You want a new computer. You've decided that the Macintosh is
the
machine on which you work the best, so you tell your boss that;s what
you want. You explain the graphic user interface is very polished and
that it helps minimize the learning curve for new applications, allowing
you to spend less timedigging in manuals and more at work. You tell him
about the built-in multimedia features. Everything is going along
smoothly until the boss asks the dreaded question: "Is it DOS
compatible?" You hem and haw for a few moments, look down at your shoes,
and finally look him in the eye and say "Why, yes. Yes it is."
When the Macintosh was first introduced, it was perceived as a toy
computer. Not only did it have little pictures and cute graphics that
were out of place on "serious" computers, but it didn't work with
anything else on the market. As the PC Compatible market boomed and the
Mac line became more capable and powerful, this rift was widened by
Apple's continued determination to keep their system software in-house
and unable to be reproduced by anyone. As a result, noone was able to
develop clones of the Macintosh in the same way that had been done for
the IBM machines, and the gulf between the two platforms remained
unbridged.
This is what we in the computer industry like to call a "third party
opportunity." Seeing that there might be quite a demand for machines
that could handle DOS software as well as Macintosh software, several
companies delevloped products that wuld allow one to do just that. The
two biggest players in this arena up until recently have been Orange Micro and Insignia solutions.
These two companies have developed different approaches to running
DOS software on a Macintosh. Orange Micros's solution uses a
coprocessor, while Insignia uses something called a "software
emulation." Each of these technologies has its advantages and
disadvantages, and might be used for different applications.
Basically what Orange Micro has done is to have designed a board
that is essentially a PC-compatible computer on a card that sits inside
the Mac and runs the DOS software while the Mac's CPU continues to take
care of Mac software . The advantage to this arrangement is that it
essentially provides the user with two complete computers in one box,
allowing one to run different kinds of programs simultaneously and
without one environment affecting the performance of the other. When
performance is of primary importance, this makes for an excellent
solution.
Insignia has taken a very different route with their product. They
have basically written a program to pretend that it's a DOS machine, and
to fool the DOS software into believing it as well. The advantage of
this approach is that Insignia's software can tell DOS programs anything
it wants about the machine configuration, and as long as it provides the
necessary illusion, everything will work fine. The practical result of
this is that one can use the Macintosh's mouse, serial ports, networking
capabilities, etc., and all seem to the DOS program to be exactly what
it would expect. This approach is also much cheaper that the
coprocessor approach, as there's no extra hardware to pay for.
Recently, Apple has made this market a bit more interesting by
introducing a product of their own, the Quadra
610 DOS compatible. This
is a Macintosh Quadra with a built-in coprocessor to allow it to run
both DOS and Macintosh software. It is somewhat less capable than
Orange Micro's solution, but for the $500 over what a Quadra would
normally cost, it's hard to argue with the prce.
One of the most exciting developments in this area that will occur
soon is the introduction of the PowerPC
based Macintosh. Up to now, all
Macintoshes run on the 68000 series of microcomputers. In April, Apple
will begin migrating the Macintosh line over to a new kind of processor,
called the PowerPC, which promises to provide perfomrance increases of
200%-400% over the current chips. In addition, work is well underway
that will allow these machines to run many different operating systems,
including DOS, Macintosh, Windows
NT, UNIX, and others, resulting in one
box that will run just about any software that's out there. The PowerPC
Macintoshes will use software emulation to do their magic, but since
their chips are so much faster than the existing ones, they should be
able to provide performance comparable to the older processors when
running code written specifically for them. Of course, code written
specifically for the PowerPC will race past that which has to rn in
emulation mode.
Though historically the worlds of DOS and Mac have been entirely
seperate, the major vendors have finally begun to acknowledge that most
environments are not solely Macintosh or solely PCs, but a combination
of the two. This has opened the door to an unprecedented degree of
interoperability between the two platforms, and has finally allowed us
to have our Mac and PC as well.
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