'displaced said:
Good track record or not, they lost a large percenage of their market share during each one of these transitions.
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Mac OS X Intel Build 8F1111
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Good track record or not, they lost a large percenage of their market share during each one of these transitions.
person quoted was from Intel, not MS...
USB suffered from the classic technological "chicken and egg" problem:
As usual, both issues had to be addressed:
- first, start building USB ports into PCs (even though they'd be rather useless for the first year or so)
- then, when OS support for USB is released, there will be a large "installed base" of USB capable systems, and a market for USB peripherals
I wonder if the single most important contribution that Apple made to USB was the decision to not put a floppy drive in the iMac. That omission triggered the first mass-market demand for USB peripherals....
Being from MS doesn't make it not true, though!jholzner said:Right, and not flaky at all to refer to a Microsoft press release for proof that Apple didn't do squat
USB suffered from the classic technological "chicken and egg" problem:
- No PCs had USB ports
- Windows95 didn't support USB
As usual, both issues had to be addressed:
- first, start building USB ports into PCs (even though they'd be rather useless for the first year or so)
- then, when OS support for USB is released, there will be a large "installed base" of USB capable systems, and a market for USB peripherals
I wonder if the single most important contribution that Apple made to USB was the decision to not put a floppy drive in the iMac. That omission triggered the first mass-market demand for USB peripherals....
AidenShaw said:
That may have been part of it but I think the bigger deal was that USB were the ONLY ports on there. Where as windows still included legacy ports plus USB Apple went USB only which may have lit a fire under some developers A**s
aegisdesign said:
while it still may be slower if not optimized heavily, i'm guessing that apple will have most of their apps intel ready right away (universal binaries)... for the pro apps it may not happen til the pro machines switch, as soon or late as that happens.
Thomas Harte said:
Adobe applications are written with their own UI libraries and with CodeWarrior. They've just finished creating an Intel native UI library. They've got 100's of thousands of lines of codewarrior code that quite possibly hasn't been touched since OS 7.
Microsoft have their own frameworks also including their own font rendering and page layout frameworks. IIRC at one point the Word engine ran as a kind of virtual machine running it's own almost Intel like bytecode - partly why it was so slow on the Mac.
shamino said:
I was using an Epson printer with WIN95B so I think you're wrong. It was beige too, not Bondi Blue. WIN95B would occasionally forget the printer was there though and you'd have to reboot so it was pretty terrible. That printer also had a serial port for a Mac and a Parallel port. Very useful as you could attach a computer to each of the ports.
That was the only USB peripheral I had though. USB ZIP drives were just stupid with USB 1.x. I had a SCSI ZIP. Even my camera back then was a normal serial port. Thankfully it was only 300K pixels or something like that though.
All,
The rumour that Altivec is now supported in Rosetta in the latest build is likely a hoax, if you've been keeping up on the hacking community's efforts to leak and break the latest release, you'll know that one of the more reputable ones has saw no sign of the mythical 8F1111A.
8F1111 on the other hand was just cracked yesterday.
The rumour that Altivec is now supported in Rosetta in the latest build is likely a hoax, if you've been keeping up on the hacking community's efforts to leak and break the latest release, you'll know that one of the more reputable ones has saw no sign of the mythical 8F1111A.
8F1111 on the other hand was just cracked yesterday.
I think that we agree
It had no floppy, so a USB floppy was a big opportunity for the first company to get a suitable one to market.
I agree - but since the iMac came with a keyboard and mouse there was no sudden market for USB keyboards and mouses.jholzner said:
It had no floppy, so a USB floppy was a big opportunity for the first company to get a suitable one to market.
aegisdesign said:
Thanks for the info--but to be clear, I never claimed that Apple introduced USB, nor did I downplay the importance of USB peripheral market. People may be reading something extra into my comments. I only said, quite rightly, that "Apple (with the iMac) was one of the first, if not THE first, PC makers to widely adopt USB." Define that how you wish, but the point is valid: Apple was a USB early adopter, not a USB foot-dragger--even if other companies also had the ports installed but didn't push to make them useful.
In any case, I was simply defending (also rightly) the absence of USB ports on the first PowerMacs. They DID come out before USB, so it shouldn't be held against them
(or used as a reason to avoid the first Intel Macs.)The first PowerMac came out in 1994. The USB 1.0 FDR standard came out in late 1995, and USB 1.1 (as used in the iMac) was out in 1998.
PS, I just learned some other trivia from Wikipedia: Apparently PowerPC stands for Power Performance Computing. Live and learn!
aegisdesign said:
http://www.barefeats.com/pb167.html
Ahh OK. Gah. I actually know what double data rate is....brain fart this morning. What I would like to see is some Xbench results. Wonder if the folks at the Apple store would let me run them.
Yes, and those conundrums typically go on for years without resolution. When was the last time any PC owner used his IrDA port? PC laptops have come bundled with them and Windows has supported them since Win95.AidenShaw said:
The big thing that pushed USB into the mainstream was Apple's decision to trash all the legacy ports (ADB, serial, SCSI and floppy) when there were very few USB devices in existance. This was a very risky decision that no PC maker would have ever considered, but it was also necessary to jump-start that market. It forced enough users (all those new iMac customers) into buying enough USB peripherals so that they could be profitable, starting the snowball effect leading to what we have now.
Had Apple not done this, we would all be using our legacy ports, and USB would remain a limited-use curiosity (much like FireWire is for PC users today). PC users would have continued with parallel-port devices and Mac users would have continued with SCSI devices.
That's what I heard as well.opq said:
Something to do with the fact that Classic requires special kernel extensions to run, and Rosetta doesn't do kernel extensions.
If this is the case, however, then it may be possible for Apple to port those kernel extensions into native x86 code to make the whole shebang work. But I don't think they're going to. The demand for Classic is much less today than it was when OS X first came out. By the time the last PPC Mac is discontinued, the demand for it will likely be too small to make the effort worthwhile.
I suspect we'll find third-party solutions for this problem. Some kind of virtual machine system that emulates a PPC Mac and can run OS 9. It might even be able to leverage Rosetta for the CPU emulation. But this is all speculation on my part. We'll see what happens when it happens.
Altivec
Altivec suport in the OS but not on the CPU. Yeah that is wonderfull. So if the OS suports 64bit, but the CPU is only 32bit it is the same thing.
Maybe they should have the system say that the CPU is 55core 8Ghz and that would make the computer make faster??
Altivec suport in the OS but not on the CPU. Yeah that is wonderfull. So if the OS suports 64bit, but the CPU is only 32bit it is the same thing.
Maybe they should have the system say that the CPU is 55core 8Ghz and that would make the computer make faster??
aegisdesign said:
Nitpick-- System 7. Apple officially called it "OS 8" with, well, OS 8. But before that, you had System Software packages, and before that, System and Finder versions that were different but sold in the same package.
aegisdesign said:
Third-party drivers for USB are found for Windows 95. So you could well have used USB under Windows 95, but the support, well, sucked. Same with 98-- the USB support was dismal, at best.
shamino said:
Something like PearPC? Linkety
It has AltiVec support, too! But it isn't exactly the most stable of all things... however it is good software, and is becoming slowly better.
a difference of opinion here...
Certainly, Apple had an effect on the USB market in late 1998/early 1999. No question. In the long run, however, that was just a blip due to a few systems sold by a struggling 2nd tier vendor.
Think back to the Intel quote in the MS press release - "a flood of devices coming to market". That was happening with or without Apple.... Intel was pushing USB - pushing into motherboards even when there weren't any peripherals to connect. Win98 and Win2K were coming with good USB support, with or without Apple.
Market forces (e.g. digital cameras, webcams, phones, PDAs, music players, GPS receivers...) would have pushed USB to where it is today even Apple had crashed and burned completely.
I actually think the opposite - without the iMac I believe that the USB situation today would be roughly what it is now.shamino said:
Certainly, Apple had an effect on the USB market in late 1998/early 1999. No question. In the long run, however, that was just a blip due to a few systems sold by a struggling 2nd tier vendor.
Think back to the Intel quote in the MS press release - "a flood of devices coming to market". That was happening with or without Apple.... Intel was pushing USB - pushing into motherboards even when there weren't any peripherals to connect. Win98 and Win2K were coming with good USB support, with or without Apple.
Market forces (e.g. digital cameras, webcams, phones, PDAs, music players, GPS receivers...) would have pushed USB to where it is today even Apple had crashed and burned completely.
I agree
I too had not yet purchased a Mac at that point and did NOT see many PC's with USB, even in 1999 when I bought my first Mac. Just like Firewire. Until about 3-4 years ago, it was nearly impossible to find a mainstream or low end PC with Firewire. All macs had them though. Without USB 2, what would PC users do?
jholzner said:
I too had not yet purchased a Mac at that point and did NOT see many PC's with USB, even in 1999 when I bought my first Mac. Just like Firewire. Until about 3-4 years ago, it was nearly impossible to find a mainstream or low end PC with Firewire. All macs had them though. Without USB 2, what would PC users do?
Windows 95B, whilst claiming to have USB support, contained beta drivers and did not support much USB hardware. The majority of USB hardware that worked under windows 98 did not work for windows 95, due to the poor usb support under win95b. Very little usb devices were compatible.
shamino said:
Hahahahahhahaha
GPS??? You mean the fact that only a couple of GPS receivers (if any) had USB support before 2004??? Many of them are STILL serial only.
AidenShaw said:
GPS??? You mean the fact that only a couple of GPS receivers (if any) had USB support before 2004??? Many of them are STILL serial only.
Not sure if it's been posted but build 8F1111 is already publicly available as well as the fact that it has already been cracked for regular computers.
It just has minor improvements, but there is no Altivec in ROsetta as far as I can see.
It just has minor improvements, but there is no Altivec in ROsetta as far as I can see.
Actually, that's just the list of gizmos that I connected to my laptop on my last business trip - it wasn't meant to be exhaustive or chronological, nor to imply that all of those devices were around in 1999.fluidinclusion said:
My traveling GPS is the Pharos iGPS360 (http://www.pharosgps.com/products/laptopdesktoppc/Misc/PK063.htm) with USB cable for the laptop, plus a Pharos PXT09 bluetooth dock so that my Windows phone and iPaq can be used as moving-map GPS systems. (I also have an older Garmin all-in-one, which is serial.)
nagromme said:
With the exception of the Quake3 engine, most games have basic or no SMP support. A fast single core is going to be better for the vast majority of games.
Case in point: My copy of Snowball Run runs faster and more stably on my single 1.33GHz iBook than on my dual 1GHz PowerMac.BenRoethig said:
Which means that there isn't very much multithreading going on, and their multithreading is making unwarranted assumptions about the computing environment. (With dual processors, two threads really do execute simultaneously, which can create bugs in software that assumes otherwise.)
I've seen similar things from many games.
DeathChill said:Not sure if it's been posted but build 8F1111 is already publicly available as well as the fact that it has already been cracked for regular computers.
It just has minor improvements, but there is no Altivec in ROsetta as far as I can see.
Damn is it posible, I say it again
People the Altivec is a Hardware feature. HARDWARE. And not a SINGEL X86 CPUare having it now, and I dont think any x86 cpu will have it EVER. Now there is in the X86 world something more or less the same but much weaker. that is called SSE. Now the ONLY thing rosetta can do is to make shure that what was before a Altivec code on a PPC with altivec suport is on a X86 a SSE code.
You can not do anything more then that. It is imposible, unless the X86 CPU have altivec suport.
And I am not shure that the Altivec code can be translated into SSE in any way, but if it can be done it is the best Rosetta can do.