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Looking Back at MacOS on x86
nutt writes "The MacSpeedZone's Apple Confidential column has a good Article which looks back at what happened to Apple's Star Trek project, (which was to "boldly go where no Mac had gone before." ... Intel hardware.) Its a very good read, and makes one wonder where Star Trek is now? The Article says the NDA's on the engineers was lifted in late 1997. It would be _very_ interesting if something like this could get out to the OSS.
Note: Darwin currently compiles on Intel hardware."
My friend, I hate to burst your bubble over there, but -- and I am not saying this to start a flamewar -- Apple hardware is fucking expensive. Not just plain expensive, it is FUCKING expensive.
Case in point: I am moving to a new company in a few weeks, and I was told that I could choose between an Apple and an Intel clone. Just out of curiosity, I checked up on some prices; an apple machine with all the trimmings came out to over 8 THOUSAND dollars. That's without the 4000 dollar display! A comparable machine (equals 1Ghz, 512 megs ram, yada yada) on the x86 architecture runs about 2500 dollars less.
I'm sorry to say that an apple machine is just too bloody expensive with too little gain. Parts are expensive to replace, support is hell to get, here in Israel at least, and the initial price is too high.
While the Apple machines look nice (and they do!), I don't want to pay that much for that little. Not only that, but MacOS X isn't out yet, and I wouldn't want to work on OS 9. (It's just as crash happy as Windows, don't let anyone tell you otherwise).
Clock for clock, the G4 may wack a p3/4/athlon, but dollar for dollar, that Apple machine is getting smacked in the hoopla like nobodies business.
(Don't even start me on the iMacs, no Graphic designer, decent or otherwise, would work on that machine.
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
Apple doesn't have to release a version that runs on *every* generic Intel box out there - they can make Apple-branded boxes that use Intel hardware.
One of the main reasons Mac OS is stable is that Apple controls the hardware environment. A PC box can have a near-infinite combination of random hardware of varying quality - half the time when my Windows box goes flakey it's the crappy sound card (or whatever) I got at a CompUSA free after rebate sale.
So, to compete with Windows in megahertz-hype marketing wars, Apple could bring out their own cool Intel or Athlon based machines. The best of both worlds, so to speak.
Soupwizard
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Twelve Step "How to Mountain Bike" Program:
Step One: Falling and Hurting Yourself A Great Deal
That's like saying Mitsubishi would be monopolistic if they only ship Eclipses with their own stock stereo.
Apple considers their product a combination of OS and hardware. Big deal. You can delete the contents of your Mac's hard-drive and install Linux if you'd prefer. Heaven forbid they decide what is in their own product.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Don't worry about it :) you PC guys so often are! One gets used to it :)
DR DOS.com and DR DOS.org have more information on DR DOS.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
> and most were forced to write detailed
> specifications and white papers instead of
> concentrating on writing code.
Even though reducing Mac hardware sales could have been a decisive reason not to carry on the Star Trek project, I still think it also lost much of its inertia because of such a constraint.
Big projects usually involve lots of Quality Insurance features which have a negative impact on people's motivation:
- Lots of paperwork to do prevent coder from focussing on what they are here for (coding, yep...).
- Dividing the project tasks in subcategories remove its role's transversality.
- Innovation is led by initiative. Allocating some specific subtask to a coder is a right way to reduce the global vision of the project it otherwise would have had, hence their opportunity to share their visions laterally across the project hierarchy instead of up then down.
- BTW, increasing the project staff increases the costs and also reduces each bonus part. this is not that good for motivation.
So, with a few people coding there could still have been this sparkling emulation which would have let them do some amazing stuff.Each time I was confronted to a similar situation we had the same problem.
Solving this issue is a choice to make:
Quality or Innovation ?
Securing or Pioneering ?
This is a manichean problem, there's no long-term compromise and Star Trek may have made its way if coders had not lost their motivation doing administrative tasks.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Um, MacOS 7 didn't do memory protection nor preemptive multitasking, right?
Nor does Windows 3.x, 9x. It doesn't support true preemptive multitasking nor a real memory protection model in order to maintain backward compatibility; everything runs in ring 0. It's true that MacOS 7/8/9 shares these limitations with Microsoft's Win9x/ME brethren. However, MacOS has a far superior interface to Windows (INHO). I'll give but one flagrant example:
Windows 3.x abstracted the filesystem away from users through the use of "Program Groups", which had no relation to the filesystem whatsoever. For this reason, many Windows users never learned basic filesystem concepts, such as directory hierarchies. This model continued in Win9x through the use of the "start" button, even though explorer provided access to the filesystem. To this day I know many Windows users who have NO IDEA what the difference is between a directory and a file, and don't care. This means that when they lose files in the filesystem they have no way to find them again.
MacOS represents the filesystem as a set of folders within folders. Let's not even get into a debate on the superiority of HFS to FAT... filesystem metadata support under HFS is so superior to FAT it's just a joke.
That said, I won't consider buying a Mac until they release OS X. I am a UNIX weenie and have been using UNIX since the '80s. NeXTStep is probably the best operating environment I've ever used.
Finally, even given that your argument were true: how does this change Microsoft's anti-competitive and exclusionary licensing behavior with the hardware integrators. Are you arguing that because Win9x has "preemptive multitasking" that Apple should not have been given entry into the market?
Am I mistaken, or did Bill call Intel Chicken?
the boy named Griff asked "What's matter, McFly? Chicken?"
There is something of an analogue to nice, a shareware (uncrippled) utility called "Peek-a-Boo" (it's also an analogue to ps, top, and kill). It's not preemptive multitasking on the Mac, of course (except between threads), but I gather it's possible to modify the number of ticks a background app gets because they all go through the same event handler loop, and that loop can be patched. What can't be changed is the scheduling for the *frontmost* application, which always gets as much or as little time as it wants. You can find Peek-a-Boo ST 1.5 at http://www.clarkwoodsoftware.com/
Virtual PC would lose a significant portion of their business. People won't need to virtually run Windows under MacOS anymore, as they would be able to simply dual boot their system. You need Windows? Reboot.
Virtual PC is too much of a Mac selling point for them to allow this to go by quietly. I expect to hear something from them.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I think it's likely that MS would have killed Office for the Mac. Remember, MS threatened to kill Office once before that, too. MS threatened to kill Office if Scully didn't give them the "perpetual license" to the look and feel of the Mac for Windows. The Mac was pretty vulnerable to not having applications at the time, and Apple conceded. (see Linsmeyer's book, "The Mac Bathroom Reader")
This resulted in the major reason why Apple later lost their look/feel lawsuit against MS. Apple gained the dubious honor of Microsoft admitting that they copied the look/feel in a private document, Microsoft got a license to steal from Apple wholesale for Windows 95, and the consumers gained a true innovation in computers: the trash can being renamed the recycle bin!
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Finally, even given that your argument were true: how does this change Microsoft's anti-competitive and exclusionary licensing behavior with the hardware integrators. Are you arguing that because Win9x has "preemptive multitasking" that Apple should not have been given entry into the market?
I never said that, I just didn't agree with the statement that MacOS 7 was superior to Windows 9x
"in just about every way imaginable".
-jfedor
I happen to like having that Apple logo plastered all over my cpu and monitor. It lets me know that no matter what, I've got good hardware inside that box; Hardware that is compatible and works properly with the OS.
Personally, I think Apple is wrong to believe that hardware sales would be incredibly hurt w/ a port of the OS to intel. Certainly they may shrink a little, and almost certainly wouldn't grow, but there are a lot of users like myself that would continue to buy it because we need that power and that stability.
Anyway that is my two cents. My new G4 should be here soon.
*nothing clever to say here*
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
SMP makes alot of sense in other areas too, if you've ever seen an Origin at work you know what I mean. I dont know what you are getting at by talking about realtime linking of core OS files. Do you want Windows or Linux to run on one processor with MacOS on the other? The problem lies in system bandwidth. Multiple processors provide more protessor time per second but don't usually provide faster data throughput. The limiting factor is the system bus, each processor is sharing the 100 or 133 mhz of bus clock. It would be entirely too unstable for two OS's to run without dedicated hardware for each (like the old Power Macs used to do with PC cards).
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
My Win 98 box is pretty stable and fairly quick on load times, especially IE5. Windows runs well if you know how to use it and don't expect it to do the impossible. Apple producing the hardware and OS is not bad business, the hardware is theirs afterall. Why isn't SGI chided for their old machines running IRIX which they produced or someone tell Sun they ought to stop packaging Solaris on their hardware or else you Linux fanatics will do something crazy.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The OS running a computer does not mean shit in the real world. You may have religious devotion to a certain kernel and library base or just version of a certain kernel but in the real world where people need to do work, the OS means shit. The OS is for running the hardware, it is what takes your high level commands and smashes them down into something silicon circuits can understand. Porting OS X to x86 hardware would not be all too difficult. The problem lies in where the real work gets done, the applications. Linux could be the best OS ever but if a company or individual needs or wants a program not available on Linux, they won't regard it much if at all. This is what is rarely understood when I see this shit about OS X being ported to x86 or some other chipset. As it stands, OS X will be running on G3 and G4 processors and on standard configuration Macs. If a company wants to write a video editing suite or office suite, they know what hardware they'll have available and also know which special things they can add due to the G4's vector processor. How many programs do you see for Windows with SSE, MMX, or 3DNow! instructions embedded in them? Not a whole lot huh. With the Wintel PC market it is next to impossible to know what sort of configuration to expect so you throw out some lowest common denominators and hope for the best. No one would program anything for OS X on x86 hardware, there is just too much to chance and too many possible configurations available. OS X's port to x86 is also beset by problems with drivers. Just count how many times you've had trouble finding Linux or Windows drivers for a piece of hardware, times that by 20 and you can imagine how difficult said process would be to find OS X drivers. Stop bitching and expecting things to be ported to every piece of electronics ever invented, I'm not boycotting the fact that I can't run Palm OS on an ENIAC.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Actually, there is a special database (the Desktop DB). It's just updated automatically, so most people never need to know about it (especially since it doesn't tend to get corrupted like it used do in the earlier days of System 7). This is possible because of the underlying architectural decision to use unique application "creator" types and filetypes that aren't part of the filename, and the higher-level objects and tools that are built on those concepts (bundle resources etc).
It's also not true that there aren't absolute paths stored - there are. But they're a fallback, and they're not stuck with silly drive letters (or with changeable mount points, which is weakness of absolute symbolic links on Unix): Changes can be repaired automatically because file aliases and "alis" resources store multiple, redundant methods of finding a target, and the Alias Manager tries them successively when one fails. There are open file ID's (somewhat equivalent to inodes), folder IDs in the B*tree (equivalent to pretty much nothing on UFS or ext2fs), volume names, volume partition IDs and device types for when a volume has been renamed, and file names, type/creator info, and yes, paths for when the other methods fail. If something changes and a file can't be found the other methods are used to find it, and when that succeeds the alis resource is updated with the new, fresh information (so the path or whatever was used won't be needed next time and redundancy is restored).
All of this means that I can rename a file and the link doesn't break, because paths aren't the only method or even the first one used - but alternately I can trash a file or an entire application folder (say with an upgraded version of an app) and replace it with one of the same name *in the same path* and the link still doesn't break, even though the old file ID is gone (the path is used to find the new one). Only when all of these tricks are exhausted with no joy do you have to see the "delete/fix manually" dialog. It's a pretty good system, but it's not yet fully clear how some parts of it will work under Mac OS X and on UFS filesystems. NeXT-style app and folder bundles can provide a lot of it, and there was an interesting article by Fred Sanchez linked to from slashdot on the subject a while back.
Not only that, but back around 1984-1985, Microsoft threatened to pull the plug on Excel for Macintosh if Apple went ahead and released some kind of " Visual Basic " avant la lettre for Macintosh, which would have made developping visual, event-driven apps for the Mac very easy.
Apple killed the " Visual Basic ". And "got" Excel.
Apple machine that I would work with
------------------------------------
2 500Mhz G4
512Meg SDRAM
2 36 GB Hard drives
NO DISPLAY
DVD-ROM
2 Rage 128 PCI cards (about the same price as a Matrox dualhead..)
No Modem
Standard keyboard, mouse, software, etc.
Support
=================
TOTAL = $6248
Dell machine that I would work with
-----------------------------------
Dual 800Mhz Xeons
512 Megs RDRAM
Matrox G400 Dualhead
2 36Gb HD
Windows 2000 (no option to not select!)
No monitor
12X DVDROM
Service, keyboard, mouse, etc.
==============================
TOTAL = $6027
I guess I was overzealous in my attack on Apple. Hehe.
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
This is a ridiculous argument on it's face simply because MaxOS X is a completely redesigned OS based on Mach and BSD, not the original MacOS codebase. That Apple isn't (formally) supporting older PowerPC hardware is no surprise, though I bet that getting the core OS to run on most PowerMacs won't be terribly difficult. Look, I've never bought a Mac. The last computer I bought from Apple was a II/e, so don't think I'm biased in Apple's favor -- but I think your argument simply doesn't hold water.
I have to point out that as of two years ago, Apple has been working to gradually remove all non-essential non-standard hardware from their computers, beginning with the mice and keyboards. If I take the mouse and keyboard from my iMac and plug it into a Win98 box, it'll say "Windows has detected new hardware and is installing drivers", make me click a dozen OK buttons, and then it'll work just fine. Only one button on the mouse, and the Alt key is in a slightly odd place, but otherwise it's fine. Similarly, I could take (say) a Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer, plug it into my iMac, download and install the driver s, and go play Unreal Tournament.
Apple has removed their non-standard ADB interface, their non-standard 8-pin mini-DIN serial ports, and their DB-15 monitor connector, and (unfortunately) the on-board SCSI controller that most Windoze lusers wouldn't recognize if it bit them. They've added USB (marketed heavily by Intel and Microsoft), FireWire (IEEE 1394, compatible with Sony's i.Link), AirPort (IEEE 802.11b, compatible with Lucent's WaveLan), switched to standard HD-15 SVGA, switched to an ATAPI DVD-ROM and ATA/66 hard drive (to be ATA/100 in a few months), and they come with a v.90 modem (a real Linux-compatible hardware modem, unlike most PCs these days) and 10/100 Ethernet (with gigabit optional). What's non-standard about that?
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I thought that originally Apple wanted developers to use either Java or Objective C to code for Rhapsody/OS X, but when they balked, they (Apple) focused on cleaning on the Mac OS API, which ended up creating "Carbon". Correct?
Correct. Apple's previous management wanted companies like Adobe to rewrite all their software in Objective-C. Jobs (perhaps with influence from people like John Warnock) realized this was a Bad Idea. Apple then canceled Rhapsody, took what was left of it and shipped it as Mac OS X Server/Darwin. Around the same time, Apple announced Mac OS X and Carbon.
Apple would love people to use Cocoa (Java/Objective-C) APIs, but Apple had to build a brige for people that had 15 years of Mac OS C code lying around. That bridge is Carbon. Carbon is basically a cleanup of all the Mac OS APIs. Apple has bolted this subset of APIs onto Mac OS X/Mach. According to Apple, most Mac apps are already 90% Carbon compliant. That extra 10% are old, crusty APIs that should no longer be used. Once an application is Carbon compliant, it can run "natively" on Mac OS X, as well as Mac OS 9.x (and perhaps 8.x) if CarbonLib is installed.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
VMWare is x86-only, but there are other emulators for other platforms (such as SheepShaver for PPC, inside of which you could run VirtualPC on Mac OS).
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The new $799 iMacs are out; more expensive than a comparable PC but the cheapest Mac Apple's ever released.
If you REALLY like beige, simply buy an old beige G3 from someplace like PowerMax, or get a newer G3 or G4 and transplant it into a standard ATX case.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The reason apple doesn't port their OS is because that would kill their main source of revenue: hardware sales. Technically there's no reason why we can't run Mac OS on a PC (just like why there's no technical reason why we can't run windows 2000 on a G4). So the reasons why we can't do that anyway are of political/economical nature.
This is not true. In theory any hardware can run any software. In practice its much more complex than that. On problem is endianness - Intel and Motorola processors store bits in different orders in memory. Unfortunately traditional Mac OS has thousands of hardcoded assumptions about the endianness of its processor. Changing these in a consistent fashion is a huge task, and even if you got it all right, it would introduce incompatabilities with existing software. This is just one example of the sort of problem you'll face porting Mac OS to different hardware.
The bottom line is that porting an OS and maintaining binary compatibility with applications is prohibitively expensive (thus the failure of the Star Trek project). This is genuinely a technical barrier.
None of this applies to Mac OS X, which is designed from the ground up to be portable between platforms. In that case the reasons Apple won't port it are commercial, not technical.
Sailing over the event horizon
Speed Doubler was an enhanced 68K emulator for PowerPC. Not all Mac apps would be open-source; they'd have to run 68K binaries some time (68K Mac binaries were very common back then before the age of PowerPC). This Intel-based Mac OS would require emulation of the 68K CPU in order to run popular Macintosh software.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
The reason apple doesn't port their OS is because that would kill their main source of revenue: hardware sales. Technically there's no reason why we can't run Mac OS on a PC (just like why there's no technical reason why we can't run windows 2000 on a G4). So the reasons why we can't do that anyway are of political/economical nature.
I think it's a pitty mac os X will never run on intel. I'm unhappy with both linux (no decent UI) and windows (decent UI but unstable). Mac OS X seems like a winner in this area, stable, decent UI from the company that practically invented the concept of a UI, runs MS Office (killer app for any desktop environment), runs internet explorer (note I'm actually writing this in a mozilla nightly build) and runs unix apps and development tools. However, should apple ever port Mac Os X, there would be no technically sound reason to buy apple hardware anymore (at least not at the prices they currently sell it).
Jilles
That's easy to say that Apple lost "world domination" if they had only shipped the Mac OS on Intel. I'm sure Microsoft would have sat back and let them do it, too. If Apple had released something like that, Microsoft would have just pulled the plug on Microsoft Office for the Mac, and guaranteed that people would have stuck with them anyway. They've done that sort of thing before when they threatened to kill Office for the Mac if Apple didn't adopt Internet Explorer. Then Apple would have been left with having to compete their hardware platform with commodity hardware from Intel clones without Microsoft's tepid support.
I'll admit that putting the Mac OS on Intel would have gone a long way towards acceptance of the Mac because people wouldn't have to invest in hardware to try out the system. However, Apple would have suffered the same problem as they did with the later clones. The Macintosh is an integration between hardware and software, and running the software on generic hardware waters down the Mac quite a bit. With that, the Mac would lose a lot of its distinction, and I don't that would have helped Apple's business any.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
MacOS was clearly superior to Windows 3.x. Hell, MacOS 7 was superior to Windows 95/98 in just about every way imaginable. That it was never ported and sold as a product may be a success and notch in Microsoft's belt, but it's one of the best examples of how Microsoft's (mis)behavior hurt consumers, and in so doing damaged the American economy. When your clueless office-mate asks you "how did Microsoft's practices hurt me?" you can point to the MacOS on Intel that never was and say "here's something you might have wanted that Microsoft made damn certain you couldn't get."
And that's NOT a level playing field...
[Replying to my own postings .. pfeh!]
I'd almost forgotten about MAE - the Mac Application Environment. This was a MacOS 7.5.3 emulator for HP-UX, and was around in the early-mid '90s. Apple officially dropped it in 1998. OK - it's not x86, but it *did* run on PA-RISC
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
there were sparc laptops, the sparcbooks
Consider that it was Bill Gates, in 1985, who approached Apple management first about them needing to enter the clone market, and he had several big manufacturers lined up. Apple Refused.
Microsoft then started work on Windows, and eventually succeeded in creating a graphical environment within which to run their applications.
Furthermore, Gates prefered the Motorola architecture, which explains that statement.
Make no mistake about it - it was Apple's arrogance that created Windows, so to speak, more specifically John Sculley's lack of brains.
Harry
I did try BeOS, nice OS but to bad that none of the kind of apps I need are available in a sufficiently evolved state (browser, wordprocessor, email client). I will retry it if a new version comes out or if more apps become available for it (mozilla hint hint).
Jilles
I'd bet that Apple's 68K Emulator was used heavily in Star Trek. MacOS is laden with non-portable 68K assembly and pascal code. In the early days of the PPC switch, 90% of the OS was running in emulation, including such critical bits as the SCSI and Networking subsystems. Even today, they haven't shipped a 100% native OS, and won't until OSX.
If you thought System 7.1.2 on a Performa 6100 was slow, now imagine it on the average low rent 486SX-33 of the day. Ow.
Of course, doing a FAT-style transition to x86 would have been possible, but from a marketing standpoint it would be stupid. "Port to Intel", "Port to PPC", "Support the 68K installed base". Most software companies would probably have done nothing, and Apple would have been forced to make 060 machines.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
However, should apple ever port Mac Os X, there would be no technically sound reason to buy apple hardware anymore (at least not at the prices they currently sell it).
Answer: AltiVec. The PowerPC G4 processor used in all current desktop Macintosh computers (Power Mac, Cube, iMac) is twice as fast as Pentium II/III even without AltiVec, but AltiVec provides a sh*tload of 128-bit vector power for Photoshop filters. And there's no x86 frontend overhead on the PowerPC (like there is on the Pentium II/III and Athlon, both of which run x86 in hard emulation) so more of the die can be used for power instead of bassackward compatibility.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
As the article hints at, it would make no sense for Apple to release an Intel version of the MacOS, because all of the existing Mac software has been compiled for a PowerPC (or a Motorola 68K series). The Star Trek project mentioned in the article is source-compatible, not binary-compatible, so every software manufacturer would have to recompile all of their code for the x86, and some would have problems, and many just wouldn't bother. The biggest issue would not be with the major applications like Photoshop and Excel (I have no doubt Apple could talk Adobe and Microsoft into supporting any new type of MacOS they come out with) but the thousands of free, shareware, or small commercial applications that people wouldn't bother to recompile.
When Apple switched from the 68K to the PowerPC a few years ago, not only was the PowerPC many times faster and able to emulate the 68K in real time, but it was the only significant change to the hardware, so many programs which accessed low-level MacOS hardware on the 68K still worked on the PowerPC. Also, Intel/PC hardware is too varied. Remember how long it's taken Linux to get support for all of the different PC hardware out there?
If Apple had continued to develop this, improving stability and porting more software to the platform, then M$ may not be in the dominant position it is today. This would also mean that the whole personal computing world could be focused on cheap x86 technology, rather than being fragmented betwen two different architectures
We would also have a lack of real choice. The beauty of nice, standardized Mac hardware is that it is far more likely to just work then hardware in the x86 world. I like to have that option available to me rather than being stuck in a situation where you have to buy x86 if you want a computer.
Besides, look at all the standards that Apple pioneered and eventually brought to the x86 marketplace: 3.5" floppy drives, built-in ethernet, SCSI, affordable/practical wireless networking, software power control, FireWire. Heck, it even did a lot to popularize USB for Intel. It's amazing to me that even to this day that most x86 machines don't come with ethernet built in, yet almost all Apple machines (even laptops) have had that for years and years. Additionally, Apple's now shipping gigabit ethernet standard on the MP G4s.
No, I contend that it's a good thing we have the Mac hardware platform. It's brought real choice and innovation to the market.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Just running the PPP dialer and netscape was enough to crash it every few hours of use. Now its running linux, and its rock solid, so it evidently is not a hardware problem.
I would expect this type of behavior out of Mac OS 7.x, or perhaps even 8.x. I would certainly not expect it out of Mac OS 9. Assuming you are running some Mac OS 9.x version, and you are consistently crashing "every few hours," then there is something wrong -- and I don't think you should be so quick to assume that your experience mirrors that of the rest of the userbase. If my G3 crashed every few hours, I certainly wouldn't be using it.
I'm not saying Mac OS 7.x-9.x is as stable as Linux, but I routinely have it up on my G3 or PowerBook for several days at a time before shutting it down overnight.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Blue box equalled MacOS apps on Rhapsody PPC(now carbon)
A believe Blue Box was more akin to the Mac OS X "Classic" environment -- basically Mac OS 8/9 in emulation.
Carbon, however, being an API rather than an environment, can actually take advantage of Mac OS X's modern features (protected memory, multitasking, multiprocessing, etc), whereas Blue Box could not. This was largely why Rhapsody was a bad idea, and why Carbon was created.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
More details on the Star Trek project can be found in Jim Carlton's Apple book. It makes sickening reading, but it's one of the most interesting reads I had in quite a while. It's really quite unbelievable to see just how many times one company can keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Apple's past maps directly to their fututre, it seems. When they bought NeXT, they got a nice multi-platform system, not just at the OS layer, but at the application layer as well. Since then, the have reworked it into Mac OS X, which has become increasingly Mac hardware specific. Darwin might run on Intel, but that's like having the Linux kernel cross platform but no libraries or applications. Just like its NEXTSTEP predecessor, the first developer preview of Mac OS X had an Intel version, but Apple dropped it after that. Now they say they're no longer supporting application-level cross compilation to Windows (aka, Yellow Box). They're also dropping Objective-C, their most useful foundation technology in my opinion, for future versions of WebObjects.
In the early 90's I ditched Apple for Linux because I needed a base OS that actually worked well. In the late 90's I went back to Apple (but not for my server! :-) by way of NeXT with every hope that Apple would have the resources to take the NeXT technology in the right direction. Here I sit in the early 00's looking again at Linux and being pleased with how far GNUstep has come.
The nature of the application market requires cross platform support these days. Apple continues to snub their developers when they make these kinds of decisions. Unless they start making better decisions, they may well end up as the "Also Ran" that some people have been calling for the last 15 years. Sad but true.