yankeefan24 said:
a) pwermac/powerbook came before powerpc was in them.
b)powerpc was around during the naming of power
, a coincidence, or was this in apple's mind when they named them.
Was apple thinking, we'll call them this, and then in a few years when we switch to ppc, we have a name, but then when we switch to intel in x years, we will have to rename it. Or, were they thinking that because they came up with power
before they used ppc, when they switched to intel, they could have an excuse to use power if they wanted to. I WANT THE TRUTH.
Here's roughly how it worked:
IBM started a project in the mid-seventies that resulted in a CPU called the 801. This was the birth of a new computer design called "RISC", based upon the idea of stripping down the number of instructions in a CPU to a minimum and then using all the saved silicon to optimize for speed. In theory, this would result in a faster CPU, but there was scepticism from mainstream computer users who were used to CPUs that "saved time" by combining a lot of functionality into additional instructions.
This project begat IBM's
America project. This was to turn the theory of the 801 (not to mention everything else IBM had learnt) into a working CPU platform intended for use, well, in the end, practically everywhere.
This project didn't want to use
America or some number as the product name for the final CPU architecture, so they took on the name "POWER", because it was highly popular in the mid-eighties (if created today, it would probably be called the EXTREME.)
Now, entirely separately, Apple (who hadn't heard of the POWER architecture, let alone developed plans to use it) created a laptop in the late eighties that sucked. This was after many attempts by third parties to do much the same thing without Apple's help (they'd literally buy old Macs, rip out the guts, and put them in luggable cases. It was horrible. Apple didn't see the market until these companies practically forced them to.) After many false starts, Apple eventually went to Sony, who designed an entirely new range of extremely attractive and usable laptops for Apple to sell. In the early nineties, they sold them. Apple decided to make them stand out from their previous attempts, and even from the Mac to an extent, given the Mac was
not doing well in business (where it was largely seen as a toy) and that the new laptop might conceivably sell into the business market despite that. So they called it... the PowerBook. Power, again, for the same reason as IBM - it was a strong marketing word at the time.
Now, yet again entirely separately, Microsoft purchases a slideshow app from someone, adds it to Office, and is stuck for a name. Calling it "Some kind of graphics program, er, yeah" wasn't really an option. Pretty much anything descriptive looked wimpy. Also "Presentation Manager" was already taken, and worse still, refered to the Finder equivalent in OS/2. So they took the word "Power", and prepended it to a word describing something you would do, or make, during a presentation. Power...point. Powerpoint. Yeah.
Looks stupid today, but in the early nineties, that was considered the ultimate in marketing.
So, going back to IBM and Apple. After Apple starts selling its laptops, Apple and Motorola decide, for reasons I still don't understand, that the 68000 series of CPUs isn't going anywhere. After some long drawn out internal politics, IBM enters the frame, and the three manufacturers decide to turn IBM's POWER architecture into a CPU for PCs (Personal Computers, not IBM PCs) The new chip architecture is named after the general CPU architecture, being called PowerPCs.
Apple now has an opportunity to launch an entirely new range of computers, based upon the PowerPC. It calles them the Power Macintosh. History does not tell us if:
1. The Power Macintosh was named after the PowerPCs (this is what most people think, but it's never clearly stated anywhere.)
2. The Power Macintosh was named after the successful PowerBooks. (ie had Apple continued to use the 68k for high-end Macs, they'd have launched three-box Macs under the Power Macintosh label anyway.)
So far as I can tell, the Power Mac (as opposed to Power Macintosh) name wasn't used officially until the return of Jobs, which again suggests Power Mac is a brand that has little to do with the CPU. My Beige G3 has "Power Macintosh G3" on the nameplate on the front.
From this though, you can deduce:
1. "Power" is a marketing term that, at least for the most part, has been put in all these product names to denote, erm, power. As in "generates a lot of force."
2. The PowerPC was designed for the Power Macintosh.
3. The PowerPC was named after the POWER architecture, which predates the Power Macintosh.
4. Apple was using the Power prefix before the PowerPC, but had no actual product called the Power Macintosh or Power Mac. The Power Mac may have been named after the PowerPC, or may have been named after the PowerBook. But the PowerPC certainly wasn't named after any of Apple's computers.
Timeline:
First IBM POWER CPU: 1990 - RS/6000
First Apple "Power" product: October 1991 - PowerBooks 100/140/170. 68000 based.
AIM alliance: Also 1991 (date uncertain)
First "Power Macintosh": 1994 - Power Macintosh 6100.
