
The Fallen Apple
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Engineering was also in for
a major shake-up. The Newton
team had been designing its
product around a little-known
chip from AT&T that was
optimized for running code
written in C, not Apple’s new
Ralph language. Apple had
already paid several million
to finance the design of the
chip when AT&T asked for
several million more to help
nish the chip’s development.
After conducting an assessment
of low-cost RISC (reduced
instruction set computing)
processors, Tesler concluded
that AT&T’s buggy chip carried inherent price/performance disadvantages.
As a result, on September 8, Tesler dumped ...