If only IBM had come out with a PowerPC Thinkpad that ran MacOS in 1995 like IBM and Apple jointly promised was the whole point of CHRP: the Common Hardware Reference Platform. But nooooo, they thought all the cool kids wanted to run WARP, aka OS/2, aka "Half an Operating System".

The great thing about the Thinkpads of 24 years ago was that they were so well built and modular and user serviceable that many of them would still be working even now. They were so much more solid and dependable than anything Apple ever produced in their entire history, and especially their shitty PowerPC laptops of that time period. It would have been the perfect Powerbook, but from IBM. But no, IBM and Apple couldn't stomach running Apple software, and Apple couldn't stomach their software running on robust reliable repairable hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Plat...

>Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) is a standard system architecture for PowerPC-based computer systems published jointly by IBM and Apple in 1995. Like its predecessor PReP, it was conceptualized as a design to allow various operating systems to run on an industry standard hardware platform, and specified the use of Open Firmware and RTAS for machine abstraction purposes. Unlike PReP, CHRP incorporated elements of the Power Macintosh architecture and was intended to support the classic Mac OS and NetWare, in addition to the four operating systems that had been ported to PReP at the time (Windows NT, OS/2, Solaris, and AIX).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

>Open Firmware, or OpenBoot in Sun Microsystems parlance, is a standard defining the interfaces of a computer firmware system, formerly endorsed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It originated at Sun, and has been used by Sun, Apple, IBM, ARM and most other non-x86 PCI chipset vendors. Open Firmware allows the system to load platform-independent drivers directly from the PCI card, improving compatibility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

>The name stands for "Operating System/2", because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 (PS/2)" line of second-generation personal computers.

IBM should have used this for the OS/2 theme song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ_03vnjJkA

My previous comments on CHRP:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438823

>At the time, IBM was making CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) PowerPC Thinkpads, which nobody could think of anything to do with because all they did was run OS/2, when everybody actually wanted them to run MacOS (but IBM refused to admit that was a good idea). That would have been the best of both worlds, back when Apple and IBM were in bed together (i.e. Kaleida, Taligent).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18393341

>CHRP was the Common Hardware Reference Platform for the PowerPC, which IBM and Apple collaborated on. IBM made a CHRP PowerPC Thinkpad that ran OS/2, but out of pride refused to sell one that ran MacOS, which kind of missed the whole point of CHRP. IBM just couldn't imagine why anyone would want to run anything but OS/2 on them.

>I would have loved to have a MacOS powerbook running on wonderful Thinkpad hardware, because Apple's laptop hardware was pretty crappy at the time. It would have been the best of both worlds, but it was never to be.