RealPC

~ the obituary ~

The box had Harold Lloyd on it. RealPC was an x86 emulator for Power Macintoshes, and it pretended to be a Pentium with MMX, in software, on a processor that had never seen an Intel instruction in its life. MS-DOS 6.22 came preinstalled, so the first thing you could do after the install was put a DOS game in the CD drive. Windows 98 was the practical ceiling, and only if you had RAM to give away, because the emulated PC had to share it with the Mac.

The lineage went back much further than the product. Insignia Solutions had written SoftPC in the late eighties and shipped it on Macs from 1987, which made it the first PC emulator the Mac ever had; bundled with Windows it was sold as SoftWindows. RealPC was the cheap end of that family, $79 against SoftWindows' several hundred, and it was the end Insignia kept the least interest in. In October 1999 the whole Macintosh line went to FWB Software, a disk utility house, which looked at the two products and decided RealPC was the one worth having. SoftWindows 98 for Mac was discontinued in 2001.

Then Apple moved to OS X and the emulator stayed where it was, running under system software that Apple had stopped caring about. FWB spent two years assuring customers an OS X version was on the way. In June 2003 a vice president finally put dates on it: a beta in July, boxes on shelves as early as August.

~ the case file ~

~ what you were actually buying ~

An emulator in 1997 was an argument about how slow you were willing to be. Every x86 instruction had to be read and rebuilt in PowerPC terms before anything happened on screen, which is why the requirements list reads like an apology: 16 MB of RAM at minimum, and 130 MB of disk if you wanted Windows 95 in there. It could convert Virtual PC disk images and run the operating system already installed inside them, which tells you exactly how the market worked. People bought the competitor first and arrived here afterward, carrying their Windows with them.

In 1997 I was thirteen and a year away from my first modem. A Macintosh was a thing I had seen in magazines, and a program whose entire purpose was to make an expensive Mac behave like the ordinary PC in everyone else's house is a very strange thing to want. Here the Mac was a design studio machine in Istanbul rather than something a family in Ankara put on a desk, and the problem RealPC solved was one that Turkish households had in reverse. We already had the PC, and what we were waiting on was the modem.

~ the letter from may ~

Microsoft bought Virtual PC from Connectix in February 2003 and so became the owner of Mac emulation as a business. In May a cease and desist letter arrived at FWB. The company talked about it publicly in June, calling it a setback and saying it had cost only a few weeks, and the Mac press wrote it up as a delay. There is no sign anyone outside FWB knew that the thing being delayed did not exist.

~ the books ~

Marko Kostyrko took over as chief executive that summer and started checking what the previous management had been saying. On 27 August 2003 he gave Macworld the answer in plain language: "After more thorough investigation and interviews with the previous staff, we have found that the development had not formally been started, and it appears not a single line of code has been written." He went further, which almost nobody does. "I am sorry to have to admit that apparently the company has been a party to vaporware."

The commercial reason underneath it was licensing. Keeping the emulation technology legal cost more than the product could earn, so FWB stopped and went back to disk utilities, which it later sold off too. Harold Lloyd kept hanging off the clock on boxes in discount bins for a few more years, holding on, in the only joke the product ever landed on purpose.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »