The Lisa was a good machine, but there was one big problem. Motorola had come out with the M68000, but not the MMU for it. 680x0 MMUs were years late, and the first one was terrible. The Lisa had a real OS, and needed an MMU. That had to be built out of smaller parts, which increased the cost enormously.
There was also a major bug in the M68000 - instruction backout didn't work. That was fixed in the 68010. But on the 68000, a page fault was not handled properly if a register had incrementation set. So the Lisa compiler had to be dumbed down to not use that feature, slowing down execution somewhat.
If Motorola had fixed those problems sooner, the history of personal computing might have been very different. Intel's x86 machines, with their 16 bit address spaces, might have gone nowhere on the desktop.
Hence the cost-reduced Macintosh - no MMU, no memory protection, no CPU dispatcher. Also no hard drive. The original 128K Mac was a flop commercially. Not until memory cost came down and Apple got a hard drive into the product did it sell successfully. The IBM PC had a hard drive earlier, which got them going in business use. The floppy-only Macs were incredibly slow.
Certainly in the UK (special case?), that's not the case . We certainly had Apple ][s at school and 6th form in the UK as the main machines - later replaced by BBC model Bs and back then there were summer camps doing computing for enthusiastic youngsters. Apple was again the computer of choice in the early days, to be replaced later by the ZX Spectrum.
Really? Throughout the 80s, it was all Sinclairs, Commodores and Amstrads (certainly in the home) and even before the ZX Spectrum was the ZX81 which at £100 (or thereabouts) was the first home computer of choice for many, many people. I knew a number of people with CBM VIC-20s, a handful of people with Acorn Electrons.
Of course these were after the Apple 2 so maybe you're correct but I don't think even I saw my first Apple computer until 1989, and that wasn't even in the UK (I emigrated to the US for a short while that year).
My secondary school had a bunch of Research Machines, until they were replaced by BBC micros.
My UK knowledge from those days was thanks to Crash, Your Sinclair, BBC Micro, Input Magazine and Computer Shopper, so I might be bit biased in regards to any sort of Apple's widespread adoption.
Not sure I agree. Just my anecdotal data of course, but I don't remember seeing an Apple II in UK schools in the 80s, but definitely BBC Micro/Master and a few Archimedes later. This was in 2-3 North West state schools, so there might have been regional differences.
Edit - oh yes, and about the ZX Spectrum... I can't imagine anyone willingly changing from something else to that rubber keyboard! Yuck.
> oh yes, and about the ZX Spectrum... I can't imagine anyone willingly changing from something else to that rubber keyboard! Yuck.
The ZX Spectrum had tons of games (many of them quite creative, many weird), all kinds of software (limitied, of course, but even a Lisp) and several magazines dedicated to it. Many of my friends owned one, so it was much more fun than owning a more obscure computer, no matter how much better its keyboard was. Remember, there was no internet.
I still have nostalgic conversations with friends from that time about how magic the ZX Spectrum world was.
Likewise here too. In fact all through the 80s and 90s I only knew one place that owned an Apple computer. Everyone else was running BBC / Acorn, Sinclair, Amstrad, Commodore 64, Atari, Amiga, Dragon, and, much later, IBM-compatible PCs.
The 380Z was the overall 'king of the hill' pre-BBC, yes, some schools had Apple II's, some even IIe's but everywhere had at least one 380Z.
Had the 'PC' not won, I suspect some of the dos compatibles that the UK produced would have been more popular - specifically, Apricots were doing fairly well with the F1 and XEN in the 83-87 era where the PC hadn't quite dominated yet.
Of course this is always going to be anecdotal, but I never saw them in the north-east in the 80s either. The predecessor to the BBC Micro that I remember was the RML 380Z. I was messing with computers at school and elsewhere throughout the 80s, and to this day I've never actually seen a working Apple II.
I do remember reading about the Lisa and thinking it looked amazing.
Again anecdotal, but my experience was that state schools had BBC Micros but private schools and many technology-focused colleges had AppleIIs. Apples were very expensive. I remember helping out at a technology college night class where people were being taught Logo programming (and later Pascal). It was the first time I'd seen more than one ApppleII in a room at a time (this class had a doze or so, two people to machine).
I could have typed that better for sure. I had meant to say that Apples were not common anywhere in the UK but the places I had seen some were in tech colleges and private schools which it seems would fit with your experience too.
Hmmm, this would have been before the BBC launch. This was a North London comp which received its first computer, an Apple II the month I finished my GCEs, so that would have been summer 81. When I went to a separate 6th Form college they also had Apple IIs with BBC Bs following soon after.
The BBC Micro didn't really get into mass production until 1982.
Our school had an Apple II in 1982 but they were quite expensive, so people mostly got Sinclair machines or Commodore 64s for home use. When I went to 6th form they had a few BBCs and an old Commodore PET. I don't the Apple IIs were common, but they were certainly around.
>Apple wasn't visible at all in Europe during those days, Atari, Amiga and IBM PC ruled this side of the Atlantic.
If you mean early eighties, yes. If you mean the whole of eighties, I'd say no. I remember lots of businesses with Macs in the late eighties/early nineties, especially for print businesses.
The first time I saw anyone using a Mac live, actually an LC, instead of having to drive down to Lisbon or Porto to the see the only importer in the contry was in 1994.
Around here print business were using Amigas and Ataris.
The way it's achieved may not matter much with a 4 GHz multi-core CPU running a multitasking OS, but having to deal with 16-bit pointers and segmented memory in a 4.77 MHz 8086/8 was a huge pain I felt in the flesh.
You would also need to update the compiler to use the MMU and backout instructions properly, and re-compile all the software to use it. It would also probably require some modifications to the OS and application code as well to get much advantage.
The 68000 and 68010 were 32bit CPUs, released in 1979 and 1982 respectively. Intel didn't have a 32bit x86 CPU until 1985 when it released the 386.
At the time though, the 68K was regarded as the best general purpose CPU you could get and was sort of a "default choice" for building any reasonably high performance systems. Unix workstation manufacturers like Sun and SGI originally built their systems on the M68K platforms before their respective RISC architectures developed and matured.
With that said, it's totally reasonable to make the hindsight argument that Apple should have developed the IIgs line further, with its 16-bit 65C816, and then reevaluated the CPU landscape in the mid 1980s, where you had more mature 68K chips, 32bit x86 CPUs, and a plethora of RISC options. In that world, I could very easily see the Macintosh make its debute on a RISC or 386/486 platform.
Speaking of the IIgs: It's rumored that Steve Jobs requested they downclock the CPU (it only ran at 2.8mhz) to prevent it from seeming faster than the Macintosh.
I worked on a IIgs at the very beginning of my career, porting a word processor that had originally been developed for the Amiga and subsequently ported to DOS and Mac. Having worked on the Mac previously, I was a bit surprised that the IIgs OS was actually more advanced in some ways. Color, for one, but hierarchical menus are another one that stick in my mind. It was slow and weird, but the IIgs was a remarkably modern update to the already-venerable Apple II series.
Because the 8088/8086/80286 had their own bugs, and 68K was a better architecture than x86. No segmentation, orthogonal registers and instruction sets, etc. This superiority probably peaked around the 68020, which started losing out to the 80386 the next year, and after that Motorola never quite recovered. The Pentium, which I imagine most here think of as a starting point, was really more of an endpoint in a complex battle between Intel, Motorola, NatSemi, and a whole bunch of RISC alternatives.
Well, yeah, but if you're buying a 32 bit CPU with weird bugs then why bother.
At this point, I'm thinking the x86 memory segmentation sucked less than a 32 bit CPU with no MMU and bugs requiring the compiler to pull the parking brake
I am familiar with how bad it was on the x86 world, but then maybe that explains why Mac OS before X was so bad
There was also a major bug in the M68000 - instruction backout didn't work. That was fixed in the 68010. But on the 68000, a page fault was not handled properly if a register had incrementation set. So the Lisa compiler had to be dumbed down to not use that feature, slowing down execution somewhat.
If Motorola had fixed those problems sooner, the history of personal computing might have been very different. Intel's x86 machines, with their 16 bit address spaces, might have gone nowhere on the desktop.
Hence the cost-reduced Macintosh - no MMU, no memory protection, no CPU dispatcher. Also no hard drive. The original 128K Mac was a flop commercially. Not until memory cost came down and Apple got a hard drive into the product did it sell successfully. The IBM PC had a hard drive earlier, which got them going in business use. The floppy-only Macs were incredibly slow.