The CHRP dream that Jobs killed . . .

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

. . . this is what happens when two MAJOR LEAGUE companies, invest baucoups development capital in partnership with a MINOR LEAGUE company like Apple.

Jobs comes back from his utter failure at NEXt and launches Operation Barbarossa against the Clone makers, the PowerPC consortium and CHRP, like Hitl . . . erm . . . Napole . . . ummm . . . some tin pot dictator or other!

So out went the Apple based Clones AND the Common Hardware Reference Platform, then in came the iCandy! Jobs took full credit for the iMac that actually saved the company and was developed long before his invasi . . . erm . . . return . . . to Apple.

Note: this is NOT Steve Bashing OR Apple Bashing, it's egregious exaggeration in trying to make a point. PowerPC and CHRP had Apple back on the road into the mainstream. Whether this strategy would have been profitable for them in the long run is open to debate. CHRP may, or may not, have been successful in its bid to overthrow the WinTel Hegemony's enormous advantage. Steve Jobs return HAS been successful, but Apple remains a Minor League "Computer Company" with a tremendous cash cow in the iCandy divisions. Yet the WinTel Hegemony remains undefeated and Apple is now allied with Intel . . . go figure!

For informational use only . . .

. . . and IMHO, of course! )

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Jobs comes back from his utter failure at NEXt and launches Operation Barbarossa against the Clone makers, the PowerPC consortium and CHRP, like Hitl . . . erm . . . Napole . . . ummm . . . some tin pot dictator or other!
Note: this is NOT Steve Bashing OR Apple Bashing, it's egregious exaggeration in trying to make a point.

Uh, my first-quoted sentence seems to indicate it very much *IS* Steve bashing.

I agree with most of your diatribe in principle. Apple was foundering before Steve's return. Bleeding money, sinking fast, making MANY bad moves. The trick is that it really needed a VISION of where to go. That is what Steve brought when he came back. His vision was a return to the days of the original Macintosh. That is what he did. FIrst with the iMac, then with OS X, then the iPod, iPhone, etc.

I would love it if there were hardware competition. Potentially had hardware competition been real back in the clone days, there might have been a serious possibility of OS competition with Microsoft; and IBM/Mot may very well have been able to keep competition up with Intel. But, with Apple being the only real "desktop" use of the PowerPC platform, it just made financial sense for IBM/Mot to abandon the high-end.

But, it is also very possible that the clone market WAS killing Apple. That Apple didn't couldn't have survived the transition to a software company. In which case, the quoted article would have been a death-blow-dealing pipe dream.

 

[protocol7]

I was flicking through Apple Confidential and in the chapter on the clones there's this quote from Woz:

“The computer was never the problem. The company’s strategy was. Apple saw itself as a hardware company; in order to protect our hardware profits, we didn’t license our operating system. We had the most beautiful operating system, but to get it you had to buy our hardware at twice the price. That was a mistake. What we should have done was calculate an appropriate price to license the operating system. We were also naïve to think that the best technology would prevail. It often doesn’t.”

 

[Bunsen]

I think it's a bit of a stretch to call NeXT an "utter failure"

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I hoped my "over the top" exaggeration of the case would be taken in jest, as I've been chided for bashing Steve Jobs and the new Apple much too often.

Thanks for the Woz quote, I've never run across his commentary on the issue.

I was hoping for a "what if" discussion about the acceptance of the Mac OS in the business world. Remember, Motorola, IBM and Apple had never had any great success in that largest of micro markets. All I've ever read here was of the "Doom & Gloom" for Apple mindset regarding CHRP and the Clones, an alternate history discussion, considering an Apple success, might prove interesting.

IBM hardware was in the same boat as the Mac, the "PC Compatibles" were running Windows 95, when it actually worked, in all but the most entrenched IBM IT enclaves. IBM never made a nickel off the unlicensed "Clones" of their hardware spec, having made the same mistake Xerox did regarding the output of the geniuses working at the PARC. IBM had a "Big and Mini Iron" mindset, considering the Micro Market to be trivial, just as the "Copier Heads" at Xerox had.

Hopefully, I'll run across the article about the first wire wrap prototypes and the decision making processes that led to such issues as the memory space limitation workarounds.

The short lived NeXT never became a major competitor in the Unix Workstation market. NeXT died in time for their elegant hardware designs to become collectible, long before the bottom fell out of that market. Sun workstations were dumpstered in huge quantities, becoming semi-collectibles in their own right.

So: what if CHRP was a major success for Apple, rendering the second coming of Steve Jobs unnecessary? :?:

 

[protocol7]

Apple was never going to beat the WinTel hegemony in the corporate sector as long as it continued it's closed approach. Corporations want things their way, not the Steve way which is why Microsoft have that area sewn up. They know how to do business.

It's hard to know whether the clones would have made any real impact if they'd be left alone. They still relied on Apple for the OS and the PowerPC chip was never as fast as Apple tried to market it as. The move to Intel was inevitable and probably should have happened a lot sooner (like when they were developing Rhapsody). Computer Chronicles have an episode that covers not just the clones but Copland too. Well worth a look. Certainly Apple were in a crisis at that time. The clones were building better machines for less money because they weren't tied to using proprietary components. Another case of the closed ecosystem coming back to bite you on the ass.

NeXT pretty much was a failure. It never made a profit and while the hardware looked funky and the OS was way ahead of it's time, it never caught on the way it was predicted to.

 

[Unknown_K]

Very little was ported to NEXT, it was a 68K machine with no software competing with the mac/pc that had everything.

The clone market was a stupid mistake, you have a hardware company giving away its designs so clone makers can undercut Apples sales. Most clones were just reference Apple designs, imagine not having to do R&D or even design an OS yet having a good produc to sell.

 

[LC_575]

That HP has to be the closest the classic Mac OS has come on running on a standards-compliant IBM PC Compatible. No ADB? No auto-detect floppy drive (note eject button in photo)? Makes me wonder how they'd get the Mac OS to work with floppies.

Still, if CHRP had taken off, consumers would have been able to choose between PowerPC and x86 like they currently choose between Intel and AMD. Mighty interesting how that would have turned out.

 

[LCGuy]

Makes me wonder how they'd get the Mac OS to work with floppies.

I assume it would probably be the same as how USB floppy drives work on Mac OS 8.5 - 9.2.2 - dragging a disk to the trash brings up a dialog box asking you to press the eject button on the drive.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Here"s another CHRP tearsheet I found while looking through the files for SE30/IIsi VidCard info for beachycove.

 

[protocol7]

An old Tempo build finally "leaked" out recently in a flood of developer CDs. Included in it was a curiously-named enabler called DNA. Upon further inspection it appears to be (at least partially) a CHRP enabler. ScorchedEarth discovered this so I dug around it and took a pic of it open in Resorcerer:

There's also references to PC UART Serial Ports, COM1, COM2 etc.

 

[yuhong]

I assume it would probably be the same as how USB floppy drives work on Mac OS 8.5 - 9.2.2 - dragging a disk to the trash brings up a dialog box asking you to press the eject button on the drive.

Even before CHRP, there was the LPX-40 that supported PC floppies. I know because I read the developer note.