In the middle of the 1980s, Apple found itself with several options regarding the future of its computing platforms. The Apple II was the company’s bread and butter. The Apple III was pitched as an evolution of that platform, but was clearly doomed due to hardware and software issues. The Lisa was expensive and not selling well, and while the Macintosh aimed to bring Lisa technology to the masses, sales were slow after its initial release.
Those four machines are well known, but there was a fifth possibility in the mix, named the Jonathan. In his book Inventing the Future, John Buck writes about the concept, which was led by Apple engineer Jonathan Fitch starting in the fall of 1984.
↫ Stephen Hackett
So apparently, the Jonathan was supposed to be a modular computer, with a backbone you could slot all kinds of upgrades in, from either Apple or third parties. These modules would add the hardware needed to run Mac OS, Apple II, UNIX, and DOS software, all on the same machine. This is an incredibly cool concept, but as we all know, it didn’t pan out.
The reasons are simple: this is incredibly hard to make work, especially when it comes to the software glue that would have to make it all work seamlessly. On top of that, it just doesn’t sound very Apple-like to make a computer designed to run anything that isn’t from Apple itself. Remember, this is still the time of Steve Jobs, before he got kicked out of the company and founded NeXT instead.
According to Stephen Hackett, the project never made it beyond the mockup phase, so we don’t have many details on how it was supposed to work. It does look stunning, though.
Project spectre was ambitious and in line with the tech chief at the time JLG. He wanted to an apple cpu to have multiple cores long before it was even plasuible on x86, it is another case of “too soon.”
JLG is a visionary and provided apple with plenty of cool stuff (most shut down by Scully)
Apple even want so far to buy a purple cray megasystem to design the new cpu. It was never used for this purpose, but rather a very expensive way to desingn apple computers (and we all know the design was good, the plastics was awful, even for the time and most macs are falling apart)
JLG wen on to found Be.inc and he is today one of the richest persons in france.
Project Scorpius was the custom Apple multi-code CPU. And it never got past the paper study part.
Gasee had little to do with that. He did, however, created the project that led to Newton and by proxy ARM.
From what I was told, the Apple Cray was used mostly for mold/fluid dynamics simulations. Which is what those machines were commonly used for, and had the software for it. Nobody was doing CPU/Circuit simulations on a Cray at that time.
The Jonathan system makes me think of Thunderbolt and external enclosures for things like video cards or storage.
The whole end of Lisa was bizarre and tragic for collectors. Third parties resellers were willing to take them off apple’s hands but apple wanted to bury them in garbage dumps with guards to make sure nobody got them. They rather the brand new computers literally go to waste than having to compete with resellers of their own products.
It’s been a while since I watched the documentary, but it’s quite interesting…
“Lisa: Steve Jobs’ sabotage and Apple’s secret burial | FULL DOCUMENTARY”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZjbNWgsDt8
Yeah, a bunch of other companies have also done similar things. Which makes absolutely no sense to me.
At least donate it to a school district or any non-profit that has to sign a non-resell contract for at least x years. That has to be way cheaper than the whole effort of landfilling stuff.
They do it to mark those products as “discontinued” and get tax refund benefits. Don’t ask me how that works, but it does.
Sounds a lot like the BBC micro that actually did execute this concept successfully. It had an interface called “the tube” which let you add an array of different processors, everything from the humble Z80 so you could run CP/M right through to the first prototype ARM processor which was used to develop RISCOS on the BBC.