[Info-vax] OT: About Digital and divisions

[Neil Rieck]

On Nov 23, 12:51 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Neil Rieck wrote:
> > You are correct (sort of). Woz was out (at Apple) because he was
> > pushed out of the way by Jobs after Woz crashed his plane then ended
> > up in hospital with amnesia. When Woz returned to Apple, he was pushed
> > back into the 8-bit division.
>
> According to the official bible, it wasnt quite like that. After his
> crash, Woz wanted out of the business alltogether. He had always stayed
> at Apple II because this is what he wanted and was against the closed
> architecture of the Mac. He wanted to work on a machine for geeks, while
> Jobs wanted a machine for the mass market.
>
> Remember that at the time, Jobs was already in trouble with his own
> company. The Macintosh happened because Jobs had been ousted from the
> Lisa group and told to go work in a corner, which he did. The Mac was
> not a successor to the Lisa, it was a competing project with both trying
> to implement what they had obtained from Xerox Parc.
>
> Woz did not want to be involved with all the infighting and did not
> believe in a closed machine which is what Jobs wanted.
>
> > In Steve Wu's book "The Master Switch" the author gives numerous
> > examples of where "open" always (eventually) beats out "closed". Hell,
> > Andy Hertzfield's original MacOS was custom and closed. It was so
> > locked down that it was almost impossible to get it to multi-task.
>
> That is definitely not true. I still have the "Inside Macintosh" manuals
> which fully documented the system calls to allow people to program.
> MacOS did not have multitasking. They did add a routine your app should
> call which would voluntarily relinquish control to the system so the
> system could pass control to someone else or update the clock on the
> menubar (aka do system related stuff).
>
> A few years alter, they improved the OS to allow multiple applications
> to run at same time, using that same call to allow the system to switch
> tasks. (the first implementation was MultiFinder, and this was later
> integrated into the Finder).
>
> The lack of true multi tasking was the result of the boring CEOS like
> Sculley and his successors who were unable to stick to one project to
> add pre-emptive multitasking and get it to completion.  Until Windows
> 95, MacOS wasn't too different from DOS/Windows in that respect. But by
> 1995, the lack of multi tasking started to really hurt Apple. But
> remember that Jobs left in 1985.
>
> > order to move forward, Apple had to (quietly) replace that paradigm
> > with a UNIX implementation. This was the software Jobs brought over
> > from NeXT. (IIRC)
>
> This wasn't quiet ! It was amazing ! Extraordinary ! the Best OS ever
> made on the best machines ever made etc etc.  It was quite public that
> Apple had failed under Sculley some other dude and d'Amelio to come up
> with a new OS and Apple got desperate and bought NeXT in order to use it
> as a basis for the renewed Mac OS.

I think we are talking past each other at this point.

First off, I never said that third party s/w development products were
not available for the Mac. I know because I owned a few of them. In
fact, I first learned how to program in "C" on a Mac using "Lightspeed
C". I first learned how to do 68K assembly programming using MacAsm.

 If I didn't say it clearly before then let me say it now "Apple/Jobs
no longer wanted other companies making making hardware" for the mac.
In the Apple ][ days it really was "Apple" and "the Apple compatible
industry" vending to the world and this is one reason why the product
was considered the Chevy of its time. With Macintosh, it was Apple
only. So Macintosh (1984) was closed while IBM-PC (1981) was open and
we can see which platform won out. BTW, part of the success of the PC
comes from companies like Compaq (who reverse engineered the IBM BIOS)
and AMD (who reverse engineered the x86 architecture to make an x86
work-alike), as well as all the other companies making all kinds of
compatible add-ons. So today we have a very closed Apple product line
vs. an ISA (industry standard architecture) PC which is very much
open. What does this mean today? Last December an old Apple buddy sent
me an email telling me that he just bought a new Core-i7 based iMac
for CA$2500. This was the same month that I bought a similar Windows-
based systems from Futureshop for CA$1195. (Mine was an HP with Core-
i7 CPU, 8 GB of memory, Windows-7 64-bit edition).

To bring my arguments back to the purpose we all hang out in this
newsgroup, new Alpha systems really dropped in price when DEC shifted
from mostly closed semi-open. DEC stopped building every subsystem
then shifted to building systems from COTS (commodity off the shelf)
components. Alpha backplanes started to appear with ISA, EISA, and PCI
slots. It is a hard thing to compare but I think I can make a good
case for Alpha systems being (on average) ten times cheaper than VAX
while also being ten being ten times more powerful than VAX. I can
only assume than Itanium has continued this trend.

Not sure what "bible" you are reading (perhaps it is the current book
from the "church of jobs" :-), but there are numerous books out there
(including Woz's most recent biography called "iWoz") claiming that
Woz went back to Apple after the accident and was treated like a
second class citizen relegated to the 8-bit division. The Mac was
going to be a Jobs-only-creation with no interference from the likes
of Wozniak. That is when Woz decided to leave Apple in order to return
to University (registered under the name Rocky Racoon) so he could
become a school teacher.

p.s. People forget that Apple made lots of money from 8-bit Apples
long after the Mac was introduced. Jobs hated this fact but it is a
prime example from companies who produce products which compete with
themselves. For more examples, see the book "In Search of Stupidity"

p.s. Speculation: if Woz had been allowed to return to any position of
prominence, then maybe the Lisa wouldn't have been so expensive while
also so slow (I heard of 2 minute boot-up times). Also, many people
have wondered if the first Woz-Mac might have been a machine with a
color display.

NSR