[www.cultofmac.com]

October 2, 1991: As the Cold War comes to an end, hell freezes over a second time as Apple and IBM agree to put aside their differences.

Having been bitter rivals for the past decade, the two tech giants host a press conference at the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco to unveil their new partnership. “We want to be a major player in the computer industry,” Apple CEO John Sculley says. “The only way to do that is to work with another major player.”

Apple and IBM’s rivalry kicked off in a big way with the launch of the IBM Personal Computer in August 1981. Despite welcoming IBM to the personal computing party in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, it didn’t take long for Apple to position Big Blue as public enemy No. 1.

The most obvious shot Apple took at IBM was with its 1984 Macintosh commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, which cast IBM in the role of Big Brother.

By the early 1990s, however, it was clear to Apple that Microsoft presented a bigger threat than IBM did. Sculley also came around to the fact that Apple’s major source of value was its software, not its hardware. In April 1991, he gave a demo to IBM engineers showing an Apple OS running on an IBM PS/2 Model 7 PC.

This led to the October Apple-IBM deal, in which two rivals agreed to work together. IBM would help Apple finish its “Pink” operating system (the one Apple engineers created to run on IBM’s computers). Plus, IBM would give Apple a license to use its PowerPC processor.

Ultimately, the only big news to come out of the deal was the arrival of Power Macs. (Although in 1993, the two companies did ship a collaborative emulation software package that let Mac users run software previously available only for IBM PCs.)

The switch from Motorola 68000 processors to PowerPC was one of only two times Apple would change its chip provider. The next time was when Steve Jobs oversaw the transition to Intel chips in 2005.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/06/2020 07:24AM by pRICE cUBE.

They got in just under the line with the "two times" comment.

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Quote
Filliam H. Muffman
They got in just under the line with the "two times" comment.

Depends on how you look at it, they said "Apple", not "Macintosh", so they're missing Apple's switch from 6502 to 68000 with the introduction of the Lisa and Macintosh.

Somewhat embarrassingly, it was only fairly recently that I connected the dots here:

PowerPC = PowerMac