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1. Thomas, Computer Wrangler (thomasfuchs@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 18:52:46 UTC Thomas, Computer Wrangler

   Do you sometimes wonder what computers would look like now if Apple had switched to ARM processors in the early 1990s instead of PowerPC (and leaving ARM to the Newton line later)?

   Probably you don’t, but still interesting to think about.

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   • Thomas, Computer Wrangler (thomasfuchs@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 18:54:13 UTC Thomas, Computer Wrangler

     in reply to

     • Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

     @vfrmedia I'm sure their main concern besides speed was availability at scale, and Motorola and IBM had factories that could churn out chips

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   • Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK (vfrmedia@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 18:54:18 UTC Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

     in reply to

     @thomasfuchs I wonder if a factor at the time was that Acorn/ARM were still selling entire computers that were competitors to the Mac (particularly in education and graphics applications in UK and Europe?)

   • Thomas, Computer Wrangler (thomasfuchs@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 18:54:19 UTC Thomas, Computer Wrangler

     in reply to

     Anyway, they (Apple) had to switch to _something_ as Motorola wasn't delivering updates to the 68k line as scheduled.

     So they started an alliance with IBM and—weirdly—Motorola again.

     And came up with PowerPC, which they used for over a decade before switching to Intel.

   • Willard Goosey (goosey@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 18:54:40 UTC Willard Goosey

     in reply to

     @thomasfuchs
     I love Motorola cpus but their failure to ship fast 040's screwed a bunch of companies. 😣

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   • ephemeris@bsd.network's status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 18:54:56 UTC ephemeris

     in reply to

     @thomasfuchs My dreams of a present that never was. what would computing look like if ibm had managed to shrink the 360 architecture to fit the pc price point. the ibm 5100 comes to mind as being close, not really a 360 but it was pretending to be one, unlike the 5150 pc.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100

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   • Chaga from the forest (jonathangerlach@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Dec-2021 18:55:08 UTC Chaga from the forest

     in reply to

     @thomasfuchs Apple probably wouldn’t have been able to get NeXT to work on an ARM CPU (pre v4), so the only viable “Object Oriented Workstation” OS would have died in obscurity and the modern Mac and iPhone wouldn’t have been built.

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