PowerPC

The Intel transition had just completed about three years previously.

from Apple being on PowerPC chips to that, and how laughable the defining feature of Apple in their hardware right now is their custom chips, which have, I think, made them into a new type of powerhouse that they never were under Steve Jobs.

Beyond just, yeah, a fascinating transition to weather.

They are still a leading audio company, just not in the way you think.

Contrastingly Dropbox took a more incremental approach test assumptions via an MVP iterate quickly with user data and let the network grow organically.

Apple in contrast bet on breakthrough products that required years to perfect but promised transformational change Apple's repeated pivots, shifting from PowerPC to Intel processors then back to its own silicon illustrate a willingness to disrupt internal architecture when the external market demanded better performance and power efficiency even at massive R&D cost.

The Apple story also underscores how vertical integration can be a strategic advantage controlling design manufacturing and distribution allowed it to keep prices stable while protecting margins and maintaining a consistent brand narrative.

If you compare the two companies approaches, you see a fundamental difference in risk tolerance.

Also, the section that I personally use a lot of the time, they've improved a lot of support for vintage and what they dub miscellaneous hardware.

So there's stuff for PowerPC, Alpha, the HP300, Mac 68K, Mac PowerPC.

There's even MIPS in there as well.

So maybe just going down the list here as well.

So it emits needless memory barriers when triggering soft interrupts on various ports.

They've also replaced the vDrain kernel thread with two thread pool jobs.

They've improved the performance of byte swaps on Spark, PowerPC and MIPS.

Within the pipe command, there's improved performance and reduced lock contention.

Last week I mentioned some of the RISC-V hardware.

This week, UV now gains S390, PowerPC, and long Arch64 support.

So if you have got some friends who are on mainframes, or the Power Platform, you're now going to have the ability to use UV as a version 0.12.7. Wow.

So is that UV itself, or is that the Python install for UV?

Apple stayed on 68K for about a decade.

Then in the early '90s, Apple made one of the most audacious platform transitions in computing history, the move to PowerPC in partnership with IBM and Motorola.

PowerPC was a RISC architecture, and it was genuinely great hardware.

The Power architecture is still with us today in various forms.

Then came the second great transition.

Apple moved to Intel x86 starting in 2006, and this was driven by practical concerns.

Intel had better performance per watt at the time, and the PowerPC roadmap wasn't keeping up.

Steve Jobs announced it, and the industry thought he was crazy.

... like, the stuff was just spread around.

Um, Hyperion was developing new versions of Amiga OS software that would run on PowerPC computers, right? The, which are themselves, like, out of date now.

Um, the original Amigas were 68K, like, Motorola-based, uh, computers.

Um, so there's a company called Amiga, that's Corp, corporation, run by the g- a guy from Cloanto who has been in legal, uh, talks with all these companies.

And now they have all of the IP and all of the trademarks, and they're licensing the name to appropriate things going forward.

And, um, in fact, they're the company that's licensing the Commodore ROMs to Commodore so they can make the C64 Extreme or whatever it's called, Ult- what, Ultimate, whatever, um, which is kind of interesting, right? But, um, they are going to consolidate all this software, and they're gonna keep making new versions of Amiga OS that will run on, uh, legacy 68K Amigas, um, PowerPC Amigas, and then-

Hmm

... future Amigas, right? And, and including this thing that Retro Games announced back, like, this was late last year, um, at the time, and still, it's called the A1200.

Yet a tiny independent company of six Swiss engineers, led by its 24-year-old president, the greybeard of the group, has accomplished the impossible.

They have moved the Macintosh operating system to IBM's PowerPC reference platform, PrEP, Big Blue's standard design for its current generation of PowerPC-based computers.

In less than six months, little-known Quix Computerware, based outside Zurich, managed to get much of the macOS to operate on prep.

Macworld Lab tested dozens of unmodified Mac applications for performance and compatibility when running with the Quix system on pre-release prep computers supplied by Firepower Systems and Motorola.

Near flawless compatibility and performance at the level of equivalent Apple Power Mac models.

We also found similar results in spot tests with an IBM prototype.

More than one year ago, IBM tried to get Apple to agree to port the Mac OS to prep, which IBM designed as a PowerPC-based standard to compete against Intel-based PCs.

IBM wanted a mass-market OS for inexpensive prep PCs that can run workstation OSs and are built from industry-standard parts rather than the specialized chips, such as the ROMs, of Apple's current hardware designs.

To quote from their site, Since November of 2001, Hyperion has been actively developing AmigaOS 4.X, an almost complete rewrite for modern times of the legendary Amiga operating system, which launched the multimedia computing revolution in 1987.

1987? Anyway, originally developed by Commodore for its line of Amiga computers, AmigaOS 4.X now runs on several PowerPC-based hardware platforms, unquote.

The company currently sells AmigaOS 4.1, so that's one for PowerPC systems, as well as AmigaOS 3.2, which is still for the classic Motorola 68000 series machines as originally manufactured by Commodore and Escom.

Earlier than 1987, by the way.