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| Author | The PowerMac 7100 and its codenames (Read 40371 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Bolkonskij
Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023 
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on: March 17, 2025, 12:23
Ran into this and found it interesting anecdotal knowledge: According to the book Apple Confidential by Owen W. Linzmayer, the Power Mac 7100 was initially code-named "Carl Sagan", after the famous astronomer of the same name. Who got to know about this from an article in Macweek. He protested against Apple using his name, even if only as a codename for the new machine, and the Apple engineers subsequently changed it to BHA, which - supposedly - stands for "Butt-Head Astronomer". Sagan heard about this and protested again, apparently this time with the help of a lawyer. Which got the 7100 another internal codename: LAW. Supposedly short for "laywers are wimps". Just checked it in MacTracker and all three codenames are listed there. Found it a fun story - hard to believe anything like that would be going on in Tim Cook's Apple these days. :-) |
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Last Edit: March 17, 2025, 12:25 by Bolkonskij
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wove
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1024 MB  Posts: 1363
Reply #1 on: March 17, 2025, 13:59
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Carl Sagan was very similar in. the 90s to Neil deGrasse Tyson today. Why people who work at night and stare into the sky become so popular is a great scientific curiosity to me. That tiff was reported at the time and I think left many shaking their heads. I think in the end Sagan took the big hit. Sagan was quite popular at the time. His books sold well and I think he was thought of at the time as a "great thinker". The incident showed him as a bit arrogant and more than a little petty. Sagan takes great umbrage at having a computer code named Sagan, and ended his reign of popularity known as BHA. Became sort of a proverb for "do not take yourself too seriously."
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ClassicHasClass
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32 MB Posts: 39
Reply #2 on: March 17, 2025, 20:58
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Sagan's objection was not (entirely) unreasonable, though. The initial x100 Macs all had codenames suggesting fraudulent science because the PowerPC was pretending to be a 68K (remember, the normal state of a Power Mac in the nanokernel is to be running 68K code). Thus, the 6100 had the codename of Piltdown Man (the famous fraudulent "missing link") and the 8100 was called Cold Fusion. By implication, this might have suggested Sagan ("billyuns and billyuns") was equally phony. It was still a stupid thing for him to do, however, and yet another wonderful example of the Streisand effect.
Last Edit: March 17, 2025, 21:00 by ClassicHasClass
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lauland
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512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!
Reply #3 on: March 18, 2025, 02:35
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OMG! You're right! I always thought very poorly of Sagan for being such a butt head...and never understood how an otherwise very intelligent person would take offense, instead of seeing it as an honor... But, dang, I hadn't heard about Piltdown man and Cold Fusion! I now see EXACTLY why he took it as an insult... It almost sounds like someone at Apple had it out for him, and that he'd interpret it that way...ie that they considered him a another "fraud" or pseudo-science. If that WASN'T what they'd meant, and they DID mean it as an honor, then it very poorly done...they really should have chosen a different product to name after him! Maybe they thought the code names would never "get out" into the public, but they were still Apple back then and they really should have known better!
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #4 on: March 18, 2025, 02:42
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That was from a time when Apple was much less secretive and still had a sense of whimsy. Everyone seemed to know the code names and there was always a hunt for easter eggs. Piltdown Man struck me as such a poor choice for a code name. I had never looked at the name in the perspective you list and only saw Piltdown Man a great hoax running for over 40 years. So anyway all I saw was, "Ah, great this whole PPC buzz is just a big hoax." Made a vow at the time to wait a few generations in before looking more closely at a PPC machine.
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Jatoba
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256 MB Posts: 270 System 9 Newcomer!
Reply #5 on: March 18, 2025, 08:43
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It should be pointed out though that Carl Sagan did not necessarily know nor realize the "fraud pattern" in the codenames, especially since various other codenames for other things inside Apple had nothing to do with scientific fraud. So I find it extremely unlikely, all things considered, that he complained at and sued Apple with any of this in mind. I also don't think he was someone who would be likely to know the "insides" of Mac OS, and make the 68k emulation connection with regards to PPC. That's IMO a massive stretch. (Incidentally, he was a fraud and should be called out for it, too. I wonder, though, if Apple's engineers themselves actually intended to suggest that.) Quote from: ClassicHasClass The initial x100 Macs all had codenames suggesting fraudulent science because the PowerPC was pretending to be a 68K (remember, the normal state of a Power Mac in the nanokernel is to be running 68K code). Was this ever officially being stated as the reason somewhere? Afterall, they never hid that PPC Macs ran almost everything in a 68k emulator in the beginning with System 7.1.2, and without there being such hiding/deceit, it cannot really be called "fraud". Also because all PPC Macs, even then, ran PPC programs fully natively, providing all the speed boosts as advertised. For this reason, I'm not so sure they necessarily were going for a "frauds codenaming pattern" for the x100 Macs all the way up to "Carl Sagan" (AKA "BHA" AKA "LAW"). But I'm open to the thought that maybe they did mean to suggest, at least, that Mac OS (at the time) was running mostly under emulation, if nothing else, at least with the "Piltdown Man" codename, as that, rather than "fraud", can also be taken as "putting together unrelated pieces, and having them come forward as a single thing", such as with running some parts in native PPC, and other parts emulated 68k instructions, yet it is all under the same "Mac OS". ------ Another thing... And slightly offtopic as this concerns versions of Mac OS after Apple moved on beyond the x100 Macs at that point: Can we still say "the normal state of a Power Mac in the nanokernel is to be running 68K code" after the release of Mac OS 8.6? The nanokernel was rewritten at that point, by René A. Vega, and dubbed the "nanokernel v2". One of its highlights is that the kernel itself is even entirely preemptively-multitasking, and I find it hard to believe the "natural state" of that is still 68k. But I could be mistaken.
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ClassicHasClass
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32 MB Posts: 39
Reply #6 on: March 19, 2025, 04:42
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I don't think Sagan thought about it as deeply as you have.  That said, in fairness, Sagan did not appear to be aware of the connection in his *first* letter, in which he wrote "My endorsement is not for sale. For this reason, I was profoundly distressed to see ... Apple's announcement of a new Mac bearing my name." (Apple Confidential 2.0, p49-50) Sagan subsequently sued over defamation of character, though this could have been as much to the Butt-Head Astronomer epithet as anything else, and the judgment references that. He lost that suit and sued again, this time for using his name in the first place, and it would be difficult to credibly assert he wasn't aware of the other code names by then. He lost that too, but Apple was concerned about the bad press, and made an apology to him as a settlement so he would go away.The "fraud" in this case is obviously not literal, but these code names are well-documented. I'm sure Apple's lawyers will never let any written reason why Carl Sagan (or the others) was selected see the light of day, of course, but hearsay from others at Apple seems to confirm the story (see, among others, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32041795 ). The situation is indeed a bit more complex with 8.6. In an Old World Mac, the v2 nanokernel is not active until later in boot, but even in a New World Mac the nanokernel still ends initialization by jumping into the 68K emulator. You can even see this with a logging ROM like that with QEMU; it terminates with the message "Reset system - Into the 68K fire:"
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