Would You Like A Windows Box With That?

[xthread]

Apple seems to have figured out how to make hay out of Vista being late.
Since the Intel-based Macs were announced, we've been making bets on when people would figure out how to boot Windows on a Mac (something that theoretically neither Apple or Microsoft were going to support, and which Microsoft appeared to have some very good reasons not to), and whether Apple would support the effort. About two months ago, a couple of programmers claimed a bounty for having made Windows XP boot on current x86 Macs, and the question shifted to 'now that you can run, how will the OS vendors respond. Yesterday, Apple answered 'yes, please, feel free to run Windows on this hardware, in addition to MacOS,' by releasing Boot Camp, a boot loader that lets you boot your x86 Mac up as either environment (and presumably lets you share some amount of disk space between them). However, you're still not running both environments at the same time, which is really going to cut into your ability to play Temple of Elemental Evil at the same time that you've got your entire Mac environment up and running. Or your ability to run Visio and Project while you've got the rest of the Mac up, something that I often want to do.
This morning someone at the office sent around the next step, though, an app from some people called Parallels, that let's you run the Windows environment (or any other x86 environment, actually - Linux, NetBSD, Solaris...) at the same time, essentially in a window within the Mac environment. Voila, I can get my Visio, my Project, my Civ IV, my Temple of Elemental Evil, at the same time that I get a real (Unix) operating system and a reasonable desktop window system with apps designed by somebody that cares about them working well.
Now to figure out how (when) to fit a replacement laptop into the budget...
Note: Yes, I know, BootCamp and Parallels are only in Beta. So's GMail, get over it

Comments

[ocicat.livejournal.com]

When I worked at Apple, my main project was a 486 chip expansion card for PowerMacs. They let you hotswap between Mac and Windows, and it actually worked really, really well. But they only made a few thousand of them - when they sold out, they never made more.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

That would have predated StarTrek?

[ocicat.livejournal.com]

Predating "StarTrek: Enterprise", yes.

Actually, this was in Apples dark ages, just before Steve Jobs came back to the company.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

StarTrek was a project doing something similar back in, hmm, 1996? 1995? Something like that...

[ocicat.livejournal.com]

This was in fact 1994.

[ckd]

We had one of those at my last job. It was actually quite handy, since it meant we could use Retrospect to back up the disk image of the DOS partition even before they started supporting Windows, and only 95 at that....

[unseelie23.livejournal.com]

I have one of those in my closet still. :) I always thought it was cool that we were able to make sure that the drive images for those DOS cards worked with Virtual PC.