DaveNet: Thursday, September 11, 1997; by Dave Winer.
Jorg Brown on Platforms
From Jorg Brown, jbx@macgroup.com, in response to The Nine Lives of Jean-Louis, 9/4/97:Jorg Brown on Platforms
There have been questions about the feasibility of the BeOS as an OS that could run on CHRP machines and be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, it can't just run MacOS 7 as you said in DaveNet last Friday. Apparently there are legal issues with the ROM. Sure, it could be clean-room cloned, but by that time it'd be way too late for anyone to care, and Apple could tie it up in court.
On the Fortunately side, it's not a matter of *if* Metrowerks ports Latitude to BeOS. Metrowerks has already made that commitment.
On the unfortunately side, the CHRP machines that almost shipped can't be shipped simply by removing the Mac ROM, due to a custom Apple I/O chip.
On the fortunately side, a re-design to get rid of the Apple-licensed chips was underway anyway, and it reduces the overall cost of the machine. How much? Well, let's just say you could build a box where just about everything is a Wintel part except the CPU. And since PowerPCs have a better price/performance ratio than Intel chips, well, you figure it out. Oh, and did I mention that PowerPCs consume less power so your laptop runs a lot longer?
Also on the fortunately side, Windows NT 4.0 runs on these boxes. As does the x86 emulator inside NT 4.0.
Put it all together, and you have a way for CHRP manufacturers to avoid throwing away all their hardware investment.
Through use of Latitude, you have a way for software manufacturers to avoid throwing away all their software investment.
Users get an inexpensive box that can run the BeOS and Windows NT. It may even be possible to use Latitude to create a library so that PowerPC native MacOS-based apps can run native without needing modification.
So....
What does all this mean? What's a developer to do?
That's perhaps the best part of the whole story. In a nutshell, what you have to do is make sure your Mac app is 100% native PowerPC, doesn't mess around with low-memory globals, doesn't use undocumented portions of the OS, etc. In other words, you do everything Apple's been telling you to do anyway. By doing these things, you'll make it easier to link your app with Latitude/Be, and if you can work with Latitude on Be, you'll almost surely be able to work with Latitude on Rhapsody as well, so you get Rhapsody capability for free.
And if you really want your app to scream, port it to the Be API!
In the future, when BeOS finishes their Intel port, you may be able to get your app to run on BeOS on Intel, with just a recompile or two, give and take for endian issues.
Now...
For those who are still confused about this, here's the motivation.
Apple killed off cloner Power Computing. Fine. But they also killed off some impressive new technology, and that's what's got everyone upset.
The fastest Apple PowerPC motherboard runs at 55MHz. Motorola's CHRP laptop ran at 83MHz. It's now been ten days since Power's Power Tower Pro G3 would have shipped! It seems Apple even tried to stop Newer Technology from shipping 750-based accelerator cards by asking Motorola to limit their chip supply!
It's one thing for Apple to ask for their fair share. It's quite another for them to ask their users for a premium when they are dragging down the technology.