From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996 18:04:09 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Tim's Mac Tales
Message-ID: <ae2ed87a020210047b34@[205.199.118.202]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 11:50 PM 8/7/96, John Young wrote:

>What caught my eye in Tim's remarks about Apple was his continued use of
>Macs. Why was that enticing?

I have no idea why it would be enticing, inasmuch as I've covered this a
bunch of times. Though John is asking this as a joke, I'll pretend he's
serious. At least for a few paragraphs.

>It has to do with what hard-headed physicists know about hardware that
>soft-headed coders don't.

Amongst other things, an _operating system_ is not the same as a _CPU_. The
Macintosh OS happens to run, for historical reasons, on Motorola
processors, and DOS happens to run, for historical reasons, on Intel
processors. Other operatings systems, such as Unix, tend to run on various
processors.

Had history evolved slightly differently, a DOS-like OS could have been
dominant on Motorola CPUs, a Macintosh-like OS could have been dominant on
Intel CPUs (indeed, many would say this is what Windows 3.x and later are),
and so forth. Quibblers may jump in with the usual religious arguments
about segmented architectures, the orthogonality of the 68000 instruction
set, etc., but these points are tangential to the simple decisions about
Seattle Computer and Microsoft coming up with a CP/M-like OS for Intel
processors, and Apple committing to the Motorola family. (And recall that
windowing systems _did_ exist for the Intel CPU even back in the 80s...Unix
systems, including Sun's OS, ran on Intel CPUs.)

As several of my messages over the years have explained, including the one
sent out yesterday, the Macintosh visual metaphor was the closest to the
LISP machine I had been using while at Intel. I did buy an IBM PC in '83
(and an S-100 Sol in '78), running DOS. I even bought Windows 1.0, a truly,
totally, completely awful product! (Steve Ballmer of Microsoft admitted as
much in his interview on "Revenge of the Nerds.")

I looked closely at the Lisa in '83, but it was too expensive. The
Macintosh in '84 was priced better, but also lacked a few key things. But
by the time the Mac Plus arrived, I was ready to buy. That the CPU was a
$40 chip from Motorola rather than a $40 chip from Intel was not even a
consideration. (Intel bought Macs to do various graphics arts things, just
as I'm sure Motorola bought PCs to do various things.)

>
>So my curiosity: does Tim know Intel intel that we don't know, and can't
>tell it? More generally, do chip physicists know what crypto coders don't,
>about the covert features of those world-pervasive chips inside?

>
>Would Tim tell, could Tim disclose intel, what the world doesn't know about
>Intel, about what Intel's hard-headed Moore, the immigrant physicist,
>whispers in utmost secrecy to Microsoft's soft-headed Gates, the
>American-way coder? Is soft-hearted OS code the front for cold-hearted
>hardware spying?

I'm having my usual problems trying to parse this? Is this some sort of
rhyme, a la "a horse is a horse of course"?

Gordon Moore is not an immigrant physicist, not even an immigrant into
California. He was born about 40 miles north of where I now live.


>Maybe the most that Tim can tell without exposing Intel is that Tim uses
>Macs.

Indeed, I use Macs because Intel chips have those special NSA instructions
in them, like the Cray did. (Funny, we haven't had this thread here that I
can recall...it used to be a staple of sci.crypt in the late 80s.)

>
>(Hold on, Tim, this is the way I write after thirty years of grinding out
>grim technical reports.)
>

I suspected as much, John. Your TRs must be doozies. (TRP, he of The Whole
Sick Crew, used to hide from his officemates by placing a large sheet of
blueprint paper over his head as he did engineering drawing work at
Boeing.)

--Tyrone Slothrope