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Copland/Gershwin vs. NeXT

Posted by pudge on from the drink-the-kool-aid dept.

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."

2 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Inaccurate in places by bnenning · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I'm glad this article showed up here, I tried to post a reply on igeek when I saw it yesterday but it wouldn't let me for some reason. Anyway, Every has some good points, but also seems to have a strange hostility toward NeXT technologies which causes him to make some odd statements. Specifically this:


    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.
  2. Hindsight by fm6 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ain't hindsight great? It allows you to sound wise without producing any testable arguments.