalk) $7,897.00

NeXTcube (68040 with 25 MHz, 16 MB of RAM, 340 MB hard drive, 2 bit (black & white) 17" display, Ethernet) $11,495.00
Macintosh IIfx (68030 with 40 MHz, 4 MB of RAM, 160 MB hard drive, 8 bit 12" display, LocalTalk) $11,497.00

NeXTcube with NeXTdimension graphics board (68040 at 25 MHz, 24 MB of RAM, 340 MB hard drive, i860 DSP at 33 MHz, 32 bit (color) 17" display, Ethernet) $17,615.00
Macintosh IIfx (68030 at 40 MHz, 8 MB of RAM, 160 MB hard drive, 8 bit (color) 19" display, LocalTalk) $17,196.00

Even so, Doom was early nineties, not late eighties, and it was the NeXT operating system more than the NeXT's hardware that made for a pleasant development environment. If it had been the hardware that required Doom be developed on NeXT boxes, then Doom wouldn't have been able to run on PCs!Much of what you get in the DOS version of Doom was precanned... and if it wasn't the hardware, why didn't John Carmack use PCs running NEXTSTEP for their development systems? And why did they continue to use NeXT hardware right into the development of Quake?

By the early nineties, Apple had started the Star Trek project which, by all accounts, worked well. The reasons why Star Trek was aborted are reasonably well documented, and the hardware not being up to it isn't one of the reasons. In all honesty, the above is ignoring the issue here. I can tell you that most of your friends were using Macs for this, that, and the other, not because the hardware ruled, but because the operating system worked for them. And that's the subject under discussion. Whether Windows sucked in 1994 isn't really at issue.First... I originally said "The earliest that Apple could have licensed a version of the Mac OS to PC makers would have been some time after the release (and adoption) of the 486 (possibly the 386, but highly unlikely)."

Star Trek was done on a 486 based system.

Second, Star Trek was never stand alone. It would only run with the help of a hardware debugger system connected. In otherwords, it wasn't quite done when the plug was pulled on the project.

Your original assertion was that IBM PC hardware wasn't capable of running good GUIs until some time around the release of Windows 95. That's just not true.Funny... my assertion was that the 486 was the start of PC systems that could run a good GUI (Star Trek and NEXTSTEP are excellent examples) and that before that PC hardware wasn't up to the task.



:rolleyes: That was enjoyable. I love digging up this type of stuff!

If you address nothing else... please explain why you feel that the highest end systems of 1984 were required to support your claim that a vast majority had around 128k-512k. Then (as with today) the highest end systems made up a minority of systems in use and being bought at the time.

It just seems like an odd way to support your assertions.

[shamino]

The major problem back then wasn't that IBM PCs of the era weren't capable of running a Mac like OS, it was that Windows was actually more powerful than a Mac like OS but was stuck in 640k of RAM.
As someone who actually used Windows 1.0 and 2.11, I'll strongly disagree with that assertion. It wasn't until Windows 3.1 that it started gaianing the powerful features you're referring to.

And it was never stuck in 640K. 8088-based PCs had EMS-based memory cards for years. 286 and 386 systems could take more natively (286 boards routinely accepted at least 1M, 386 boards routinely accepted at least 8M.) DOS programs could use this memory using three different memory management schemes - "extended" memory, "expanded" memory or DPMI (DOS Protected Mode Interface.)
And remember: compared to early Macs, only the CPU speed was poorer. PCs had 640x200 colour (CGA), 640x350 colour (EGA, usually by default on 286s and better) and 720x384 monochrome (Hercules) screens, compared to 512x384 monochrome on the Mac
Not quite. CGA was 640x200 monochrome. Color was only available at 320x200, using one of two 4-color fixed palettes. EGA was 640x350 using a 16-color palette from a possible 64.)
... they generally shipped with 512-640k of RAM, rather than 128k-512k. Higher end versions came with hard disks, early Macs had to have any hard disks hooked up via the serial port and couldn't boot from them.
At the time the Mac-128 was shipping, 512K was not standard. At the time PCs started shipping with 512K, the Mac Plus was available, with a minimum of 1M RAM, expandable to 4M.

Yes, Apple didn't ship internal hard drives until the Mac II (1987). But the Drive port used for the ProFile and HD-20 drive was quite a bit faster than a serial port. And when the Mac Plus shipped (1986), SCSI was available - an interface far superior to anything used on PCs of the day.
Finally, by 1990, PC manufacturers and owners were crying out for a decent operating system. DOS was stuck in 640k as was Windows 2.
DOS was not at all stuck at 640K. There were three different standard mechanisms for using more memory. Software developers didn't like using them, but that is hardly "stuck".
OS/2 1.1 was having difficulty making headway, being bloated (for the time) and not exactly elegant.
OS/2 1.x's problem was an $800 pricetag, and limited compatibility with hardware. IBM OS/2 was only certified for use on IBM PS/2 hardware. Microsoft OS/2 was only certified for a small number of systems.

Those who actually used it and programmed code for it loved it. I was one such person.
Meanwhile PCs were shipping with 80286s, 386DXes and 386SXes, they could all support megabytes of RAM, VGA had taken over from CGA and EGA pretty much completely.
And by 1990, Apple was shipping 68030 systems with multiple megabytes of RAM and high resolution displays. Superior in most ways to comparable PCs.
In every sense, pretty much all the PCs generally on sale were technically as powerful as, or more powerful, than most of Apple's range. It ended up being Microsoft who stepped into the void with Windows 3.
"Every sense"? Hardly.

Apple definitely dropped the ball by resting on their laurels for many years, but that's hardly the same as your claim that no Mac had any feature superior to any PC.

[shamino]

My understanding of the technologies of the period was that Motorola's 68000 processor (which was 24 bit) could access up to 16 MB of memory while Intel's 8088/8086/80286 were 16 bit which limited both memory and storage access.
The 8088/186/286 were 16-bit chips, but they always had more than 16 bits of addressing. A 8088 had 20 bits - allowing up to 1M of directly-addressed memory. The 286 had 24 address lines, allowing up to 16M. The 386 had 32 lines - allowing up to 4G, although no 386 motherboard ever wired them all.
And yes at this point (the introduction of the 386) we started seeing IBM and Microsoft pushing OS/2 (I own OS/2 2.0, OS/2 Warp 3.0 and 4.0 as part of my OS collection) to take advantage of the new hardware.
OS/2 1.x was 286-based using the segmented memory model to allow support for up to 16M of RAM, and a much larger (theoretically, up to 4G) virtual address space.

OS/2 2.0 came out much later than the 386. It (like OS/2 1.x) began life as a joint IBM-Microsoft project. Microsoft decided to abandon it during 32-bit OS/2 development, focussing their attention on Windows NT 3.1 (which shipped years later.) When 2.0 finally shipped, it was an all IBM product, and was missing the level of device driver support that Microsoft's clout with hardware vendors could've brought to the table. This lack of driver support (combined with Microsoft actively working to kill OS/2) is what eventually did it in.

[shamino]

The 80286 could address 16Mb of RAM using a flat addressing model too...
It wasn't a flat model. It was segmented. Applications requested memory in terms of segments, which could be up to 64K each. Segments were swapped to disk. Programs had to deal with "near" memory pointers (offsets from a base specified in a segment register) and "far" pointers (where both segment and offset were specified.)

It wasn't until OS/2 2.0 (which required a 386) that a flat memory model was used. The 386 still supported segments, but each segment could be up to 4G, so system software would simply create one huge segment at startup and use the chip's paging mechanism to manage virtual memory instead.
which is one of the reasons why early versions of OS/2 worked fine on it. Windows 2 came in a version called Windows 286, also designed to use the extra memory.
Windows 2 had no such version. It used whatever DOS memory managers you instealled. Typiclly a third-party package like QEMM or (later on) the EMM386 driver shipped with DOS. Shortly prior to the release of Windows 3.0, there was a "Windows 386" that used the chip's virtual-86 mode to allow better multitasking of DOS apps, but Windows apps used the same memory model as before.

Windows 3.0 had three run modes to support the three memory models: real-mode (8088-comapatible), standard-mode (286-compatible) and enhanced-mode (386-compatible). Windows 3.1 dropped real mode and standard mode, requiring a 386 chip.

[RacerX]

OS/2 1.x's problem was an $800 pricetag, and limited compatibility with hardware.I wasn't aware that the first version cost that much (I also didn't know it could run on 286 based systems).

That price is about at the level of most Unix licenses... was OS/2 originally aimed at that market?

[shamino]

I wasn't aware that the first version cost that much (I also didn't know it could run on 286 based systems).

That price is about at the level of most Unix licenses... was OS/2 originally aimed at that market?
No, and that was the key problem. It was intended to be the successor to DOS for office computing.

It was never suitable to be a UNIX replacement - its entire design is strictly single-user, with the login facility only being used for accessing network resoruces.

I remember the cheering when 2.0 came out with an affordable price (and free upgrades from all prior releases, including 1.0.) It was something OS/2 developers had been begging IBM and Microsoft for from the very beginning.