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Copland/Gershwin vs. NeXT
Etcetera writes "David K. Every (of MacKiDo fame) has written an interesting article at iGeek about Copland vs. NeXT and the decisions that Apple made back in '95-96. Although most agree that bringing Steve Jobs back was a Good Thing, a lot of cool Apple-invented technologies got left by the wayside without a fair shot at proving themselves once NeXT came in. Was it always the right call? Functions as a cautionary tale about management vs. engineering as well."
I worked with a Software Engineer who worked on OpenDoc, which was about the only good thing aside from QuickTime that Apple had put out in that era. Some of you might remember the demo of an ActiveX control running inside an OpenDoc container. When NeXT took over, they hacked OpenDoc to run within NeXT's ojbect model. The Steve (himself) just said no, NeXT's object model is better. That's when my friend left Apple. Can't say that I blame him. OpenDoc had a lot going for it.
Karma: It's not just a good idea. It's the law.
Another good one about how a project evolves into a "death-march", but it's probably preaching to the choir here.
The tragedy is that those who most desperately need to learn the lesson presented here (that would be the uninformed, inflexible PHBs) will never read this kind of article, or if they do they will never realize that we're talking about you, here!
It's just amazing how many technology "managers" cannot comprehend the silliness of mandating a schedule and a feature set. You might get it by then, but it will be a piece of #@%$.
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
"(A common engineering practice is to take your best guess at how much time it will take, and then multiply that by 3)."
that way, you look like a miracle-worker =] (or so Scotty told LaForge)
Still, it would be an interesting universe had Be been chosen over NeXT. the Be APIs were super nice, but from what I heard they had a very hard time in larger projects. I think Gobe Productive was the largest app ever for BeOS. I used BeOS exclusively (when i had a peecee) for about a year, and I loved it. All the applications felt oddly 'light', I think from the quick responsiveness of it all.
The Best OS is Dead! Long Live the Best OS!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Given a choice between OLE and COM on Windows (95% of the desktop market) and OpenDoc on MacOS (5% of the desktop market), most developers chose OLE and COM for their components.
Are there any good pointers to what Copland/NuKernel would have looked like, had it reached final form? Was it System (whatever) + protected memory, or did it have other newer features?
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
So Carbon on a new kernel (NuKernal) was done long before the rest of OSX was ready. It took years to get NeXTSTEP and Cocoa and the rest of the OS time to catch up
This is just absolutely false. The NeXT kernel (Mach/BSD) and Cocoa were ported very quickly. Apple bought NeXT at the end of 1996, the first Rhapsody developer release was ready less than a year later, and Mac OS X Server 1.0 shipped in early 1999. The reasons why the "real" Mac OS X took longer were that Apple had to implement Carbon for developers unwilling to convert to Cocoa, and write a brand new display system (Quartz) after Adobe dropped Display PostScript.
NeXT delivered on its promises, it's just that Apple's requirements changed. And it's also worth pointing out that Mac OS X is a far better system than what was envisioned for Copland. Aside from the much better adherence to standards, it is a much cleaner architecture. From what I remember of Copland's documentation, it had a weird form of partial memory protection where the entire GUI ran in a single process, so any app could take down all other UI apps, although server processes would be protected. The transition to a fully buzzword-compliant OS wasn't going to happen until Gershwin, and I seriously doubt that could have shipped by now.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
This article is one big rant. I wish he had more information to back up his claims. The article just seemed to be overly bitter calling NeXT "liars" and claiming that the engineers were hit with unrealistic expectations.
Hey, I'm an engineer and I think it takes everyone on a project to make it fail. On successful projects you have only 10% of the people doing all of the work and fixing the other people's mistakes... most projects succeed in spite of bad management or bad subsystem X.
Mac OS was on a death march because of the fundamental underlying technologies and a culture that was stuck in only one way of doing things... and windows is on a similar death march. OS X takes technology from the UNIX way of thinking and from the NeXT way of thinking to make a platform that is a developers dream. I think this is what puts OS X beyond Windows and will eventually lead to new "killer apps" that will save Apple. I really doubt that if Apple had went with Copland so many alpha geeks would be flocking to Mac... I doubt slashdot would have added an Apple page or O'Reilly would have a macdevcenter.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Ain't hindsight great? It allows you to sound wise without producing any testable arguments.
I would remind people that David, in my mind, is a Mac zealot. His old Mackido website was full of vitrole and over-advocacy. (Mind you, it was a great place to find a computer joke, but I took little of the site very seriously.)
As I mentioned in other topics, Mac OS 9 users are among the most stubborn to change their way of doing things on a Macintosh. That's understandable--the original Mac OS was easier to use than most operating systems and developed quite a fan following. This resistance to change, however, causes finger-pointing and blame-making over a matter that, now, isn't really a point of conversation anymore. I think David falls in this trap of "Apple's changed with OS X and I don't like anymore." I also give this problem a name: whining. I'm a Macintosh advocate by trade but I've never been fond of zealotry--its a blinding thing in helping a customer.
I disagree with David about his being "sick of hearing that Copland project failed because of engineering. From what I know of engineering and people inside of Apple, it was mostly because of bad management decisions inside of Apple." He makes the incorrect assumption that the technology was sound enough and needed only enough money and time to push it through. Apple creates the environment that R&D works in, true. But faulty engineering is faulty engineering. Steve Jobs likely killed many projects not only because he didn't find them practical but because they just plain didn't work or didn't follow the business plan. Seedless corn or instant water sounds like a cool idea, but a bad idea is a bad idea.
Apple nearly died because they didn't have a business plan. Does David want Apple to revive old projects at the cost of the company's existence? Makes no sense to me. I think David is grousing over spilled milk.
We were all uncertain about what became OS X, and, thanks to a strong business plan, focused R&D, and listening to customers and developers (things that Apple did very badly in the '90s), Apple has a sound product with a good future.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
As I remember the events of the summer of 1997, Apple would have fallen apart if Steve Jobs had not come on board. At the time, people were leaving Apple left and right. Scott McNealy suggested that Apple should abandon MacOS and start selling java based network computers. The pundits were suggesting that Apple should abandon all things Mac and sell PC clones. I like OS X. I use it every day, but I have to wonder if Apple hadn't abandoned Copeland, if today I would be using an operating system more in the spirit of the original Macintosh. OS X feels like Unix with a bunch of pancake makeup on top. Instead of being simple like pre-X MacOS or BeOS, it hides its complexity from most of its users. For all the strength that OS X brings to the Mac platform, it brings along a fair amount of baggage too. It just doesn't feel quite right. There is something disharmonious about it. I'm having a bit of trouble explaining it, but I wonder if an OS built from the ground up for the Mac wouldn't have been better,
What Apple, NeXT, Sun, and Microsoft have done ever since has been to copy little aspects of those systems imperfectly. Systems like OpenDoc Objective-C were an attempt to bring some of the things that happen naturally and easily with Smalltalk and Lisp into a world dominated by C, C++, and multiple address spaces.
What you should really be crying about is that none of the Apple or Microsoft technologies ever actually took advantage of the object oriented programming technologies or development environments developed before the rise of the PC and instead condemned us to nearly two decades of awful IDEs, batch compilations, object marshalling, and pointer errors, as well as plenty of unnecessary work. We could have had something with the convenience of VisualBasic 2000 or HyperCard and the power and appearance of NeXTStep in the early 1980's if people had only listened back then. Now, these ideas are slowly being rediscovered and being hailed as great technical breakthroughs.
Apple did do a good job at making the Macintosh UI visually attractive and easy to use for casual users, both in pre-OSX and OSX. That's what they are good at, but it almost doesn't matter much what technology they are using--a set of kludgy toolboxes or a half-hearted Smalltalk clone based on C. So, don't cry over Copland/Gershwin, cry over the stuff that really could have happened but didn't.
I know this is off topic, but does anyone know whether the spec is available? This sounds like such cool tech, that I would love to see a sourceforge project implementing it... Is OpenDoc patented? Google's not helping me much here but maybe I don't know what to look for either. :(
What I don't understand is why OS-X is so slow. I've got a 33MHz 68040 with 64MB that's more responsive than a 233MHz G3 with 160, even when the G3 isn't swapping (which it does often). According to my RC5-64 crackers, the G3 is 30 _times_ faster than the NeXT. :-)
Sure, there's more eye candy in OS-X, but the NeXT UI is cleaner, more clear to understand, and _easier_to_use_! People complain about OS-X's UI being "NeXTified", but the NeXT UI was just as clean as Platinum. Yes it wasn't as spacially oriented (no Desktop stock, and Icon view was always in 'grid' mode), but that sure seemed to work better for large networked filesystems. Besides, the 'shelf' at the top of browser windows would give you a place to keep shortcuts to different file(s)/folders.
So where did the OS-X UI nightmare come from? Where's Keith Olfs's when we need him?
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One of the nice things about Slashdot is that when you make a stupid spelling mistake, people invariably let you know. Thanks. As far as Copland, the vast majority of Mac users (you apparently being an exception) never had a chance to try it and form an opinion about it, seeing as it was never released. Maybe it would have excruciatingly awful. Most of us will never know.
One I recall from early net days was a browser plug-in for viewing a web directory (Yahoo!?) as a 3D flythrough environment, like lots of other neat Apple demos it's long gone without a trace. Another still in MacOS 9 is the smart text handling - the ability to click on a text string and have an appropriate handler come up for it: web, address, phone number, etc. Or "summarizing" a selected stretch of text via Sherlock.
Anyone else have any favorite past Apple Mac-based technologies? Promised, demo'd, here-and-gone, whatever? Anyone know of a site detailing the MacOS-tech graveyard?
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.
lent a hand to the OPEN SOURCE LINUX MOVEMENT so I can have linux on my xbox?
So that's where they got the name for the OS used in the series. I knew that the 'Navis' featured in the show where supposed to be futuristic Macs, but all this time I thought the 'Copland OS' was a stab at Microsoft.
>
I agree with your overall philosophy but not with some of your specific points.
You make the argument that Smalltalk and Lisp systems from the 70s were addressing the kinds of things that Microsoft and Apple have been dolling out in small doses over the years (inconsistently etc.) and I agree...
However, the deeper fact of the matter is Smalltalk wasn't and isn't a complete solution (and still aren't) and can't compete with, say, OS X, because it certainly doesn't provide:
* Component document models like OpenDoc was supposed to provide. Smalltalk-80 didn't have this, nor does Squeak.
* Further, they don't even really have tools like word processors, image editors, and other areas that normally fall in the "application" domain. I've seen simple web browsers and simple editors, but nothing on the order of functionality provided by most word processors. There is the argument that if you were to do these things properly object oriented they wouldn't look like Word anyways, but Smalltalk didn't/doesn't even do that.
* The same kinds of areas of work that are being heavily investigated in other languages are areas of heavy investigation and work in the platforms you mention, too: object distribution, published components and packages (Squeak is only now breaking out the single-image-single-system and allowing for modular ), persistence, etc.
* Performance of Smalltalk in the 80s was hardly acceptible on personal computers of the time. Apple and NeXT used the "compromised" (i.e. compiled, not interpreted, etc.) tech they did because they were running on 68K platforms with consumer hardware.
C++, Objective-C, Java, etc. are different answers to different questions. I don't necessarily agree with the questions asked, but they are solutions.
C++ is a great system-level programming language. It does a lot of things really well, though object-orientation isn't really one of them. Objective-C is a reasonable compromise for moving people from a C/Unix world to an OO world. Java is, well... an overarchitected and overmarkted approach to the same thing Smalltalk was attempting...
The problem is that the best system based on the principles established by PARC, etc. hasn't been built yet. Perhaps it could have if certain companies had displayed more guts and leadership -- but there were very distinct market forces acting against the progress of properly engineered, heavily researched, elegant technologies.
One of the reason why NeXT failed is that because of Motorola and then because of Sun and HP.
The Motorola was because they could not get a new 68K chip fast enough.
The Sun was because they went from an OpenStep based system to a java based one. HP decide to brake their deal with NeXT right after that.
OpenStep was running on both SPAC and HPPA before Apple bought NeXT.
Also before Sun went the java route, they bought a company that was making an office suite for OpenStep (see they owned an office before StarOffice).
The author seems to assert that a fantasy completed Copland and OpenStep would be of equal value. But imagine if Apple had actually shipped Copland. What would Apple have had? It might not have crashed as much, but it would have been just as obscure.
NeXT brought Apple Unix roots. This has completely changed the market perception of Apple. Folks and companies who never would have considered Apple are now testing the waters.
It may have come about because of confused decision making, but thank goodness it came about.
Taligent was working on the "Pink" OS.
cpeterso
The Mac without the Unix underpinnings would still be relegated as "toy" OS and its marketshare would be declining rather than climbing (or at least stagnating).
Unix gave the Mac credibility from some key market segments. It gave the Mac mindshare. If we chirped about OS 9 having preemtive multitasking, people would've said "about time" and rightly so. As it stands now, the Mac is now buzzword compliant and, more importantly, it has the time tested core of Unix and all of its familiar tools that scientists and sysadmins love.
Most frustrating part:
Apparently the author is too stupid to realize Apple was sinking. Fast. It took a major acquisition to prove to the board and shareholders that positive steps were being taken towards updating what was then a very unstable, inefficient Mac OS.As a Mac user since the early 1990's, I can honestly say that the 2nd-generation Power Macs (the PCI ones like the 7200/7500/8500), in the System 7.5.2 - to 8.0 era, were horrendously crashy and pricey. (I still used them because the Windows UI pissed me off, but I was beginning to envy my Wintel friends every time my 7200/75 locked up)
OS 9, the iMac, the legacy-free towers were all great products which had little to do with the NeXT team. While it's likely true that Apple's own engineers bailed themselves out of the mess they had gotten into under Sculley's leadership, it was too little too late in the eyes of shareholders and consumers.
In short: if they couldn't demonstrate that they were going to leapfrog Windows in terms of stability, Apple was dead in the water. Apple's own engineers likely had lots of credibility with Apple management, but that was not enough. Even if Copland was only 6 months from completion, Apple was in grave danger, and was wise to purchase a proven technology. It may be unfortunate that business success is a necessary evil in the development of software, but I wouldn't go calling Apple's management stupid. They bit down and did what had to be done.
[url=http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO -8859-1&q=3D+browser+apple+1995+hotsauce]HotSauce[ /url]
man, that is the 3D space navigation you are referring to. I wish I could recall the company that has implemented a search engine based on a similar notion. it is current and was in beta when i used it last year.
A rumor I heard Way Back In The Day(TM) was that the operating system after Gershwin (OS 10!) was supposedly code named "Zorn", a reference to the incredible downtown NYC avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn. There is essentially no known information about the vaporware OS, and given the state of Copland and Gershwin it's no wonder -- but I still wonder if there's any truth to this rumor. Anyone know anything about this?
~jeff
I worked for Apple in the mid-nineties, when the PPC was new. I watched the entire (almost) death-spiral with particular interest.
I think the article is good, but it is only half the story. Apple is, and always has been, a hardware company. The thing that really screwed Apple during the Gil Amelio years was a total lack of hardware engineering. Apple tried to become a "beige box" company, and tried to have a solution for every problem. It just wouldn't work.
When Steve Jobs came back to the company, there was something like 85 SKUs for hardware systems. For those who aren't familar with marketing/retail, that's a lot. It wasn't like "You can have a 7200 with X Y or Z memory", it was "You can have a 7200 with 16MB, or you can have a 7200 with 32MB or you can have a 7200 with 64MB" and the vendor would have to stock all three. Impossible.
Plus, none of the hardware was exciting. People just plain didn't want to own it. It was like, sure, I can get a beige box that runs 7.5.2, crashes all the time, and has only Word 6 (god, what an abomination), or I can spend half as much, build my own Wintel, and get the newest Office.
The main thing the reintroduction of Steve Jobs did for Apple was put a single vision back in charge of both hardware and software. Even if Copland was further along than NeXT, it was hopelessly mired in a hardware development cycle that was just flawed. One of the main problems Copland faced was not only the need for backward compatibility of software, but the need to support 85 different configurations of non-industry-standard hardware. Impossible. Anyone remember the "Enablers"? God, what a mess.
One of Job's most controversial moves, and perhaps his smartest, was to draw a hard line in the sand at the G3, a processor that was barely even shipping when he announced the spec. Thus, he promised hardware compatibility only back to the currently brand-spanking new machines, guaranteeing that, at the end of a 3-5 year development cycle, the OS would only have to support hardware 3-5 years old. Man, did people scream and moan ("But I just bought an 8600/120!"), but now Apple is back where it needs to be. One of the biggest complaints over Win2K was its trouble with older hardware. MS was able to make Win2K fly by (1) not pitching it to home users, who were more likely to have funky sound cards, and (2) providing a lot of expensive support to hardware manufacturers to write compatible drivers in time for XP.
One pre-Jobs hardware move that Apple took that is now reaping benefits was to eschew its own good but expensive standards for adequate but cheap industry standard. Internal SCSI 4X CD Roms gave way to ATAPI; NuBUS gave way to PCI; etc. This made it even easier for the OS developers to support hardware.
Anyway, in order to understand the whole Apple picture, you have to consider the wretched state the hardware side was in in 1996, and realize that, even if no one bought the cube, they have come a really long way - and that is what made OSX possible.
I'm a lawyer with excellent karma. Something's gotta be wrong.
For those of who weren't programming Macs back in the Day (remember APDA?), Apple had an award-winning quarterly technical journal called "develop" which had lots of neat articles in it with a fun and offbeat tone. Sort of like O'Reilly and Associates has now. They stopped putting it out in '97 amid all the hemoraging, but all the issues are available here.
Anyway, there's a pretty informative article explaining all about Copland here.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Some people did try it I got a maxwell build off hotline. It was quick and reminiscent of the mac os and Be. But it was not stable half complete and did not do much of anything. I think had they been more realistic about the goals of the project it would have been decent but still not OS X. OS X is more compatible, generally is well designed and has a good OO model. On the other hand it is also slow and quite large, where as copland was small and fast, the driver model and NuKernel were really pretty good and will make their way into OS X. The only thing really bad about OSX is speed and some interface issues. The only major change I would advocate would be a different microkernel, Mach is old and rather out dated.
Here's the archive of Apple's official Hotsauce (aka Project X) homepage, which is what you're thinking of. Yeah, even Yahoo was up on the Meta-Content Framework deal.
V-Twin was the basis for the summarize feature, I think there's still an SDK up for it.
Personally, I liked PowerTalk. A system-wide, integrated mail and collaboration framework with a standardized mailing interface.
Even if the implementation is done with LDAP, PGP, and Sendmail now, I really wish they'd bring back those APIs for application code. The "digital signing" concept integrated into the API was better integrated than Apple File Security in Mac OS 9, and better than anything in OS X right now. Remember being able to verify a document's signiature from the Get Info window? The Keychain is the only concept that survived.
QuickDraw GX ( here or here) was WAY ahead of its time. Although a lot of its features found their way into ATSUI with Unicode, QDGX still had soul. I still don't know of any program that can do all the really really fancy and obscure ligatures properly.
Probably my FAVORITE technology was/is Apple Guide. There's nothing quite like a help system that draws coach marks on the screen when telling you how to perform a step. That plus hilighting proper menu options in red, and the fact that it wasn't glacially slow once it became PowerPC native, made it a really amazing conversion tool.
Balloon Help was quirky and fun. I don't really understand why they replaced something so cool with something as lame as Tooltips. =(
QuickDraw 3D and Apple Data Detectors had some cool concepts too. Maybe we should get them to re-write Data Detectors using Perl regexps
Arrgh.. the OS that Could Have Been... Try the old Apple Advanced Technology Research Group website for more stuff.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I loved that! Apple Deta Detectors. Then there was ICeTEe that let you click on URLs in almost any application and launch your web browser.
For OS X there is ICeCoffEE which does the same thing as ICeTEe under OS 9, but only with Cocoa applications. BBEdit and TexEdit Plus are two Carbon applications that let you Command-click a url.
You can get it from http://web.sabi.net/nriley/software/
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Isn't V-Twin what runs/ran sherlock searching when you indexed and searched your hard drive?
Go out and get sailing!
Yes, V-Twin (AIAT) is still alive in OS X.
Although I've never even been in the same room as Copland, I've got a developer copy of Mac OS 8.7, which I believe to be Rhapsody just before it was merged with NeXT. I tried installing it on my Umax S-900 (currently running 10.1.5), and spent the following week getting my onboard SCSI busses functional again. Haven't tried since.
If anybody can tell me what machine will successfully boot that, I'd love to see it in action.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I had a copy of System 7.7 once, which more or less became OS 8 (not System 8, aka Copland). It had some weird features that I don't remember anymore, that never made it into OS 8. Mostly it just crashed :)
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Just out of curiosity: is there any reason why every now and then, slashdot posters obviously insult people merely because they have a different opinion?
Is that the thinking different bit of apple.slashdot?
After reading Mr. Every article all I can say is WOW. Its amazing to see how someone can look at something that happened, like the Apple situation in the mid 90s, and come away with a totally skewed view. I don't even know where to start with the bad information or misconceptions. I will however put forth one piece of information about copland that I think is germaine to this discussion. Applications in Copland, by default, only had cooperative multitasking. They could start tasks that were preemptive but those tasks could not interact with the GUI and were limited to certain parts of the API. Full preemptive multitasking was not to come to the macos until Gershwin. All I can say is "Thank God NeXT came along.
I would argue that component models are a solution to a problem created by dividing up the world into separate applications in the first place. Smalltalk doesn't have them because they don't make sense in that kind of environment.
Further, they don't even really have tools like word processors, image editors, and other areas that normally fall in the "application" domain. I've seen simple web browsers and simple editors, but nothing on the order of functionality provided by most word processors.
Yes, but the question is whether the partitioning of the world into "big word processor" and "big web browser" is the right one. We never really had much of a chance to find out. In part, that kind of structure wasn't even imposed by poor technical decisions, it was simply imposed by the way we packaged and sold software.
C++ is a great system-level programming language. It does a lot of things really well, though object-orientation isn't really one of them. Objective-C is a reasonable compromise for moving people from a C/Unix world to an OO world. Java is, well... an overarchitected and overmarkted approach to the same thing Smalltalk was attempting...
Yes, we are in agreement there.
The problem is that the best system based on the principles established by PARC, etc. hasn't been built yet. Perhaps it could have if certain companies had displayed more guts and leadership
Right. That's basically my point. Smalltalk-80 (or Squeak today) clearly does not represent anything most people would want to use for anything. But in the early 80's, Smalltalk-80 represented a genuninely different starting point for the evolution of GUIs and personal computing than MacOS, and I think a better starting point. (And I think at the time, it actually could have been competitive, since what it was competing against wasn't all that good technically either.) Smalltalk-80 could have evolved into something much better than we have today. We never got to find out where that path would have led.
As for Apple, my point is: yes, MacOSX is prettier and a little nicer to use simply because Apple does a reasonable job at making upscale computers. But if Apple had shipped Copland/Gershwin, that wouldn't be any different. Apple pays a bit more attention to quality than other vendors, but fundamentally, their products are no different from the prevailing paradigm in my opinion.
So, I don't lose any sleep over Copland/Gershwin--but some other possible paths that the industry didn't explore really strike me as missed opportunities.
The reason that it had semi-cooperative tasking (actually engine was preemptive, UI thread was cooperative) was because it had to have 100% compatibility. If you took out that requirement, then you had Carbon/Gershwin. That was the point.
A tad inaccurate... I don't ad the [teako170.com] crap everywhere... What I do have is keyword substition on the little CMS thing I wrote... and haven't yet tuned. Since Apple is a keyword, it is linking you to the stories about Apple (which happens to be one). I plan on expanding that, to auto-interlink a lot of definitions, stories and information. I don't find the underline horribly intrusive myself. But I do think the feature needs tuning. (It has the ability to only do the first instance in the document, and I probably need to throw that switch).
Your comments are quite excellent.
Try pouring your life into Amiga for six long years only to see it die because it "isn't allowed" to run Word and Excel while its "credibility" is attacked by a bitter holocaust survivor (who knocks-off the product with inferior technology under a defunct video-game brandname just to get back at his old boss).
Then sit by for another seven long years as some Amiga designers die of heart attacks while French software executives jack their technology piece-by-piece (QuickDrawGX = GfxBase, AppleScript = ARexx, MacInTalk = SpeechSynth, etc.) running a $15 billion publicly-held crown-jewel of America into the "trash can" icon. This gives Bill Gates everything he needs to build the global weather control platform just by slapping a GUI ontop of DOS! Then watch the "Euro-backlash" that slowly destroys the commercial software development industry in a wave of socialism that empowers the underpaid masses of the Sub-Continent.
Rather than rant about the death of Amiga and System 7, let's see if we can't get Apple's Cocoa-runtime to be bundled with every copy of WinXp sold in USA (with a mandatory royalty paid to Apple that they can use to fuel the next generation of Apple-hardware and operating systems). Then lets rally around Cocoa and build exceptional products that cannot practically be duplicated using the free Euro-tools exploited by masses of $5000/yr Sub-continent developers.
If the new Mac OS had been rebuilt from the ground up I don't think we would have as much of this, or possibly any of it at all. A ground up Mac OS would probably be proprietary, closed, and Apple would be left to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to software development.
I think that Apple has made a good tradeoff here. Sure, OS X does feel a little disharmonious in the interface, but the community, sysadmin, and software support are well worth it, IMHO.
"Belief means not wanting to know what is true." [Nietzche, The Anti-Christ, 1889]
I'm not sure how many people here actually got to see the Taligent way of doing things. Several developers who saw it didn't like it very much, in fact they thought it was not a very successful approach. NeXT's OPENSTEP library was a much more powerful, flexible approach to app design (which has stood the test of time, as opposed to Taligent that died.
:)
Of course, don't take my word for it. Many other prominent mac people express dislike towards Taligent's way of doing things.
We lucked out, fellow mac developers. OpenSTEP is our home now.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Well, yes, but it really reduces to the knapsack problem in that case. Do you have some kind of heuristic, or are we dealing with an NP-complete case?
the trouble with hotsauce was that it was an hci disaster. it didn't scale well. for extremely deep & narrow sites, the user's experience quickly degraded into a forward-back mess. deep & narrow sites are hard to pull off (i'm ignoring the utility of search intentionally) with decent navigation, but hotsauce made that worse than it was previously.
given that and apple's characteristicly poor marketing, the product died.
it is, however, good to see r&d like newton's hand writing recognition be improved and brought back into the light (it's now in jaguar, called "inkwell").
Man, it's always a bad sign when an author has to respond defensively to every post about his article. I can think of a few possible reasons: a) Ego - They're talking about ME! b) Combativeness - No, YOU'RE wrong! c) Poor writing - No no no, that's not what I meant! Why doesn't anyone understand what I'm trying to say? d) All of the above. Having read a bit of the collected wisdom of dke, I'm guessing d. "i'm a little lizard trapped in a man's skin"
"i'm a little lizard trapped in a man's skin." - RapeMen
Second I've read
Slash has always been a place with some brilliant insights and informed people, mixed with a lot of pissed off little trolls that vent. I'd rather see more bidirectional feedback, rather than just a bunch of DuDe, what A toTal Lamo, M@N. LeTs DIS the GuY beHInD hiS bAcK! Which do you want to be? Oh wait, I think you already answered that.
Taligent didn't die. IBM integrated CommonPoint into VisualAge C++'s OpenClass library. Microsoft has licensed the patents. The patent holder (Object Licensing Technology) is located at 1 Infinite Loop, the Apple campus.
Taligent was (sorta) doing what NeXT did but with C++ (mistake) and with more classes (the MS approach). There's still plenty from the Taligent experiment that's seeing the light.
My favourite OpenDoc app was a word processor called Wav by Digital Harbour (they probably disappeared some time ago - one product company)
It was just a plain page based text editor that was easy to use but with little other functionality. The really great thing was it didn't need to do anything else but be a good text editor because you could just embedded any other type of data into it through OpenDoc. Plug in picture, chart, spell checking components and they would all just work.
They came up with a really good OpenDoc interface, the toolbar had a customisable shelf to hold whatever components you wanted so you could just drag and drop them into your document.
Damn shame that OpenDoc failed to gain widespread use.
Don't blame me - this
Maybe that's why the MS libs are so abysmally annoying. I had no idea we had Taligent to thank for the evils that have lead to MFC.
Taligent's general philosophy of OO design was not really all that great. It worked and it was very OO, but (maybe just because of language limitations) it had a very static feel (much like MFC coding does).
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
7.7 was Tempo. It was pretty cool. It used the Copland finder, which was a _much_ more fragile version of the Finder that showed up in Mac OS 8. Ah, those were the days. All the coolest stuff was on Hotline and the IRC. You're right, though: 7.7 did crash a lot. Mac OS 8, though, was very cool and very stable. I used one of the beta builds long after the final was released, I was so happy with it on my PowerBook Duo 2300c.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Oy, it wasn't quick! It was simple and slow and spewed out about ten pages a minute of debugging code to your convenient serial-connected debugging Mac. Argh, it was a beastie to use.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
If Apple would throw some weight behind Services, they'd show everyone what the ADD people were going for. Services, as implemented in NEXTSTEP, are possibly the coolest OS feature ever. Select a URL in Edit.app, open it with OmniWeb. Drag a PNG file into PasteUp.app and it displays properly because I have an image viewer program somewhere that knows how to display a PNG and chips in to help. Really amazing.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
I forgot all about that name! :) I used to use the Appearance extension from Tempo with System 7.6 to get the Copland look, and sticky menus. There was a copy floating around that I hacked that had the trash in the can in color.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Yep. (You're probably the only one reading this reply...)
Tempo was the first system where the appearance themes worked. They were nifty. I never used anything other than Platinum, but it was great fun to show people hi-tech and gadget just to see their faces. Ah, what a pleasant period. Apple was blithely fiddling while the rest of the place burned and producing some irrelevant, but damned-fun stuff on the way.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
...such a pity. But then, Every's always been a blind zealot. I went through my own blind-zealot phase, and everything I learned, I learned from him. No joke; I usedto visit his site every day looking for new articles. It was only later that I realized just how inaccurate he was. Incidentally, I'm still a Mac user. I'm just not blind about it anymore, and no longer have the "Not Invented at Apple Before 1995 = BAD" mentality that Every seems to maintain.
He's also a massive OS9 whiner, often deriding things in OSX just because they're not the exact same thing as they were in OS9. But let's look deeper into this. The big inaccuracy with this article is the assertion that Apple had Carbon working on NuKernel (spelled with an e, not an a) many years ago. False. Copland, rather like OSX, had a completely new API (Taligent), and used a virtual machine known as the Compatibility Box to run System 7 apps. Copland had no notion of anything like Carbon.