![]() “Fitch’s concept called for the backplane and track to support book-shaped modules, each containing circuit boards and chips for running the Mac OS, Apple II software, DOS, Windows or Unix operating systems, plus other modules for connecting disk drives, modems and networking hardware all plugged into the same track. ‘But rather than do a standard motherboard configuration, I designed a backplane that contained the power supply and a few ROM chips in the base… I/O connectors on the back, and a track on top that connected directly to the bus (the backbone of the computer, which functions as a high-speed data highway).’ ‘For weeks I had been thinking about a small computer that users could put in their living room and slowly build into a full-blown machine as their needs increased,’ said Fitch. Digging back into Paul Kunkel’s gorgeous 1997 book, “ Apple Design: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group,” I re-read the passages on the “Jonathan” concept computers built at Apple in the mid-Eighties and designed by John Fitch: The Boot Camp announcement reminded me of the past ’daily trials’ that Apple engineers have endured while building spectacularly unexpected products. Don’t we expect more from Apple, a company that is practically synonymous with systems innovation? Booted Predecessor to Boot Camp Still, it strikes me as reaching for only low-hanging fruit: making Windows available from a dual-boot prompt on Intel hardware is only minimally impressive from a technology standpoint. I still hold out a lot of hope for its eventual maturity, but it’s still a long way off.īoot Camp, though it’s being released today only in public beta form, is here and now, and it presumably has the more or less full commercial (if not technical) support of Apple Computer itself, which makes it dramatically more viable than Darwine. There’s a Macintosh-specific version of WINE called Darwine, and it has been making steady progress. This has been the focus of the open source WINE project, which seeks to give us the world of Windows software without Windows. This means launching programs written expressly for the Windows operating system alongside those written expressly for the Mac OS - getting the applications without the overhead of the frankly unwanted operating system, essentially. When Apple moved to Intel processors, my original hope was for native support for Windows applications inside the Mac OS itself. ![]() For the many users like myself who often need to work on two different platforms at once, it’s still not an ideal solution, nor does it truly mitigate the need to actually have two physical, separate computers on our desks. Through the lens of time and productivity, this is a costly decision-making process, and I can’t imagine swapping back and forth between Windows and Mac OS X more than once or twice a day. Boot Camp does nothing to mitigate the fact that dual booting is incredibly inconvenient, that a user must first make a modal shift in hardware to move from one operating system to the other. ![]() While I’m ecstatic about the idea of essentially getting two computers for the price of one with my next Macintosh purchase, I think dual booting is short of the ideal that I had in mind. On a third pass, a bit more sobriety nibbled away at my excitement. Every day.” He’s twice the man I would be in that situation, to say the least. His response was, “Every day is a trial, man. My second reaction was to email a friend who actually works inside the Apple Computer ‘mothership’ in Cupertino, CA, and ask him how he could ever keep a secret like Boot Camp - indeed how he manages to keep all of Apple’s juicy, expletive-inspiring product secrets - to himself. The world outside of Apple’s many legions of overboard devotees seems to think so, too: this afternoon, the Boot Camp story made it into the prized top-left slot on our home page at (I swear that I have no influence over such decisions), and when the market closed today, AAPL was up by over six dollars. syndrome that’s dogged the company like a lingering cough for years and years. This is a momentous move for Apple, something representing a real break from the nagging case of N.I.H. Here was my first reaction to Apple’s announcement that they are now officially enabling, if not supporting, the ability to boot Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system on their new, Intel-based hardware through a software utility they call Boot Camp: “Holy shit!”
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