Sculley was wrong about Apple’s transition to PowerPC: had Apple gone to Intel back then, without benefit of Jobs and the iMac and clean architecture of OS X, the Macintosh would have most likely devolved into a no-value-added PC clone and the company would have disappeared by now.
Sculley is misremembering events anyhow. Project Star Trek (ie the effort to get the MacOS System to run on Intel) began February 14, 1992 and by November of that year the project's tagline of "to boldly go where no Mac has gone before," was being mocked by Coputerworld as "the OS that boldly goes where everyone else has been"
The problems with Mac 7.0 (its formal name IIRC) was it ran on too narrow a hardware set and was very sensitive to hardware quality. By mid-1993, thanks to a good mixture of political infighting, personnel issues, and questionable marketability Project Star Trek had flown into a black hole from which it would not return. Later that year Scelley was replaced by Michael Spindler who preceded to do some boneheaded things (key of which was the whole MacClone thing) that nearly destroyed what was left of Apple.
We don't disagree that FileMaker is coming, but it isn't here yet.
FTA: "You can be certain that FileMaker Pro will make the move, though. As originally an Apple app, and today made by a wholly Apple-owned subsidiary, it's not a surprise that FileMaker Pro has made it through the moves from 68000 to PowerPC and Intel.
The company has confirmed full support for Big Sur, so the latest FileMaker Pro will certainly run on M1, but there's not been any word on a native release."
There really isn’t any magic behind the reasons that some software applications have survived for decades while others have vanished into the ether. As long as the “what it does” quality of an application is still relevant, there is still a large enough customer and profit base to justify continuing to maintain the application, and there is a platform to run it on, the application it can continue forever.
Software doesn’t wear out, age, or break from use. It can age or break as a consequence of design choices, latent designed-in and/or implementation defects that made it to the field, or the underlying platform (software and/or hardware) changing out from under it. In the case of Apple (and other platform providers like Microsoft) the platform owner typically provides mechanisms for application developers to migrate to the new dependencies or provides a shim or proxy layer to isolate the application from the breaking changes - but not always.
The biggest challenge for software is the “how it does it” quality. Well designed software in any language is designed in a modular fashion along several dimensions including separation of functional concerns, architectural layering, and to modularity to provide abstractions from platform dependencies. As long as the “how” part can still be achieved on the new platform, in some way and at reasonable expense, everything is possible. While it is possible that a limited functionality application designed as a single monolithic blob of code could be completely rewritten to move the “what it does” quality to an entirely new platform, or to use a completely different implementation, taking this approach would be very expensive and inefficient. In fact, over time, even the individual modular elements in a highly modular application will often be reimplemented (refactored) to improve their modularity, to take advantage of new programming or platform features, and to improve reliability.
So basically, if there is a compelling business reason to keep an application around through generations of changes to the underlying platform, the technical folks responsible for the application design and code base will find a way to make it happen, and the platform folks like Apple will often find ways to make it possible for the application owners. Because this pattern of change has repeated itself for as long as software has been around, people who architect, design, and implement software often do so with the kinds of anticipated changes they’ve seen in mind. As with anything, “often” does not mean “always,” anticipation can fail, and business priorities can change. So yeah, some applications do end up in the proverbial bit bucket in the sky.
I’m reminded how long it took both quark & Adobe to bring their flagship products up to date. Don’t remember the software version, but it was painfully slow. They tried to squeeze as much money out of the existing versions they could, and made any number of bullshit exudes as to the delay. That being said, they had no competitors. Now, there are a few solid competitors out there who are younger, leaner, more hungry and aren’t resting on their laurels.
so, basically, as was already stated. If they haven’t already transitioned, they are either extinct or DIW (seafaring term for “dead in the water”).
Quark’s inability to update its product in a timely manner to native Intel for Mac was one of the final nails in its coffin. As companies like the one I worked for bought new Intel Macs we wanted native software to run on them. Adobe had it and Quark didn’t. Most printers at the time still preferred Quark over InDesign as they considered InDesign files problematic. This was because InDesign took advantage of Postscript Level 3 features like transparency and a lot of printers hadn’t updated their RIP software yet. After transitioning my agency to InDesign I finally had to start telling printers that they could either accept InDesign files or we would find a new printer.
When will I stop receiving onscreen messages telling me 3rd Party Software installed on my Mac won’t be compatible with a future version of Mac OS and to contact the developer? It’s not the customers job to remind the developer to update their software to be compatible.
Never. Apple will do this to you again and again.
It would be trivial for Apple to support 68k software in System 11. It would be trivial to support 68k, PowerPC, 32-bit Intel, and ARM software at the same time. The only programs that truly couldn't handle it would be things like disk utilities.
But in the next few years you can expect that Apple will again f you over when they intentionally break 64-bit Intel software, just as they did for every previous architecture.
I'm done. No M1 for me. Xubuntu is looking really nice these days, and it'll run on standard x86 hardware for the foreseeable future. Hardware that also doesn't make me get new dongles for every new port that comes along because it still includes the old ports. And with just a tiny hack, I can run x86 Mac software in VMware Workstation. I can even get it to run Apple's last really good version of Mac OS X, 10.6.
For now, I'm telling my clients to buy Intel Macs while they still can, avoid the M1 garbage like the plague it is. That'll get them at least 5 years of reasonable functionality, then we can move on to what's next, which at this point isn't likely to be Apple.
Microsoft OSs suck. But did you know you can still run some 16-bit Windoze 1 software on current Windoze 10 20H2? You can.
When will I stop receiving onscreen messages telling me 3rd Party Software installed on my Mac won’t be compatible with a future version of Mac OS and to contact the developer? It’s not the customers job to remind the developer to update their software to be compatible.
Never. Apple will do this to you again and again.
It would be trivial for Apple to support 68k software in System 11. It would be trivial to support 68k, PowerPC, 32-bit Intel, and ARM software at the same time. The only programs that truly couldn't handle it would be things like disk utilities.
But in the next few years you can expect that Apple will again f you over when they intentionally break 64-bit Intel software, just as they did for every previous architecture.
I'm done. No M1 for me. Xubuntu is looking really nice these days, and it'll run on standard x86 hardware for the foreseeable future. Hardware that also doesn't make me get new dongles for every new port that comes along because it still includes the old ports. And with just a tiny hack, I can run x86 Mac software in VMware Workstation. I can even get it to run Apple's last really good version of Mac OS X, 10.6.
For now, I'm telling my clients to buy Intel Macs while they still can, avoid the M1 garbage like the plague it is. That'll get them at least 5 years of reasonable functionality, then we can move on to what's next, which at this point isn't likely to be Apple.
Microsoft OSs suck. But did you know you can still run some 16-bit Windoze 1 software on current Windoze 10 20H2? You can.
Intentionally breaking compatibility is insane.
Very similar statements were made online during the 68K to PPC shift, and then again, even louder, during the PPC shift to Intel, including the "at this point, isn't likely to be Apple."
When will I stop receiving onscreen messages telling me 3rd Party Software installed on my Mac won’t be compatible with a future version of Mac OS and to contact the developer? It’s not the customers job to remind the developer to update their software to be compatible.
Never. Apple will do this to you again and again.
It would be trivial for Apple to support 68k software in System 11. It would be trivial to support 68k, PowerPC, 32-bit Intel, and ARM software at the same time. The only programs that truly couldn't handle it would be things like disk utilities.
But in the next few years you can expect that Apple will again f you over when they intentionally break 64-bit Intel software, just as they did for every previous architecture.
I'm done. No M1 for me. Xubuntu is looking really nice these days, and it'll run on standard x86 hardware for the foreseeable future. Hardware that also doesn't make me get new dongles for every new port that comes along because it still includes the old ports. And with just a tiny hack, I can run x86 Mac software in VMware Workstation. I can even get it to run Apple's last really good version of Mac OS X, 10.6.
For now, I'm telling my clients to buy Intel Macs while they still can, avoid the M1 garbage like the plague it is. That'll get them at least 5 years of reasonable functionality, then we can move on to what's next, which at this point isn't likely to be Apple.
Microsoft OSs suck. But did you know you can still run some 16-bit Windoze 1 software on current Windoze 10 20H2? You can.
Intentionally breaking compatibility is insane.
It’s people like who pull the rest of us back with your whinging vis a vis backwards compatibility. Good riddance you’re done and gone.
Well designed software in any language is designed in a modular fashion along several dimensions including separation of functional concerns, architectural layering, and to modularity to provide abstractions from platform dependencies.
That, historically, is bull. Well designed software in the 1980s was written in machine code, taking advantages of quirks in the hardware to eeke out every possible millisecond of performance from a chip that it conceivably could. It's only in the last couple decades that computers have been fast enough that programmers have had the luxury of being able to abstract hardware at all.
What you call well designed would be called bloated garbage in 1995.
The issue now is that OS programmers DO have the ability and spare processing power to abstract out and make that machine code work on today's systems. Microsoft does. Apple not only can't be bothered, they actively and intentionally break much newer software.
Well designed software in any language is designed in a modular fashion along several dimensions including separation of functional concerns, architectural layering, and to modularity to provide abstractions from platform dependencies.
That, historically, is bull. Well designed software in the 1980s was written in machine code, taking advantages of quirks in the hardware to eeke out every possible millisecond of performance from a chip that it conceivably could. It's only in the last couple decades that computers have been fast enough that programmers have had the luxury of being able to abstract hardware at all.
What you call well designed would be called bloated garbage in 1995.
The issue now is that OS programmers DO have the ability and spare processing power to abstract out and make that machine code work on today's systems. Microsoft does. Apple not only can't be bothered, they actively and intentionally break much newer software.
You’re reading too much into what I’ve said and assuming all of the attributes I’ve mentioned apply to all software. Design choices have to be applied to fit the needs of the application and problem you’re trying to solve.
I’ve been involved with product development since the 80s and I’ve never seen a one size fits all approach for any of it. I personally have never seen an application the size of Excel or Word written in processor specific machine code. All of the assembler level code that I’ve been involved with that was written as part of larger programs written in C or C++ with was isolated and structured in a modular fashion to address very specific requirements that could not be effectively done in higher level languages.
My point here is that software can last a very long time if there is sufficient business rationale for keeping it going. There are technical hurdles but there are also accommodations and strategies that are available to both developers and platform owners to keep legacy applications going - up to a point.
No need to take on an antagonistic tone. That’s not what we’re here for. There are plenty of opportunities elsewhere for that.
Those are the basic requirements for long-term OS, language and CPU changing events to not result in software dying as things change. Any developer worth their pay can learn any changes in programming language and OS APIs and how things are done without their heads exploding when it is done over such a long time period (easy enough to largely forget old stuff you no longer use).
As far as the Macintosh history goes back (37 years now) those with enough experience and skill to be original MacOS application developers in 1984 have a high probability (as individuals, as well as companies/corporate entities) of being retired, dead, bankrupt, all depending.
For the relatively simple applications that have no reason to constantly change, the slow platform churn isn’t a big deal in the larger scheme of things, just providing the occasional blip of effort. If a developer/company has many such applications, they can be maintained with a small workforce.
When will I stop receiving onscreen messages telling me 3rd Party Software installed on my Mac won’t be compatible with a future version of Mac OS and to contact the developer? It’s not the customers job to remind the developer to update their software to be compatible.
If not customers, who's job is it exactly? If customers of an app can't be arsed to prod their developer to update why would anyone else care? I certainly don't want Apple wasting time on an app I don't use prodding developers to update. It's not their job.
darkvader said: For now, I'm telling my clients to buy Intel Macs while they still can, avoid the M1 garbage like the plague it is.
lol - don't let the door hit you on the way out. No platform is perfect and they all have their issues. Overall I still have FAR less overhead with macOS than any other operating system and there are still many apps I use that aren't available elsewhere. At the end of the day that's what really matters.
darkvader said: What you call well designed would be called bloated garbage in 1995.
We have found Steve Gibson hanging out in the AI forums!
The issue now is that OS programmers DO have the ability and spare processing power to abstract out and make that machine code work on today's systems. Microsoft does. Apple not only can't be bothered, they actively and intentionally break much newer software.
It's more than abstraction. Old API's hanging around add complexity. More crap to troubleshoot. More shit to introduce vulnerabilities - or allow vulnerabilities that have always been there but just not discovered yet to surface. Old crap that prevents new stuff from being more efficient.
If it were so easy for Intel to pull the same tricks Apple has to get the power and performance improvements with the M1, they would have. But they can't because of legacy architecture decisions.
I'm sure Intel would love to make a 64 bit only CPU - how much crap would break if they tried to do that?
If you think hanging on to the past is so great go enjoy those other platforms. I, for one, am glad there is at least one vendor willing to push the envelope - and by extension, the rest of the industry along with them. I suppose if I had some weird one off program that was being left behind I might feel differently but luckily I don't. And most of what I use I could find an alternative if I had to. As I have over the last 40 years too.
Are people really using and 3rd-party compression and FTP apps? Personally, I haven't needed ether in well over a decade. Modern option make FTP less than ideal for any need I may have and I haven't seen a non-Zip file that macOS couldn't unpack for countless years.
Well, what are your needs that no longer require your choice of flavour of ftp client etc?
Are we talking sharing vacation images with your friends, uploading batches of code, or whatever else you used to use ftp for. And also, are we talking like traditional ftp, or more modern sftp? Are we just talking third party, or built in functionality? Do you still use it, but not with third party clients?
For instance, my first reaction to reading "ftp" is always that it's way outdated and that I stopped using it in favour scp a looong time ago; but by today's standards my use of scp is the outdated thing, as I should be using something like sftp or rsync instead. But since I always use it in the terminal anyways it's not really that big of a deal what characters I type to get it done, so, hey, does it really matter (as long as it's secure)?
Are people really using and 3rd-party compression and FTP apps? Personally, I haven't needed ether in well over a decade. Modern option make FTP less than ideal for any need I may have and I haven't seen a non-Zip file that macOS couldn't unpack for countless years.
Well, what are your needs that no longer require your choice of flavour of ftp client etc?
Are we talking sharing vacation images with your friends, uploading batches of code, or whatever else you used to use ftp for. And also, are we talking like traditional ftp, or more modern sftp? Are we just talking third party, or built in functionality? Do you still use it, but not with third party clients?
For instance, my first reaction to reading "ftp" is always that it's way outdated and that I stopped using it in favour scp a looong time ago; but by today's standards my use of scp is the outdated thing, as I should be using something like sftp or rsync instead. But since I always use it in the terminal anyways it's not really that big of a deal what characters I type to get it done, so, hey, does it really matter (as long as it's secure)?
For sharing at work over the internet we primarily use two different methods: Dropbox and BitTorrent. Both are private that only allowed those with access to have access and used modern encryption, but perhaps most important, if a file didn't finish, it didn't have to be completely re-up/downloaded, as was the case with FTP, if it didn't completely finished. Maybe FTP has modern advancements that no longer make that an issue, but the solutions we have now just work without fail or having initiate anything. Have an update to build? Just add it and it will be there. Deleted something by accident? Just restore it and it'll show back up as if it was never gone.
When will I stop receiving onscreen messages telling me 3rd Party Software installed on my Mac won’t be compatible with a future version of Mac OS and to contact the developer? It’s not the customers job to remind the developer to update their software to be compatible.
If the software you are using is still being developed and supported and you are updating it, you should almost never hear about this. If your software is out of date, then yo are getting fair warning. Otherwise you will get a legion of angry users who all of a sudden find that their software stops working after an OS upgrade. Pick the lesser of the evils.
When will I stop receiving onscreen messages telling me 3rd Party Software installed on my Mac won’t be compatible with a future version of Mac OS and to contact the developer? It’s not the customers job to remind the developer to update their software to be compatible.
Never. Apple will do this to you again and again.
It would be trivial for Apple to support 68k software in System 11. It would be trivial to support 68k, PowerPC, 32-bit Intel, and ARM software at the same time. The only programs that truly couldn't handle it would be things like disk utilities.
But in the next few years you can expect that Apple will again f you over when they intentionally break 64-bit Intel software, just as they did for every previous architecture.
I'm done. No M1 for me. Xubuntu is looking really nice these days, and it'll run on standard x86 hardware for the foreseeable future. Hardware that also doesn't make me get new dongles for every new port that comes along because it still includes the old ports. And with just a tiny hack, I can run x86 Mac software in VMware Workstation. I can even get it to run Apple's last really good version of Mac OS X, 10.6.
For now, I'm telling my clients to buy Intel Macs while they still can, avoid the M1 garbage like the plague it is. That'll get them at least 5 years of reasonable functionality, then we can move on to what's next, which at this point isn't likely to be Apple.
Microsoft OSs suck. But did you know you can still run some 16-bit Windoze 1 software on current Windoze 10 20H2? You can.
Intentionally breaking compatibility is insane.
That backwards compatibility comes at a cost - a huge increasingly complex OS that has numerous issues because developers took shortcuts that make going to the next level. Look at the horrid performance of Microsoft's x86 emulator vs Apple's translator. Like it or not x86 has likely reached the end of the road of how it can be improved without getting into the 'doubles as a space heater' jokes again. Nearly everybody (even AMD) has seen that ARM is the future be it Opterron (and the M1 competitor AMD is rumored to be working on) or the M1. Hanging on the dying past is why Sears, Blockbuster, and dozens of other business are either walking undead are all but dead.
I can run a World Builder, a 32-bit 68000 assembly program from 1986 via emulation on a modern Mac. If you want to run old software there will be a market for emulators. If their isn't a market not enough people really care about act old software...otherwise there would be emulators QED.
Comments
The problems with Mac 7.0 (its formal name IIRC) was it ran on too narrow a hardware set and was very sensitive to hardware quality. By mid-1993, thanks to a good mixture of political infighting, personnel issues, and questionable marketability Project Star Trek had flown into a black hole from which it would not return. Later that year Scelley was replaced by Michael Spindler who preceded to do some boneheaded things (key of which was the whole MacClone thing) that nearly destroyed what was left of Apple.
FTA: "You can be certain that FileMaker Pro will make the move, though. As originally an Apple app, and today made by a wholly Apple-owned subsidiary, it's not a surprise that FileMaker Pro has made it through the moves from 68000 to PowerPC and Intel.
The company has confirmed full support for Big Sur, so the latest FileMaker Pro will certainly run on M1, but there's not been any word on a native release."
Software doesn’t wear out, age, or break from use. It can age or break as a consequence of design choices, latent designed-in and/or implementation defects that made it to the field, or the underlying platform (software and/or hardware) changing out from under it. In the case of Apple (and other platform providers like Microsoft) the platform owner typically provides mechanisms for application developers to migrate to the new dependencies or provides a shim or proxy layer to isolate the application from the breaking changes - but not always.
The biggest challenge for software is the “how it does it” quality. Well designed software in any language is designed in a modular fashion along several dimensions including separation of functional concerns, architectural layering, and to modularity to provide abstractions from platform dependencies. As long as the “how” part can still be achieved on the new platform, in some way and at reasonable expense, everything is possible. While it is possible that a limited functionality application designed as a single monolithic blob of code could be completely rewritten to move the “what it does” quality to an entirely new platform, or to use a completely different implementation, taking this approach would be very expensive and inefficient. In fact, over time, even the individual modular elements in a highly modular application will often be reimplemented (refactored) to improve their modularity, to take advantage of new programming or platform features, and to improve reliability.
So basically, if there is a compelling business reason to keep an application around through generations of changes to the underlying platform, the technical folks responsible for the application design and code base will find a way to make it happen, and the platform folks like Apple will often find ways to make it possible for the application owners. Because this pattern of change has repeated itself for as long as software has been around, people who architect, design, and implement software often do so with the kinds of anticipated changes they’ve seen in mind. As with anything, “often” does not mean “always,” anticipation can fail, and business priorities can change. So yeah, some applications do end up in the proverbial bit bucket in the sky.
My point here is that software can last a very long time if there is sufficient business rationale for keeping it going. There are technical hurdles but there are also accommodations and strategies that are available to both developers and platform owners to keep legacy applications going - up to a point.
As far as the Macintosh history goes back (37 years now) those with enough experience and skill to be original MacOS application developers in 1984 have a high probability (as individuals, as well as companies/corporate entities) of being retired, dead, bankrupt, all depending.
For the relatively simple applications that have no reason to constantly change, the slow platform churn isn’t a big deal in the larger scheme of things, just providing the occasional blip of effort. If a developer/company has many such applications, they can be maintained with a small workforce.
We have found Steve Gibson hanging out in the AI forums!
It's more than abstraction. Old API's hanging around add complexity. More crap to troubleshoot. More shit to introduce vulnerabilities - or allow vulnerabilities that have always been there but just not discovered yet to surface. Old crap that prevents new stuff from being more efficient.
If it were so easy for Intel to pull the same tricks Apple has to get the power and performance improvements with the M1, they would have. But they can't because of legacy architecture decisions.
I'm sure Intel would love to make a 64 bit only CPU - how much crap would break if they tried to do that?
If you think hanging on to the past is so great go enjoy those other platforms. I, for one, am glad there is at least one vendor willing to push the envelope - and by extension, the rest of the industry along with them. I suppose if I had some weird one off program that was being left behind I might feel differently but luckily I don't. And most of what I use I could find an alternative if I had to. As I have over the last 40 years too.
It had something to do with scoping which as far as I've been able to see no other package had.
Are we talking sharing vacation images with your friends, uploading batches of code, or whatever else you used to use ftp for. And also, are we talking like traditional ftp, or more modern sftp? Are we just talking third party, or built in functionality? Do you still use it, but not with third party clients?
For instance, my first reaction to reading "ftp" is always that it's way outdated and that I stopped using it in favour scp a looong time ago; but by today's standards my use of scp is the outdated thing, as I should be using something like sftp or rsync instead. But since I always use it in the terminal anyways it's not really that big of a deal what characters I type to get it done, so, hey, does it really matter (as long as it's secure)?
I can run a World Builder, a 32-bit 68000 assembly program from 1986 via emulation on a modern Mac. If you want to run old software there will be a market for emulators. If their isn't a market not enough people really care about act old software...otherwise there would be emulators QED.