Ten years ago the success story of Apple's big cats
by Christoph Dernbach - 24.03.11
Ten years ago, on 24 March 2001 came the Macintosh OS retreaded in the
final version of 10.0 on the market. Apple was able to switch from one
operating system on a dino-modern and stable Unix - and in between to
switch still twice the architecture on both PowerPC and Intel from 32 to
64 bits. Mac & i look back.
15 years ago it did not look as if Apple would turn the corner. From
today's perspective, it is hard to imagine in what a desperate state,
the company was 1996th Eleven years after co-founder Steve Jobs was
forced out of the company stood, Apple close to bankruptcy. Although it
had joined the group in the first half of the 90s in a profitable niche
in the field of print production, graphic arts and in the advertising
and creative agencies made comfortable. But the boom of the young wide
PC industry, which benefited especially from Microsoft and Intel went to
Apple over almost completely.
In August 1995, Apple's managers were able to make fun of the technical
shortcomings of Microsoft's new operating system Windows 95. Ironically,
they welcomed the competitors with "CONGRATS.W95" in the style of a DOS
file name. But the Microsoft system conquered in spite of all
shortcomings in the shortest time to market by storm, pushing the share
of Macs to below three percent. Against mighty Microsoft and its
partners such as Intel and Dell Apple stood with their backs to the wall.
At Apple, not just the business went bad. Under John Sculley and his
successor Michael Spindler, the former pioneer had lost the
technological lead. The Macintosh operating system was indeed pretty,
but dominated the old cooperative multitasking where the OS is not
centrally distributed resources. If the programs themselves to take care
of the necessary computing power, they are often against each other's
way. The Mac OS at that time had not a protected memory management, so
applications could be another crash.
After two internal projects ("Taligent" and "Copland") had failed to
renew the operating system, bought the then-Apple CEO Gil Amelio, the
system on NeXTStep, which once had ousted Steve Jobs at Apple can
develop. Jobs' company NeXT was acquired for 429 million dollars. The
Apple co-founder back in 1996 as an advisor to Apple CEO Amelio to
board. A year later, Jobs staged a coup with the help of Apple's board
back to the top of the company.
It took many months, was released to the new operating system for the
Macintosh at last. It was a difficult start with some previews and
developer of the first public beta of Mac OS X. But then the Mac users
were witnessing a remarkable history of innovation and good practice
that have influenced the entire industry.
In contrast to Microsoft Apple ventured several times a radical step.
The first Macs were running on the Motorola 680x0 chips. Early 90s rose
by Apple on the PowerPC microprocessors. This platform, Apple had
developed with Motorola and IBM. The late 90s Steve Jobs took the
ambitious risky move to Unix. And 6 June 2005, he announced, finally, to
leave the supposed paradise PowerPC and switch to the x86 architecture.
It had the Intel chips still attacked recently in commercials as a lame
snail. Thanks to the Rosetta emulation software could run on Intel Macs
and most of the programs that were written for PowerPC processors. With
this trick allowed Apple and its software partners and customers a
smooth transition to the Intel era.
Six years after the transition process of this transformation is largely
complete. In the current version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard Rosetta can be
installed later if needed. In the upcoming version 10.7 also known as
Lion [1] Apple even waived entirely on the dynamic translator Rosetta.
Thus we have checked in Cupertino the PowerPC era for good.
Apple has, despite or perhaps because of the huge changes in the system
architecture and associated operating systems, its developer and
customer base is not lost, but can build on it. When moving into the
future 64-bit era Apple seems to be better positioned than Microsoft
with Windows 7 And the development of mobile devices (smart phones,
tablet computers), Apple versus Microsoft in the lead anyway, because
the base of Mac OS X is much better than this is still too bloated Windows.
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