
The Jonathan Computer (2015) - erickhill
http://www.storiesofapple.net/the-jonathan-computer.html
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sblank
The Jonathan concept of modular slices was a copy of the Convergent
Technologies NGEN family of computers. frogdesign sold Apple the same
packaging they had done two years earlier for Convergent. See the product
family here: [http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-
stuttgart.de/pdf/convergent/...](http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-
stuttgart.de/pdf/convergent/ngen/brochures/)

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benj111
The concept isn't far removed from the S-100 [1]bus as seen in the Altair
8800, and you could probably find numerous other examples, weren't early IBM
mainframes made up of standardised cards with a few nand gates on each?

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus)

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Someone
Yes, early IBM _CPUs_ were made of standardized cards
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Solid_Logic_Technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Solid_Logic_Technology).
It references
[http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/logic/SY22-2798-2_LogicBloc...](http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/logic/SY22-2798-2_LogicBlocks_AutomatedLogicDiagrams_SLT,SLD,ASLT,MST_TO_Oct71.pdf)
which has lots of detail)

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rbanffy
> Jonathan could look not only strikingly different but also more impressive
> as its performance increased.

I remember myself in the mid 90's joking about the internal expansion of PCs
versus the multiple boxes around our Sun pizza-box workstations: the emotional
return on investing on Sun hardware was greater because you could actually see
the more disk space you had. Or, when we got to the Enterprise 4500's, you
could even see the extra CPU and memory boards.

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GlenTheMachine
Huh. Design-wise that thing looks a lot like a NeXT machine.

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GuiA
Well, it was designed by Hartmut Esslinger of Frog Design, who would design
the NeXT cube a few years later.

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goldenkey
Looks really nice. It would be interesting to see the alternate timeline where
Apple became an icon of the more boxy, greyscale, functional design.

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ggm
I think the reverse-stealing trojan horse fear was real: I think the amount of
"yea lets be more mac-like" would have drowned under the "but I can play more
games" emerging force of DOS. DOS gave birth to something compelling for home
use, mac was better, but not enough to attract the moment of change in young
minds. I wanted neither of them but the CP/M upshift to a UNIX world was not
going to happen (for a long, long time)

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kwccoin
Seems a winning design. You can do both. And wining or not depends upon
application and I do not think desktop publishing would use DOS.

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slfnflctd
The comment by the Product Development guy that they would have to "sell two
or three Jonathans to equal the profit of a single Mac" came across as super
myopic to me. This is one of those situations where you _can_ make it up on
volume, and accomplish a whole lot of greater goals along the way.

Amazon's explosive growth in cloud services, Linus' recent comments about how
x86 has an advantage over ARM because developers want the server to optimally
mirror the desktop environment, and the increasing need for datacenter-like
hub functionality at the edge all suggest to me that this was possibly Apple's
biggest missed chance to get a foothold on the server side.

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milleramp
Similar idea to VMEbus, perhaps VME was influenced by the Jonathan computer.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMEbus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMEbus)

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wmf
You have the dates backwards; VME was 4-5 years earlier and AFAIK there were
various backplane systems for years before VME.

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mrguyorama
I'm not convinced they could have made it cheap enough for the average home
user in the 80s. Apple at the time was not gaining home market share because
their computers were very expensive

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bluedino
One system to do it all usually ends up with a bunch of sub-optimal solutions
combined into one.

