IBM has been reevaluating its operating-system strategy. Good move, IBM. The whole industry could stand to reevaluate what it's doing--or not doing--with respect to operating systems. And some people may feel they could use some help understanding what's what with PowerPC. I wish I could help.
At recent meeting of the Software Entrepreneurs Forum in Silicon Valley, panelists listed all the reasons why UNIX is prospering--then went on to list all the reasons why it's barely surviving. That could be metonymical for the state of uncertainty prevalent in the entire operating-system field. Other authors have things to say about UNIX standardization, but I see no sign that 1994 will be the year of UNIX, or that UNIX is suddenly going to start moving apps. Maybe it'll be the year of OS/2, yuk yuk.
It's certainly not the year of System 7. Granted, Macintosh System 7 supports a lot of applications. Apple sold more personal computers than any other computer manufacturer last year, according to some estimates, and System 7 is really Apple's only PC operating system. But the Mac operating system is on its last legs. Does anyone doubt that Apple could have replaced it by now if it were not for the fact that replacing your hardware architecture and your software architecture simultaneously is more than a little crazy?
The replacement waiting in the wings is the Taligent operating system, code-named "Pink." Apple's future. And IBM has a say in what it contains and when it gets released. Does this make any sense to you?
The bottom line used to be the beaten path to Bill Gates's door. DOS and Windows rule the universe, a situation heavy with historical ironies, from the $25,000 Tim Paterson got for writing DOS, to the carefully engineered "success" of Windows. But the DOS/Windows picture gets a little cloudy out beyond next Thursday. The fact that WordPerfect is no longer working on its DOS version is bad news for DOS as a platform.
So, in theory, is Chicago, aka Windows 4, which is supposed to eliminate the need for DOS, but won't. Windows, meanwhile, grows another head every time you look at it. There are three versions of Win32 alone, not to mention the proliferation of Windows for [Fillintheblank] announcements.
NT is Microsoft's future, but it isn't selling very well. Maybe one of the new versions (Daytona? Indy? Cairo?) will turn the tide, but 173,000 real copies sold in 1993 is not impressive. And even Chicago may be a hard sell to IS managers still trying to complete the transition to Windows 3.1. Meanwhile, OS/2 is selling hundreds of thousands of copies a month.
Realizing that I couldn't make sense of these phenomena, I went trolling for clearly articulated perspectives among some of the operating-system watchers and builders I know. The perspectives I got were clearly articulated all right, but....
One long-time observer of the operating-system scene and a professional cynic predicted slow progress in operating systems from Apple and Microsoft so long as a majority of their customers are using 68K and x86 machines. We'll see new operating-system components added to existing operating systems, many of these components having been borrowed from unreleased next-generation systems languishing in their R&D labs. But those next-generation operating systems will continue to be all promise and no delivery until the push of marketing hype exceeds the drag of installed-base inertia.
One out-of-work former employee of an operating-system company grumbled that no operating system these days can make it unless it's named Windows or System 7 or MS-DOS. Superior technology is no guarantee of success against an established standard, he said, especially in a commoditized market, which is what the PC market has become.
But if computers are commodities, they're getting to be awfully gaudy ones. An employed app developer complained about how hard it is to keep up with the galloping featuritis of modern GUIs. "Bare metal is starting to look awfully good," he said. Yeah, but where is it an option? A few weeks later, I listened as an Adobe developer explained how he deals with Apple's incessant demands that Adobe add support for the latest operating-system gimmick to its apps. "Sure, Apple," he kids them along, "We'll do that right after we implement publish and subscribe for ATM."
After wading through some more observations along these lines, I decided I'd better find out what IBM was saying. After all, IBM has been reevaluating its operating-system strategy.
IBM's strategy currently seems to be that it will sell customers any operating system they want, at least among the five (five!) 32-bit operating systems it intends to support: WorkPlace OS (aka WPOS, formerly portable OS/2), Windows NT, AIX now and PowerOpen later, Solaris, and Taligent.
The list doesn't include DOS or Windows, though DOS and Windows apps are supported through OS/2. It also doesn't include the Macintosh operating system. To run a Mac app on an IBM PowerPC machine, I gather, you'd have to run Mac Application Services (Apple's unbundled System 7 components) on top of PowerOpen on top of WorkPlace OS. PowerOpen is the not-yet-released replacement for IBM's UNIX (AIX) that will also replace Apple's UNIX (A/UX).
IBM's argument for supporting five operating systems is that the user ought to have a choice. On the other side of this tissue-thin argument is the fact that a choice of five operating systems could mean a dearth of applications. Sales of a million machines wouldn't represent a viable base for application software if the machines were evenly distributed among five operating systems. Of course, IBM offered three operating systems on its first personal computer in 1981, and that situation shook itself out quickly. If the analogy holds, we are in preshakeout, a good time to clean your basement.
Not all of IBM's lines of computers will support all five operating systems, but the PowerPC machines will. They will be preloaded with the user's choice among these 32-bit OSs as soon as they are available. IBM has demonstrated all five running on PowerPC machines.
According to Andy Jawlik, spokesperson for IBM's Power Personal Systems Division, the reason for these new processors is to support the next generation of OSs with several desiderata: robustness--that is, crash protection, security, and preemptive multitasking; distributed processing; and new human-interface technologies, including speech recognition, handwriting ditto, and intelligent agents.
Agents? This refers to some intriguing work afoot at IBM. IBM Power Personal Systems Division will, it is officially reported, provide tools for creating object-oriented intelligent agents that use the power of the PowerPC to provide more human-centered interaction with the computer. IBM expects a cottage industry of agent developers to grow up around this technology, in a two-guys-in-a-garage model.
There's another mission for these PowerPC machines: Under a recent reorg, the client mission for RS/6000 products has been moved over to Power Personal Division. IBM's first PowerPC machines will run RS/6000 apps. PowerPCs have to coexist with RS/6000 machines. And run any of five operating systems.
Apple's PowerPC story is simpler.
The story is: Macintosh forever. Or until we say otherwise.
"Macintosh" here means the Mac operating system. Apple's Ross Ely assures us that there will be multiple operating systems on Macintoshes with PowerPC hardware, but what he means is just this: In year 1, there will be System 7 and A/UX, the latter of which will "migrate" to PowerOpen. PowerOpen will appear first on Apple's server line.
Oh, and Apple is "looking at Windows NT."
Emulation has a bad name. That's why, in the future, it will be called "having a personality."
Taligent, when IBM and Apple release it, will have personalities for all the important operating systems, meaning that it can run their apps. NT will have or does have personalities for DOS, Windows, Win32, OS/2, POSIX, and native NT apps. WPOS will have personalities for DOS, Windows, Win32, OS/2, and AIX. Sun's Solaris has a Windows personality, but it's not an engaging personality, since it is based on WABI, an incomplete Windows emulation.
Then there's the ability of IBM's new PowerPC machines to act like POWER workstations. Although PowerPC is an IBM-Motorola line, the initial 601 chip is purely an IBM chip. The 601 is designed to run the software of IBM's POWER line of RISC computers; it's a bridge chip from POWER to the pure PowerPC architecture. It's not a matter of emulating the POWER architecture, I gather. (God no, it's not emulation!) They just included the POWER instruction set. This would seem to mean that native-mode app developers had better be careful what instructions they use.
Then there's the 615. In mid-1995, IBM will be in production with the PowerPC 615, which will have onboard x86 emulation. This will also be an IBM product, not a Motorola one. It is expected to run x86 software as fast as a 66-MHz Pentium. Of course, it would need something like SoftWindows to emulate the peripheral hardware, which raises some performance questions.
SoftWindows is real emulation. It's the PowerPC version of Insignia Solutions' SoftPC, which emulates a PC on a Mac. I say PC rather than x86 CPU because the product supports PC peripherals, too. Microsoft is using Insignia SoftWindows technology in Windows NT, for which Insignia gets a source license to Windows 3.1. That makes possible rock-solid compatibility within certain limits and better performance than you might expect. But both these claims come with very large caveats, which I'll go into when I talk about the new Power Macintoshes.
Yes, Power Macintosh. That's what the new PowerPC-based Macintoshes are called. As I write this, that's a big secret. By the time you read it, it'll either be wrong or old news. I know a lot of such secrets. You see, I got sneaked. Let me tell you about it.
It's November. I'm a little vague as to just what time it is, but I know it's way too early for me to be up and about. Here I am, though, in the conference room of Bandley 88, or is it DeAnza 6-5000, not entirely sure how I got here, not entirely sure why. Across the room I see jelly donuts and some mystery pastries with powdered sugar on top. Ten feet to the west of me is a huge steaming coffee urn, and the breeze is to the east.
Gradually, I become aware of a presence. Between me and sustenance stands a woman in a suit. She is saying something to me, holding out a pen and a piece of paper that I slowly come to understand is an Apple nondisclosure agreement. Savvy and cruel as any inner-city crack dealer, these Apple PR people withhold the goodies until they get theirs.
Three cups of coffee and a sugar fix later, I know that I'm at a technical press briefing covering Apple's plans for PowerPC. I smile as I watch several dozen other computer-industry columnists, technology trackers, and high-tech reporters stagger in and run the gauntlet. Several of the more technical types gravitate to my table, attracted perhaps by my alert expression and cheery greeting. A few cups later--or in the case of the nutritionally correct, a hit of fructose later--their eyes begin to open, too.
We cover the basics quickly, reaching immediate consensus on which pastries are to be avoided and which are to be stuffed in the pockets to get us through what's ahead. A MacWorld editor comes by to say hello, but won't sit down because there are MacUser editors at the table. Protocol.
Finally, we are all ushered across the hall to get sneaked. There will be two days of sneaking, with lots of inside info that we are not permitted to leak to a soul until the embargo date some eight weeks hence. Monday morning it'll all be in MacWeek.
There were three issues on people's minds at the sneak: price, performance, and compatibility. And developer support. There were four issues_.
These issues were the obvious ones. Apple knows it needs to cut into the Windows/DOS/Intel CPU market if it is to grow. According to Ross Ely, the biggest objections to Mac from Windows users have been--guess what? Price, performance, and compatibility.
Is that all? Hey, no problem.
At least, that's the attitude Apple wants to project. The new Power Macs will answer the first two concerns, goes the story, and the SoftWindows bundle should help a lot with the last. How fanciful is all this?
Price: Apple is pricing these machines aggressively. The cheapest, which is a pretty hot machine, will cost about $2000, monitor included. There will be a SoftWindows-bundled version for which I don't have a price now, but it should come with 16 Mbytes of RAM and cost under $3000.
Performance, native mode: Compute-intensive apps should speed up by a factor of three or four, based on early results I've seen from a variety of sources. Since the PowerPC 601 is 40 percent faster than a Pentium on floating-point operations, apps that use floating-point math will probably do better on a PowerPC than on a Pentium machine. Unfortunately, many of the early Power Mac native applications will be ports of mainstream applications, not optimized for the PowerPC, that wouldn't show off its power if they were optimized. One company that will be pushing the PowerPC hardware from the start is Fractal Designs of Santa Cruz, CA.
Performance, emulation: To get a fresh perspective on this, I talked to a friend whose old Mac application hasn't had a major upgrade in several years. He reported that it ran flawlessly on a PowerPC and was noticeably faster. His experience seems not to be unusual. Because Apple has ported key elements of the system to PowerPC, apps that rely on system calls will be sped up when they run on a PowerPC machine. This isn't pure emulation.
Performance, SoftWindows: Insignia's SoftPC ran Windows apps on Macs at unacceptable speeds. It looks like you can expect high-end 386 to 486SX/25 speed for Windows apps using SoftWindows on a PowerMac. That's apps; system tasks will execute faster, though, reportedly rivaling Pentium speeds. Insignia Solutions optimized Win 3.1 for PowerPC, writing drivers that map Windows operations directly to QuickDraw. Claims are for high-end 486 performance for apps later this year, and better compatibility, when Insignia Solutions delivers the 486 version. My friend Hal says that high-end 486 performance from current-generation PowerPCs via 486 emulation is impossible.
Compatibility, Mac apps: Solid, from what I saw, and heard from third-party developers, at the sneak. An interesting scenario is shaping up. Corporate buyers are universally expressing cautious optimism, and preparing to act on the caution, not the optimism. If early appearances hold up, there will be few problems with Mac compatibility, and these buyers may be revising their purchase plans midstream.
Compatibility, Windows apps: Early reports describe really solid compatibility. (Insignia has a Windows source license, and a complete licensed copy of Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS is part of the package.) SoftWindows reportedly deals appropriately with Novell NetWare, LAN Manager, Banyan Vines, TCP/IP, COM and LPT ports, floppy drives, displays, and CD-ROM drives.
The caveat is that SoftWindows emulates a 286. 486 emulation is slated for later this year. For now, SoftWindows is restricted to standard mode by the 286 emulation, so it won't run apps that check for a 386 on installation, or that insist on a 386 or 486, or that require Enhanced mode. That includes current versions of FrameMaker, Quattro Pro, Visual C++, Borland C++, MathCad, Paradox, Improv, FoxPro, and Access, among other apps. That's a big caveat.
Developer support: Apple has a slew of developer tools for PowerPC development, including the $399 Macintosh on RISC Software Developer's Kit, which includes all you need to write PowerPC-based apps on a 68030 or 68040 Mac using C or C++.
But the real news for development is the arrival of Metrowerks on the scene. This St. Laurent, Quebec company's CodeWarrior development system should be shipping (not a prerelease version) by the time you read this. It lets you write code on a PowerPC or 680x0 Mac using C, C++, or Pascal, and compile it to a 680x0 or a PowerPC binary. The development environment is something like MPW, something like Think. I've seen it in action, and compilation speed blows away the competition, meaning Apple and Symantec. This thing is hot.
Copyright © 1994, Dr. Dobb's JournalThe Year of the Pundit
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