Apple Johnathon & Apple Macintosh II: Seperated at birth?

From: Louis Schulman <louiss_at_gate.net>
Date: Thu Jul 6 20:15:42 2000

The way you describe it, it sounds like the joint project
that Apple had with IBM for the PowerPC. The idea was to
develope a "microkernel" operating system, which provided
the first layer of services, and "personality" modules that
would go on top. Presumably, the Apple would have used a
Mac personality, while IBM would have used an OS/2
personality.

Of course, the project never went anywhere. The PowerPC
became the standard Mac with the MacOS, and IBM introduced
its own flop version of the PowerPC, which had a version of
OS/2 that was shelved just as it was supposed to be
released, and was replaced with a version of Windows NT.

Another case of vaporware that went nowhere.

Louis

On Fri, 07 Jul 2000 00:54:04 GMT, David Vohs wrote:

>I have read something at applefritter that intrigued me: that Apple was
>thinking about marketing a system known as the "Johnathon" (Successor the
>the Mac, perhaps?). The basic design was very similar to that of an Acorn
>RISC PC: You bought the base "module" (What OS that run? Mac OS?) as it was
>called, & you could buy additional modules that would allow you to run other
>operating systems. Unfortunately, Apple canned this computer because they
>thought that everybody would just buy the MS-DOS module.
>
>My question is: Was this the original concept for the Mac II, or is this
>something completely diffrent.
>____________________________________________________________
>David Vohs, Digital Archaeologist & Computer Historian.
>Home page: http://www.geocities.com/netsurfer_x1/
>
>Computer Collection:
>
>"Triumph": Commodore 64C, 1802, 1541, FSD-1, GeoRAM 512, MPS-801.
>"Leela": Macintosh 128 (Plus upgrade), Nova SCSI HDD, Imagewriter II.
>"Delorean": TI-99/4A, TI Speech Synthesizer.
>"Monolith": Apple Macintosh Portable.
>"Spectrum": Tandy Color Computer 3, Disto 512K RAM board.
>"Boombox": Sharp PC-7000.
>____________________________________________________________
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Received on Thu Jul 06 2000 - 20:15:42 BST

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