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Run Mac OS X On Those Old Macs
AllInOne writes: "Despite Apple's claims to the contrary, Mac OS X runs just fine on older Apple hardware.
Thanks to the Open Source nature of Apple's underlying Darwin system serveral clueful folks have written kernel extensions that allow "Old World" machines such as the 7300, 7600, 8500 etc to run OS X. They even support G3 & G4 processor upgrades cards as well.
The best release (and free as in beer) is by Ryan Rempel. I just installed his Version 2.0b3 of Unsupported UtilityX on my old 8550 with a Newer G3 upgrade card along along with 10.1 and performance is quite respectable."
And elsewhere along the OS price/performance front, Cinematique writes: "I was surfing around and came across this useful little tidbit for mac os x users. Apparently, apple included a way to compress the memory-hungry finder window buffer images, but didn't turn it on at the last minute due to a debuging issue. this turns the compression on, thus saving a sh*tload of memory."
While there are scads of OS X "tips" sites, most of which are newbie unix introductions, I have found the following to be very useful with a wide variety of tips and other neat hacks:
http://www.ResExcellence.com/osx/index.shtml
Some of the more low-level hacks are probably pretty obvious to NeXT vets and Darwin & GNU-Darwin users.
Are these adaptions useful? Sure, particularly for those with a significent investment in an existing Mac. If one's box is already tricked out, running well and has the oomph to run MacOS X 10.1 properly then this is a great thing. But for folks thinking "heeey, I'll just pick up an old junker Mac and cobble MacOS X onto it" you're probably not making a good investment of time or money.
Wintel hardware has an optimum lifespan of 24-36 months, 48 months is still ok but you're running into diminishing results. Sure folks still use 5 year old Wintel hardware but rarely as a desktop system and even more rarely do they go out and buy it just to put a new OS onto.
On the other hand lots of Mac folks are perfectly happy running 5 year old Mac hardware and are in no hurry to move on. They paid a premium and got a box that has lasted well and is only now going to be a problem if they want to jump to the new MacOS X. Selling for 10 cents on the dollar isn't how the old Apple hardware market works: There are folks out there still willing to pay serious money for extra PCI slots or built-in SCSI or whatever.
So, if you're looking to play with MacOS X borrow a friend's. Or buy a cheap new box. Or throw Darwin onto your Wintel and play with the underpinnings. But going the buy-an-old-Mac-&-fix-'er-up route isn't really worth it unlesss you've already got one laying around.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Rhapsody is not OS X
9 95/q3/950508.pr.rel.copland.html h tml
Close, but not quite. Perhaps it's time for an Apple OS and Code Name refresher.
First off, and totally unrelated, is Apple's first unix OS from the mid 1980s, A/UX. This OS made its way thru several revisions, eventually ending up around 3.1. A/UX was available for certain 680x0 CPU based machines only and was never ported to PowerPC as at that time Apple had been hoping to move completely to Copland.
http://applefritter.com/ui/aux/
(The move from the 68K to PPC is also an interesting story, especially the small side storys of Apple's lab experience with later model 68Ks (68060, etc), the 88K, Alpha, 5x86, and MIPS CPUs.)
Apple's first attempt to upgrade and overhaul the Macintosh System software (Mac OS) was with Blue and Pink. Blue eventualy became System 7.0 and was a significant upgrade over previous versions of the OS, but still lacked many modern architectural features that were even present on the Lisa's OS in 1983 (in the Macintosh's defense, the Lisa had almost 10x as much RAM and cost 5x as much when it originally shipped). Blue was to be followed by Pink, a modern OS to be designed by Apple and a startup known as Taligent. Pink died a horrible political death and never saw the light of day.
Apple's second attempt was Copland, which was to be later followed by Gershwin, a heavily OpenDoc container based platform. Copland came close to being finished, Apple had released an early developer release (DR0) to select developers and had already started a Mac OS 9 marketing campaign. Copland was canned for a number of reasons, application compatibility (or the lack thereof) was a major factor.
http://product.info.apple.com/pr/press.releases/1
http://www.bozosoft.com/copland.html
http://www.macworld.com/1995/04/news/550.html
http://www.macworld.com/2000/09/buzz/windingroad.
Following the demise of Copland, Apple continued development of Mac OS 7.X (at the time at 7.5.X and 7.6.X). A version with some of the Copland features and appearance was developed as 7.7 but released and marketed as 8.0. Today this series is known as "Classic" Mac OS and is currently at 9.2.1. Since 8.0, Classic has undergone several major microkernel changes, driver architecure tweaks, and VM overhauls.
At the same time, Apple began a new OS search. Their options were to revive Copland, license Windows NT, or buy someone such as Be or NeXT. They decided to buy NeXT (which came with Apple and NeXT cofounder Steve Jobs).
Apple's most recent OS attempt, the the one that made it out the door, was Rhapsody. This project began at NeXT porting and updating their "OpenStep For Mach 4.2" (formerly NEXTSTEP 1.x - 3.3) OS to Apple PowerMacintosh hardware. The first devloper release of this was Rhapsody DR1 and came in three flavors... Rhapsody for Mac, Rhapsody for x86, and Rhapsody for NT (essentially a runtime framework to run Rhapsody apps atop Windows). Apps could be crosscompiled into a single fat binary to run on both platforms.
Rhapsody went thru several developer releases and was first publically shipped as Mac OS X Server 1.0, which had a GUI that resembled both Mac OS 8 and OpenStep. OS X server eventually reached version 1.2. 1.2 was codenamed Rhapsody 5.5. This can also be seen by doing a uname -a.
Later Rhapsody developer releases were known as Mac OS X Developer Previews, eventually gaining the Aqua look and perhaps most importantly, Carbon support. Previously, Rhapsody supported only two types of binaries -- Classic (non-ported Classic Mac OS apps running within a virtual machine, originally called Blue Box, later simply called Classic) and Yellow Box (applications specifically written for Rhapsody, based on the NS framework from the NEXTSTEP/OpenStep era. Yellow box is now known as Cocoa). Carbon was created to allow something no previous Apple Macintosh OS attempt had - an easy upgrade/porting path. Apple cleaned up the Mac APIs and supported them on both Classic Mac OS versions (starting with Mac OS 8.6) and on Mac OS X. The average developer now only had to modify 1% - 5% of his code to make it run on both Mac OS X and Classic Mac OS.
When Apple decided to release the source to the OS's internals, they replaced the Rhapsody name with Darwin. Today the current version of Mac OS X is 10.1, aka Darwin 1.3.1.