robphy said:
Macs, on the other hand, have jumped around a bit: Motorola 6502 and 68000, IBM PowerPC, and now Intel Core2Duo.
6502 => Apple 2, not a Mac. It ran at a whopping 1mhz (while the Atari's 400 / 800 / 65XE / 130XE ran their 6502 at 2mhz).
a short history of the mac and how it became so unpopular
The Lisa and the first Macintosh's used a Motorola 68000, but with the Mac only having 128k of ram, they didn't use a 32bit flat model, and instead used PC relative instructions and handles, which were pointers to pointers to allocated resources, which could change anytime a system call was made (had to re-establish the handles). With MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop), applications had to be manually split up into 32k chunks (by grouping source file object outputs) so that the handles, jumps, and calls would be within range of the PC relative instructions. Note that MPW ran in command line mode, similar to a windowed version of the dos console mode in windows. Think C improved on this with a GUI interface to specify how to group source files with a drag and drop interface. Later, Think C implemented a GUI interface to generate code from menus and windows created via a GUI interface (4th generation language). In spite of promises that the next OS (4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) would have pre-emption, they never did, until OS-X. Macs might have been user friendly, but they weren't programer friendly.
Just 3 years after the first Mac, the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST showed up, the Atari having 1024mb of ram (or 512mb). The Atari ST had a niche market in the music industry, but was otherwise never that popular, in spite of the fact that it was simply DOS ported to run on a flat 32-bit environment, with a Windows 3.0 like GUI called GEM (from Digital Research) running on top, bascially the 32 bit equivalent of DOS and Windows 3.1 on a 32 bit platform.
Back to the early Macs, they didn't have DMA, even though the very first PC's had it as well as most of the CPM systems prior to PC's. So the MAC's had a cluge called "blind reads" and "blind writes" to speed up I/O with a weak hardware handshake to throttle CPU reads or writes. Eventually 3rd party vendors made DMA SCSI adpaters, later the Macs incorporated DMA.
One of the mistakes by Apple was the decision to raise prices at the end of 1989, about the same time that 286 and 386 clones with Windows 3.0 were starting to flood the market place. Apple was pretty "smug" in those days. Market share eventually dropped to well under 10%, and party time was over.
Then again, there's the IBM PS/2 fiasco that occurred during the same time period. I'm not sure what caused confusion, but a lot of people though that PS/2's could only run OS/2 and vice versa. IBM wouldn't make a 386 AT, and that doomed IBM's market share, as the EISA group took over and made their own 386AT standard. Now it's Intel and Microsoft calling the shots.
I've always had the impression that Macs were overpriced, and non-compatable, especially if a person has any interest in computer games. At least with an Intel based Mac, it's compatable, but then what's the advantage of buying a Mac?
Since I do some computer gaming, I won't be buying Windows Vista, and will stick with XP for quite a while. Although I did buy Visual Studio 2005, I'm still running Office XP (prior to versions that have years in their names).
