[X4U] "Backwards Compatibility"

[Zane H. Healy]

At 2:49 AM -0500 6/24/08, Eugene wrote:
>68k: end-of-line hardware.
>
>SPARC: mainframes.
>
>PA-RISC: more obscure mainframes.

Realistically dropping all three of these made sense, SPARC and 
PA-RISC never really made sense to me.  You do have an interesting 
definition of "Mainframe" though.  I think Fujitsu or someone like 
them used Ultra Sparc chips in something resembling a mainframe, but 
most SPARC and PA-RISC machines have been workstations.  Basically 
PowerMac G5 type machines.  I doubt very few people have ever bought 
a brand new SPARC to run something other than Solaris, or a PA-RISC 
to run something other than HP-UX.

>  > Is there a point to all of this, probably not, but you have to wonder 
>>  what Mac OS X would look like had it been based on BeOS, rather than Mac
>>  OS X.
>
>BeOS was just an OS, nothing more (well, there was the BeBox, but that's
>goen the way of the dodo).  NeXT was an OS, a programming environment, a
>hardware platform, and a mature (but small) customer base.

Good point on the programming environment.  The hardware platform was 
already dead (like the BeBox).  What did the NeXT customer base move 
to?  Does anyone even know?  I know I've not heard anyone every 
comment on that.

Zane



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| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
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