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A History of Apple's Operating Systems
jpkunst writes "Amit Singh of kernelthread.com has written A History of Apple's Operating Systems. From the introduction: 'This document discusses operating systems that Apple has created in the past, and many that it tried to create. Through this discussion, we will come across several technologies the confluence of which eventually led to Mac OS X'."
all I know is at the time I could do everything with my Apple //e, word processing, visicalc, Apple BASIC. Hell, I even had the orig Castle Wolfenstein! Wow, those were the days.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
I'd like to remind everyone that the greatest computer ever created runs Mac osX native. As if it woudn't.
tcd004
Put the crack pipe down. All Apple did was modify the kernel to run as a userspace process on top of a Mach microkernel. I'm presuming those changes were eventually merged into the official kernel.
[b]Apple tried to control Linux? Good lord... be thankful they never pulled that off. I can see Apple up there in place of SCO already, and with loads more money and arrogance[/b]
where does it say exactly that they tried to 'control' linux? i couldn't find it anywhere in the article
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
You just summoned an odd image of Jobs fighting McBride in my brain...
The screenshot of rhapsody makes me think something rather neat was lost to the world. While the inner workings of os9 hold no appeal for me I REALLY adored the look and feel of the UI. the simple raised grey windows and 'platinum' themed buttons/menus.
Personally, I'd prefer working in an environment with those windows/gui elements and the cartoonish crisp simple icon style, than that of OSX. I realise it's very much a subjective thing - pity we don't have the choice of looks in OSX to go back to that platinum look
(and no, shapeshifter themes are nothing like the real thing)
While using unstable Windows 95 at home, I admired apple for creating stable operating systems such as Macintosh OS, which I used in my university. Yes I believe Apple has always been better at making OSs than microsoft
Interestingly enough, correct me if i'm wrong here, Jobs tried to woo Linus to Apple around 1997, but obviously failed. Makes you wonder how it all would have turned out though, doesn't it?
Why are a large number of slashdot stories directly copied off other sites? They give no credit to the original site at all.
This story could have easily said: "jpkunst noticed over at macslash.org they are running a story about an article on kernelthread by Amit Singh etc etc...
In many cases these are copied word for word from the originating site, however thankfully our submitter took the time to rewrite a different summary for this particular story.
Isn't one of the main points of the GPL et al that you have to give credit to the original authors? How very hypocritical of the Slashdot editors to let things like this through.
I don't see it on the list.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
My first love... System 6. : \
Apple started with a decent OS for the Mac, given the hardware at the time. No innovation to the kernel happened afterward throughout the nineties, resulting in the worst modern OS on the planet by MacOS 9. Steve Jobs comes back, identifies how aweful the OS is, and rightly abandons the horrible piece of software. Apple creates MacOS X to replace it out of Mach, and BSD, resulting in a decent OS.
And I guess TrueType worked out pretty well, but I was a pretty small part of that. Still System 7 was quite a big deal back then and was fun to work on.
Copland never went "beta". It never even went Dev Release. It was cancelled almost immediately before the Dev Release was scheduled. Gershwin was nothing more than the successor of Copland. When Copland died, Gershwin died. This isn't in any way a definitive collection of Apple systems, let alone an accurate one.
Keep it up. By the time this story drops into oblivion at the end of the page Linux will be spun into an integral part of MacOSX. spin spin spin
notice how some of the earlier incarnations of what became OSX show the about box and has teh words "pentium" on them .. i wonder... also i wonder where the windows version is of some of the stuff is now. This guy is obviously using it on win xp.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
1 -- Finally can have a multi-button mouse (though it is a Logitech, and the trackpad still only has one button)
2 -- Protected memory. I was so freaking sick of ol' Crashy McGee, as I nicknamed my Windows 2000 box (and that was WAY better than 98). I took care of that machine, too, but every so often the kernel seemed to spontaneously get corrupted. That's a hell of a lot worse than the proverbial BSOD. I'd have to boot into Linux just to fix Windows! But before OS X, Macs didn't have such great stability, either.
3 -- Built-in command-line-interface. There's nothing I hate more than being slave to my mouse. If your Windows mouse doesn't work, you're screwed. Try navigating and performing normal tasks with only the keyboard. Unless you have the foresight to enable all that handicapped-access stuff, which most people don't. And I can ssh into my shell account, where I still check my mail with pine. Not that I'm some spectacular programmer (I tinker with stuff for fun, but no formal experience), but pine works just fine for email. Why does everything need to be in HTML? Why do I need stupid pictures or e-cards?
Anyway, not all Mac users are nostalgic for the old OSes; some of us just want a Unix box with a consistent and functional GUI. Not that the history wouldn't be of interest to any long-time Mac user, but it isn't interesting to me except as a curiosity.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Uh, I wrote this. And I own 4 G4's (and countless older systems). Truth hurts. NeXT did all of the hard work.
Preach it brother!
So was the term "frameworks" coined at Taligent? I couldn't determine from the story. For those of you that don't know, a framework is like a library bundled with the headers, and so instead of installing multiple objects (the library file(s), the headers, etc.) you can just copy over one framework and have the same functionality. Pretty clever actually. Never knew where the name came from, though.
Gotta get me one of these!
Oh, by the way, he also killed OpenDoc, a very good technology that combined a strength of both Corba and DOM. And CyberDog, an OpenDoc based browser that back then was a a real competitor to both IE and Netscape Navigator.
And all that for what? For zealot-oriented Mac OS X? I don't get it.
Less is more !
I remember running Mac OS 2 through 4(!) on my Mac 512. Ah, back in the day when you could run your OS off of a floppy... and a 512k floppy no less ;)
Wow. While I've always like the Macs, I've never tried to build much of my career on them. And yet, between hobby and career, I have used nearly every version that saw the light of day, and read voraciously about the others.
A couple of tidbits he left off.
Secure A/UX. I forget what it was called, but a DOD-compliant (I forget the Orange Book classification) version of A/UX was developed by an Atlanta company called SecureWare, later bought by HP. It was one of the first (if not the first) Unix variant to get that classification.
X11 for NEXTSTEP. An Austin company called Pencom Software (later PSW Technologies) developed a version of X11 for NEXTSTEP, called co-Xist. It was never blindingly fast, but then a lot of things were that way on NeXT platforms. As more of the server was ported to a lower level, performance got better. Steve Jobs hated X11. It didn't fit in with his vision of the "perfect OS". I suspect he felt it sullied his beloved DPS. So NeXT never was interested in bundling co-Xist with NS. (There were a couple of other NS X companies as well, but co-Xist was the better product in my admittedly biase view. 8^)
Alas, the only Mac I personally own is a dead one I keep in my cube for visitors to sit on. No idea what the OS is on it, but the rounded top is more comfy than the typical, flat PC. 8^)
Hey, I loved OS 9 too, and even the older Mac OS' got my heart beating fast.
But I mean, OS X just has to be the next step. There's only so much Apple could have improved OS 9. I do VERY much agree with some here about the way OS 9 looked, I like it as much as/more than I like the look of OS X. If Windows XP is the "Playschool" interface, then OS X is the "Mattel" interface.
I really, really wish Apple would provide ways to completely skin the OS from System Preferences, such as making it look like OS 9 while keeping the features set. That would be nice. Even though some programs now can do that, I'd love Apple to do it.
In the future I can only see good things for Apple. And who knows, maybe they will get closer and closer to integrating Linux, though BSD isn't a bad option as it stands.
the screenshots in question are: rhapsody on intel
Yellow box on XP
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
It was introduced at a price of $666 that included 4K bytes of RAM and a tape of Apple BASIC.
;)
And you all thought Microsoft was the evil company.
Googled up some more info.
A lot of folks in Silicon Valley are so drunk on their own bath water that they simply don't get Linus. Take Steve Jobs. After Linus moved to the States in 1997, the acting Apple Computer CEO got in touch with him. Jobs wanted to persuade Linus to get involved in making the MacOS an open source code project. "He tried to get the Linux movement going more into the Apple area. I think he was surprised that his arguments, which were the Apple market share arguments--which would have made an impression on people who did this for commercial reasons--had absolutely no impact on me,'' Linus says.
According to Torvalds, Jobs assumed that he would be interested in joining Apple's mission to capture more of the personal computer market from Microsoft, rather than continue concentrating on Linux. "I don't think Jobs realized that Linux would potentially have more users than Apple, although it's a very different user base."
I really liked NEXTSTEP, and the NeXT cubes were pretty nice machines. They were the first I had worked with that supported dual monitors, and true color.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
I happen to have a Quadra 650 with A/UX on it.
"Secure A/UX" sounds like an oxymoron to me. Maybe it's a bad libc. Maybe it's a bad shell. I know the terminal emulator has a lot of problems. But for whatever reason, it is very, very easy to segfault A/UX.
Overall a decent system, though. Pieces of it are just very poorly done, even if you spent forever and a day getting modern components to run on it.
...inispired this?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
very offensive.
but then you knew that.
which begs the question..... why?
grow up
To each his own, I guess. On the rare occasions I see an OS 9 system, I think "I used to like that interface? It's ugly!" I'm an OS X convert, look and all.
It seems kind of odd that multi button mouse would be so important when you use the command line so often. And how did you arrive at the conclusion that old Mac OSs didn't have good stability. Its even stranger that you give your computer strange nicknames. Rather than a new subcategory, I think you're just an idiosyncratic crank. MacWeirdo!
Yes, there were some oversights, but this is still a remarkably thorough article. The influences section which included the Xerox Star system was a lot more than I was expecting. Most Mac zealots prefer to believe that Apple invented the GUI all by themselves so they can mock Microsoft for ripping it off. Star was far from the first GUI, but it was the first full-blown GUI designed to be used by the typical officer worker. It was a true innovation, whereas MacOS was more of a savvy repackaging, albeit a first rate one that brought GUI's to the home PC market.
my mac IICX, we tweaked the thing up to 32 megs of ram, 1.1 gig hard drive (80 interneral, 1.1 external), and os 7.5 The thing worked like a beaute, would boot up in 30 seconds and did fine on word processing and the occasional sim city. Ah good old times.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Emulation links:
//e to write them to the Disk II. If anyone remembers what I'm talking about please link under this post (it showed a boot screen on the homepage then it redirected to their homepage).
http://emulation.net/apple2/
Images:
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/
Whole bunch of other sites:
http://e.webring.com/hub?ring=apple2
There used to be a really good one out there I used as a resource when I was trying to figure out how to move the images from my PC through the serial port to my Apple
Thanks! Hope these links help.
Oh and of course if you want to buy old stuff (as I have done) there is always eBay (They suck by the way because they used to have an Apple II section but it's gone now.)
Really, don't be surfing Slashdot when you have two companies to run!
In reality, Steve Jobs came back as part of the deal when Apple bought Next. So his return didn't start the move for a new OS, it was a side effect of the end result of it.
Well Apple had been making serious attempts to get away from the classic codebase since System 7 came out. Everyone knew that the fundamentals were way behind where they should be. There was a team-up with IBM, Copland, Rhapsody, and who KNOWS what else was happening 'in the basement'. The on-campus attitude was quite snooty, from my understanding, and that makes innovation difficult.
The problem seemed to me to be that Apple really wanted to remain 'true' to their die-hards while reimplementing the entire OS around them. It just couldn't happen that way.
Overall I think Apple did well with OS X, I wish it were a little more lightweight and zippier, but it's poky because the fundamental technologies behind it are much more extensible than any other OS. The filesystem overhead in OS X (which seems to really slow things down) provides for single-icon cross-platform binaries. The OpenGL display system brings scaled displays much closer.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
While that's true, it's worth noting that Apple was not exactly clear that Gershwin had also died that day. Developers understood it, but some users didn't get it for a while.
Still, it definitely needs some work.
I clearly recall a pre-release version of Copland running on my well-connected buddie's PB 3400. I remember him trying to boot it, but it pretty much crashed whenever you tried to DO anything (open two windows, copy files, rebuild desktop, etc.).
This was the same guy who showed me OpenFirmware, Linux (pre 1.0, may I add), and South Park. He's quite responsible for the geek I've become.
Apparently he's the author and number-one on the Kismet wireless project.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
That was used (IIRC) on my home system The Apple IIGS - I went vic20, Apple //C, Apple IIGS - after when Apple screwed the GS users by going mac only is when I switched to the PC.
Ryan
For your deader, pop the hood and push the little tiny CUDA microswitch on the motherboard. Only push it once, though. A lot of "dead" power supplies are vindicated this way.
Is there any way to get a copy of Rhapsody on Intel? I know there would be no useful applications for it, but I'd just love to witness it.
If you have ideas, reply or email me at andrew-rs@gizmolabs.org.
-andrew
Write OS that is decent for the era (1984).
Add hierarchical file system (1986).
.
. (RTFA)
.
Buy NeXT (12/96).
Massage it into something Mom can use (2001).
Profit!
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Where do you see "beta" in the article? As far as I can see, the only Copland releases he mentioned were "Driver Development Kits," which are described as being essentially prototypes, which does not in my mind imply "beta," or even "alpha."
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Nope, the linux-on-mach stuff never made it back into the mainstream kernel. Linus's position on microkernels in general (and mach in particular) is, ah, well-documented: he'd be more likely to assign the linux trademark to Bill Gates and run off to join the circus.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
No, what Apple did was 'throw a bone' to the Mac community by developing a version of 'Linux' to run in a sandbox setup they arranged.
Near as I can tell, the main reason was to discourage hackers from reverse engineering the Apple hardware/firmware. Give them a toy to play with and distract them.
For that reason, there still is no low-level bootloader if you want to run NetBSD or any other freenix on classic Mac hardware. The NetBSD on my SE/30 boots out of a little vestigal MacOS app, which auto-runs after MacOS loads.
---
There are so many UI mistakes in OSX compared to MacOS9 that I not sure if Apple was ever thinking about good UI when designing OSX
.
I'd totally believe it. I love a lot of things about my Powerbook and OS X, but I'm also constantly reminded that, in the Jobs era, apperances reign supreme and intelligent design takes second seat. How else can you explain horrible blunders like Apple's mice, the "See-through" screen on newer PowerBooks, 'drawers' that can only be opened with a keyboard combo or the menubar, NSSchizophrenicTextField controls. .
Apple is spending all its time focusing on selling its products through the initial "wow" factor while at the same time chronically annoying its existing user base. I switched to Apple less than a year ago and I'm already getting very salty with them over all sorts of little bugs in the hardware and UI that are so glaringly obvious that it seems the only reason they continue to exist is that some manager or hack 'visionary' at Apple decided that usability just isn't as important as whatever the hell factor Apple is using to make major decisions nowadays.
And yeah, I do have a feeling a lot of this is the fault of Steve "solid magnesium case" Jobs.
He also at that point killed Newton.
A darn shame, too.
---
I enjoyed learning more than I ever thought possible about the evolution of the MacOS, but as a graphic designer, I felt myself wanting to know more about the evolution of the visual interface side, like: what other fonts were designed for the Mac besides Chicago, back in the day? And: why put the "Close" window button in the upper left corner?
Sorry but alot of time has been wasted spent on taking Carbon and making it a first-class citizen with Cocoa instead of focusing on Cocoa.
That is changing with each revision as more Cocoa is implemented and the OS becomes more seemless.
Politics played the most important part of the direction OS X has taken.
Whatever.
Rhapsody has nothing on this.
Ha! I got modded as a Troll!
Would anyone seriously consider TWM to be more attractive than anything from Apple?
ROTFLMAO!
The sarcasm-challenged are out tonight!
Long ago, I went to a talk by the author of MacWrite. He mentioned that at one point, text deletion was done by selecting the text and dragging it to the trash can. That was quickly rejected by test users.
Copeland didn't fail for technical reasons. The problem was that Microsoft refused to convert Microsoft Word to run on it. That's what held up the transition to a new OS. Until Jobs did the big suck-up deal with Microsoft, Apple was stuck.
The whole Next thing was to justify paying $400M to bail out Jobs. Supposedly, the NeXT acquisition was to provide a new MacOS within a year. It took much longer.
For that reason, there still is no low-level bootloader if you want to run NetBSD or any other freenix on classic Mac hardware. The NetBSD on my SE/30 boots out of a little vestigal MacOS app, which auto-runs after MacOS loads.
There probably never will be such a bootloader, because the startup code is built into the ROM. The classic Macs MUST start Mac OS, the boot code is hard-wired. The only way around it is to pull the ROM off the logic board and replace it with something of your own.
For that reason, it's much easier to write a simple start-up app that boots into Linux/*BSD from Mac OS.
The original Macintosh (128K, one floppy, and no hard drive) wasn't very useful. You spent most of your time looking at the watch icon and changing floppies. Not until Macs with hard drives came out was it good for much. And that took years. Apple even fought a company that managed to put a third-party hard drive into original Macs.
Technically, the big problem with the Lisa was that Motorola was years late with the MMU chip for the M68000. The Lisa had an MMU that Apple put together out of register-level parts. This ran up the parts count and the cost. Worse, the M68000 didn't do instruction resumption after page faults correctly. So code for a M68000 with an MMU had to avoid all instructions that could cause page faults after they'd already changed the machine state. This meant avoiding the use of increment bits to increment index registers. If a load with increment page-faulted, the increment would be done twice. So the compiler had to generate code which incremented the index register in a separate operation. This produced code bloat and a slowdown.
Secure A/UX. I forget what it was called, but a DOD-compliant (I forget the Orange Book classification) version of A/UX was developed by an Atlanta company called SecureWare, later bought by HP. It was one of the first (if not the first) Unix variant to get that classification.
:D
It was either B1 or B2. (catalog is buried, sorry.)
I also thought that the A/UX print ads with the sumo wrestler doing ballet were humorous.
Does anyone know where I could pick up some A/UX install disks/CDs? 10 years ago I've always wanted to play with A/UX... After reading this I'd love to try it out on one of my old macs just for nostalgia...
Kaleidoscope.
I have not yet found a theming engine for Windows an Linux that even comes close to what was done with that little CDEV, especially in regard to irregular window shapes.
Well my Apple II Integer Basic was pretty special then with the language card pascal was pretty special. I still think Apple P.I.E. (programmer's editor) was awesome. My brother's woz-signed IIgs was neat. And the Apple /// was pure ecstasy to me, that was sheer amazingness. Of course Apple dropped it the jerks! The Apple III was sheer love and I never wanted anything else, until they dropped it (the bastards!) When they dropped it (damn! damn! damn!) I was scarred for life, the disillusionment distorted my personality.. hee hee.. bwahahahah!!!!
Oh and my fat mac was great, then when I got a hard drive to replace a floppy port that was awesome, my Quadra 950 shipped from the U.S. when it came out that was fantastic. My dual cpu 9600 was great especially with BeOS on it. And finally MacOSX which has some nice touches, too much candy, a fabulous non-apple OS under it which is not used enough, and could be great. I think however that Apple research used to be insanely great and now appears to have let a lot of air out of its sails. I remember the god who ran it quit at one time, Quicktime was used to appease M$, (though I found enough of the Mac toolbox in QT for windows that I was able to port a giant Quark XPress type program from MacOS in 6 months) and never since then have they focussed on insanely great research, if you judge from marketing. Of course they are great at marketing which is why they are taking over the music industry but I wouldn't mind if they took that money and put some serious brainpower onto some next generation OSs now. I mean now we have gotten to where the desktop always should have been and it works great with mostly Apple's GUI integration. Now it would be nice for something new again. BWAHAHA!
But couldn't a freenix (i.e. NetBSD) loader of some sort be constructed that pretends to be MacOS?
It's an academic topic anyway, as few people want to run a non-Apple OS on the old machines, but it's interesting to dig into. Since Apple now lets us download MacOS 7.5 for free from their FTP site, there's no 'cost-barrier' to using MacOS as a booter. It would just be 'cleaner' to not have to run any Apple software on the way to your chosen OS.
---
Omg! It just looks windows xp! LOL!
until I read this.
My first "modern" computer was a Mac Plus. 1 MB or Ram and a 20 MB HDD that connected throught the external floppy port. I didn't even have HFS support until I cobbled together a system from the files on a few game disks that I had lying around. Falcon 2.0 provided me with a newer "System" file than I had before and I believe that I ripped off a new "Finder" from my HS. Oh, nostalgia, back in the days when I paid $80+ per month for Compuserve at home and had free internet access (FTP+Gopher+Usenet) access at college.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You just reminded me -- I had a friend who had a Quadra named Godzilla (one of the minifridge-sized ones the old Avids used to come in, with flames painted on it). He liked to name his System 7 harddisks 'New York' and 'Tokyo'... just so that when you held down option on boot it presented you with:
Are you sure you want to rebuild Tokyo?
It's the little things.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
When A/UX 2.0 came out, Honeywell (or HFSI; don't remember when the name change occurred) did their own port working with SecureWare and based on the SecureWare code. The Apple A/UX gave you option of SysV file system or BSD FFS; the SecureWare 1.1 used only SysV FS, and the HFSI 2.0 used only BSD FFS. Again, the secure version was never updated to take advantage of Apple point releases, though there were bug fix releases of the secure 2.0 release.
The contract provisions were -- what can I say -- government provisions. I remember in particular the requirement that all output, including disk files, from the workstation had to be labelled with appropriate security markings. There was also a requirement that the system had to read and write DOS diskettes. Somehow DOS never supported security labels in its file system, but that didn't seem to bother anybody.
Apple bought the SecureWare code and did their own secure version of A/UX 3.0, but it was never completed by Apple. HFSI completed the release for Apple and distributed it. Once more the secure version stayed at 3.0 while Apple released at least 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 versions.
Since A/UX was never ported to PowerPC, I believe that HFSI did provide a few PowerMacs running System 7x at the end of their contract with DoD.
This article - as the one before it - is so full of sloppy factual errors it's actually best to not read it. At the end of the day you can't know what is true and what is not, nor how far off you are.
Until this author shows more care in assimilating facts, I say 'forget it'.
Also, the '9' is a misnomer. The article does deal with classic Apple ventures, but also goes into detail about 'X' and its origins in NS.
Sorry but alot of time has been wasted spent on taking Carbon and making it a first-class citizen with Cocoa instead of focusing on Cocoa.
That is changing with each revision as more Cocoa is implemented and the OS becomes more seemless.
Politics played the most important part of the direction OS X has taken.
Yeah, and I'm sure that Apple's not happy about that, either. But without all of the carbon work there wouldn't be anything Adobe or Microsoft. Yeah, the slashdot crowd might cheer the latter, but....
Because of Adobe, Carbon will be around forever. There's no way in hell that they can (or will) port their common code with Windows over to Objective C.
Oh COME ON! If you even read the article you are claiming to comment on, you'd know that Carbon and Cocoa are complementary APIs, created as peers around the same time. There are still some very basic features in carbon that cocoa does not have, and there are still a vast numbers of cocoa calls that are just wrappers for carbon calls. They are two different and perfectly valid APIs. People are just jaded about carbon because it's responsible fro the "bad carbon port." Essentially a Mac OS 9 application with all of the Macintosh Toolkit (the Classic API) bits worked out and holes barely filled with Carbon calls. It's unfair to denounce an API because a lot of developers were lazy. Look how good Carbon apps can be. iTunes anyone?
And before you complain about the Finder's being Carbon, remember that a lot of its troubles are due to the fact that it was a 1.0 release in 2000. While far from perfect, Panther's Finder is a perfect example of how good threading can pay off (except for Networking, my God, what were they thinking!).
Most of the "mistakes" I've read about boil down to simply operating differently.
Remember, the OS 9 GUI was originally designed for a uni-tasking computer with a tiny screen. It was brilliant. But over the years, more and more features were welded on, Frankenstein-style and it ended up being inconsistent and unwieldy. Curmudgeons now bitterly complain that it was better, but it sucked in so many ways...
For example, the Apple menu which became the dumping grounds for anything that didn't fit elsewhere. It was originally meant to be a place where mini-applets resided to provide you with a tiny bit of multitasking. (The calculator, Chooser, etc.) And let's not even mention that the Apple menu could change on a per-program basis even though it was supposed to be independent of the currently-running program.
How about the File menu which is featured in every program and mostly contains functions that don't have anything to do with files, or even the program in which it is featured. Then we have the much-vaunted Finder which does things absolutely inconsistent with all other apps. (I.e. CMD-N creates a new folder, not a new window/document.)
How about another OS 9 Finder gem: go to one window and select some files, go to another ans select some more files. Guess, what, the files in the first window are no longer selected. Would you put up with this in any other app? NO. You'd complain about Apple's GUI guidelines, and rightly so.
But OS 9's GUI has achieved sacred status in the minds of the inflexible and so you can't argue with them.\
(The most prominent curmudgeon is the Applelinks guy, who has become a parody of himself with all of his protestations about being a MacOS X guru yet wanting his old kludgy and inconsistent OS 9 back. Sort of like the sports "expert" who complains about the end zone in baseball. He bitterly complained about performance for a long time, but it turns out he had all kinds of "haxies" to make OS X look like OS 9, then he ran in a tiny partition without enough RAM.)
"My first Mac experience was poking around on a Mac Plus I got at a thift store"
Come on down to the Thift Stoe...our prices are so low because we got id of all ou 'Rs' in odo to pass the savings on to you...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
Huh, looking at the screenshots, I realize I think System 7 really look the best to me. I'm mostly a Windows on the desktop guy, but when I was first introduced it to it was on System 7, and that's probably what I used at the School of the MFA. It captured the elegance of the early Mac but wasn't so starkly monochromatic. OS 8 still looks about the same, but then 9 starts to get into that "ooh look shiny metal crap" that was the prelude to the Fisher Price look that is so dominant these days.
Similarly, I think I'll always dial down Windows XP and whatever comes next to as close to Windows 95/98 in appearance as possible. The boring parts of an OS should look as boring and grey and consistent as possible, that way you can more easily tell what's boring and what might be interesting and new.
(This from a guy who invented gamebuttons, javascript games where the sole input and output is a single javascript button)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The interface to OS X, OS 9, and Windows all suck. While OS X IS better than anything else (I am typing this in Safari) I would DIE for a Jef Raskin (more recently) designed computer interface. For more go and read The Humane Interface. You will get pissed off walking though buildings.
It may be Jobs's fault, but in any case, the issue is moot. The choice is not between Aqua and the Classic look-and-feel. The choice is between Jobs and OS X or a dead-in-the-water Apple still making incremental upgrades to OS 9 and getting less relevant by the second. Regardless of Jobs's faults, he did save the company, and I prefer a modern OS with a good GUI to an ancient OS made by a dead company with a great GUI.
Although, for me, I prefer OS X in every way except for the Finder, including appearance and interface. It might help that I studiously avoid Carbon apps (except for the Finder). And of course I like UNIX, which helps. But on the rare occasion that I boot back into OS 9, I feel very constrained and limited.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I look at this screen and can't help think of early versions of the Matrix. That was probably the first iteration of Neo.
Yes, I went to high school with him up in Providence. He graduated when I was in tenth grade, IIRC. We called him 'Kersh' as an abbreviation of his last name. He has a website at www.nerv-un.net.
My fondedst memories of him were when we went to MacWorld'97 in Boston, and when he would hang out with all the gothy freaky kids and show us cool media files, like the pre-television-series South Park stuff and oddball underground videos.
Like I said, if it weren't for him I never would have moved beyond the Mac OS, he showed me Linux and BSD, and encouraged me to diversify my knowledgebase.
Thanks Kersh!
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
> But couldn't a freenix (i.e. NetBSD) loader of some sort be constructed that pretends to be MacOS?
Possibly... I think the "Quik" bootloader did some tricky stuff in that vein. The question of Apple not documenting the low-level boot code in ROM is really moot, since you can't change it without replacing the ROM.
The short answer is that you can't run Linux/*BSD on a stock classic (non-Open Firmware) Mac without also having Mac OS. I don't think Apple really meant to discourage hackers from digging into the ROM, mostly because a) it was still necessary in order to create MkLinux, and b) the Apple bigwigs really didn't know anything about MkLinux-- it was a kind of underground project, run by a handful of developers at Apple and OSF!
His history is interesting, but not definitive and not necessarily accurate. There was, for instance, a UNIX port to Lisa hardware somewhere in there. The Apple Library was full of strange documentation on micro-kernel projects (e.g., Vanguard) from as early as the mid eighties. They might be over at Stanford now, or buried off of Caribbean drive next to Weird Stuff.
"Copland" and "Gershwin" were external code names. The corresponding internal code names were "Maxwell" and "Marconi". The "Maxwell" effort was spread throughout the company with different components being in different stages of readiness. System 7 languished without updates (to the UI in particular) due to withholding features to appear in an "imminent" Maxwell release. There were a number of seeded releases; the first general Developer's Release (DR1), however, was never mailed to customers---the CD jackets sat in an empty office for 12 months.
Maxwell was too ambitious a project for the Apple of 1990-98. It never would have shipped. The technical ideas and underpinnings were good, but Management was risk adverse & development was so spread-out and balkanized there was little hope of a release unless some massively-gifted leader came forth to unify the effort.
Gil Amelio wasn't that guy. Neither was his pick to run engineering (who's name escapes me). Neither understood Apple and neither knew what the hell to do with their $10,000,000,000 company. Many months were spent considering weird operating system options. Rumors of the new OS direction were constantly flying (one week the rumor was "Chrysalis"---a winnowed-down version of the Solaris kernel---would serve as the new MacOS's kernel), but Amelio & friends never communicated effectively or established a direction. People kept working on technologies associated with the dead Maxwell project and the sands shifted around them.
(This shouldn't be viewed as an indictment of Amelio. He and his team could not lead a company like Apple, its employees and customers were so foreign to them that they were often perplexed when they weren't outright lost. Amelio did some useful stuff in a kind of "distant uncle" sort of way: he put an end to the Maxwell daydreaming and prepared the kids for a downward trajectory that happened to intersect that of another down-on-its luck computer company.)
That Apple survived---even in significantly reduced form---is amazing. That it remained an independent company and returned as an innovative force in the industry, is astounding. Now that there is a stable underpinning to the new OS, I hope someone treks over to the Santa Clara landfill, Stanford Library, or Apple SCM & reads through the (huge number of) Maxwell/Marconi requirements and design documents; there's some gold in there.
FUck yOU, nIGger.
http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/os.htmle first Macintosh used MFS, followed by HFS and then HFS+."
"Th
True.
MFS (Macintosh File System) gave way to HFS (with nested folders!) with System 3.0 and the HD20.
Rhapsody lived as Mac OS X Server 1.X, and as of course pre-dated by OPENSTEP/NeXTStep.
The icons are all (funky NeXT) TIFFS. They're all available with a little knuckle grease.
As far as the scrollbars/window decor go, I couldn't agree more. Just look at XP.
And: why put the "Close" window button in the upper left corner?
I believe the left corner was considered better than the right corner because that's the direction to go to find the Apple menu (with all the Desk Accesories) and the File menu (with Quit). MS started the buttons on the right (probably just to show that they were not coppying every thing from the Mac). The Maximize button on the right did not show up till 7.x (I think).
cheers- raga
Back in '96, the power supply on a Power Computing clone got fried. This machine was hosting our dept. webserver. We just took out the HD, and swapped it into another Mac (forget what, but it was one of the '94 AV models from Apple). Installing the HD was a pain (poor internal layout), but once it was in, booted the Mac and the server was back on-line with zero system reconfig. The Windows folks just couldn't believe their eyes (one of them had helped swap the HD).
cheers- raga
No, MkLinux was an official project within the OS team and managed by the manager of the NuKernel group. Everyone on the OS team thought it was cool.
> No, MkLinux was an official project within the OS team and managed by the manager of the NuKernel group. Everyone on the OS team thought it was cool.
I didn't mean to suggest that MkLinux was an "unofficial" project, or that nobody at Apple liked it. If I remember correctly, Apple even shipped some Macs with MkLinux pre-installed.
What I meant was that while the developers were hip to it, the brass wasn't. MkLinux was never taken seriously by Apple management or made a part of their marketing strategy. It was pretty much a red herring.
He shoulda killed all the Dalton brothers....
Yes, I'd like to know who was responsible for:
But Adobe et. al., don't have to port _all_ of the code, just the front-end for an application (they did code in a separation of the UI and the grunt work, didn't they?).
The thing which kills me is that Macromedia chose to stick w/ their foetid Carbon code for FreeHand, even though they had a NeXTstep version (Altsys Virtuoso 2 ~= Macromedia FreeHand 4) which they could've updated instead.
Doing so would've gotten them ``for free'' support for the NeXT-style font/type palette, Apple Advanced Typography, Unicode, and Services.
Oh well, at least now there's Cenon, http://www.cenon.info
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I was at Apple during the MkLinux/OpenDoc/CyberDog days, so let me offer some correction for the record.
- A/UX was long dead before Jobs returned to Apple. The only Unix Apple was selling at that time was AIX, which drove their completely unsuccessful Network Server boxes -- but it wasn't Apple's Unix, it was IBM's, and it could not run Mac software in any way. It was pointless to keep.
- OpenDoc was conceptually cool, but Apple did a poor job at deploying it. The few developers who had decided to adopt early were punished by finding their applications incompatible with each new OpenDoc release. Users were also confused; OpenDoc was never properly integrated into the OS, so the net effect was that the handful of apps which supported it had weird menus (a "Document" menu instead of a "File" menu, for example) and took forever to launch. By the time Jobs was on the scene, Apple was already in crisis, with years of OS development work scrapped, and OpenDoc was going nowhere, with few developers on board. I would have loved to have seen the technology evolve, but I couldn't blame any manager for deciding it wasn't the best place to use resources.
- Cyberdog was not a real competitor; it was a nice proof of concept for OpenDoc, but it couldn't do half of what NS and IE could do, even back then. Most Mac users didn't even know it was there, and Apple never pushed it as a primary browser.
- MkLinux was evolving at a snail's pace, if at all. By the time Jobs was around, most users who wanted Linux on their Mac were running Linux PPC, myself included.
And so now we have Darwin, which uses much of the same foundation as MkLinux. We've got a BSD Unix, like A/UX. We've got a high quality browser in Safari. And rather than three separate products, it's all in one well-integrated product. It's true don't have a document-oriented computing paradigm, and that is too bad. It is one of the many brilliant ideas and technologies Apple has developed and shelved. But to suggest that somehow A/UX, AIX, MkLinux and CyberDog were fantastic technologies which were superior to OS X is fantasy.
a red herring? at the time i was installing MkLinux (even bought the t-shirt) on my Power Computing compatible, it seemed the point of the project was to 1) get the MACH microkernel running correctly on mac Hardware / ROM and 2) get linux to work on top of MACH.
now, years later you have OSX, and noone seems to remember MkLinux.
odd.
history of apple machintosh os
> a red herring?
:)
Yes, a red herring. Apple was having trouble delivering on Copland, and they needed a bone to throw developers to show they were on top of the OS situation. Linux was gaining ground with developers. Apple never intended to make UNIX into a new Mac OS-- Copland was going to use NuKernel, not Mach.
MkLinux wasn't even conceived by Apple management. It was just Michael Burg at Apple and a couple guys at OSF to begin with. Google for "Eryk" and "Unisoft" if you want to find out more.
They met the goals for the project, and then Apple cannibalized it for Rhapsody after the NeXT buyout.
> years later you have OSX, and noone seems to remember MkLinux
Seems pretty evident that a lot of people remember it!
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"