Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Apple OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard

Posted by chrisd on from the office-ain't-done-till-bsd-won't-run dept.

We've had a number of posts noting that Boston.com's digitalMASS has a very decent article on Apple's OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard.

1 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. Why OS X uses Mach by Animats · · Score: 2, Flamebait
    OS X is architected on top of Mach to keep Apple stockholders from asking why Apple paid $400 million for NeXT, bailing out Steve Jobs and his buddies.

    The argument for cancelling Copland (the original MacOS 8) was that it was going to take another year to make it work, and buying NeXT would get the new OS up faster. A similar argument was advanced against BeOS. That was, what, in 1996?

    The MacOS really needed a new layer underneath, but UNIX/Mach wasn't a great match. I'm not suprised it took Apple almost five years to make them play together.

    The original MacOS only supported one app at a time, and the addition of "multitasking" was a horrible hack internally. No memory protection, no process dispatching, no interprocess communication, and no way to reliably get an app that crashed cleaned up without a system crash. Developers used to call it the Mess Inside. Apple desperately needed a new kernely, and it should have happened around 1992 or so, by which time all new Macs had enough hardware for a good protected-mode OS. Basically, Apple was nine years late with their new OS, which is part of why Apple tanked.

    I once wrote an entire dial-up PPP implementation for the MacOS, called "Simple PPP". It was not fun.