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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!
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.
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
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 !
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^)
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))
Not really. Apple bought NeXT at the end of 1996 under leadership of Gil Amelio, with the express purpose of using NeXTStep as the basis of the new OS (or whatever the proper capitalization is). This was perhaps a year or so after they dumped their ill-fated Copland next-gen OS project and needed a new OS fast. Be was the other company that was rumored for an Apple buy-out.
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.)
You can get that 'simple' look with WindowMaker or any of the other lightweight window managers. I run WindowMaker and some selected bits of KDE for better menus and a 'taskbar'
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
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
Rebuilding the desktop != Rebuilding an OS.
The desktop file only stored very minor information (file comments, file-icon associations, etc). When it became corrupted, the general symptom was an icon or two didn't show up correctly. Rebuilding this file took about a minute, and was completely non-destructive.
Back on Classic Mac OS I would generally do a clean build with each major system release, more to clean out old extensions, preferences, and other crud than deal with system stability issues. On the whole, Classic Mac OS might have crashed on occasion, but in didn't catastrophically fail and require a complete rebuild the way Windows tends to.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
A big part of the motivation for Star Trek was that Moto was late late late with the 030 (due at least in part to a patent licensing issue) and there was a chance the CPU wouldn't ship at all, leaving apple a generation behind.
Sound familiar?
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
BeOS installed 'smooth and easy' like that on my x86 box. Because I was lucky enough to have the right hardware. I tried it again, another time, with the wrong hardware. Boy was it a mess.
What graphics hardware did that release support? Possibly it had limited 'demo grade' support for moderatly high resolution generic SVGA that would have crapped out if you tried to do anything fancier. That's my experience with the BeOS installer.
Apple isn't particularly good at supporting third party hardware on the system level. They don't have to be, it isn't one of their goals.
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Darwin x86 is an excercize in portability, which is a smart thing for the Darwin developers to do. Design for portability, i.e. NetBSD, keeps things a lot cleaner.
Darwin, however, gives you a command prompt and XFree86. Cool and useful to some of us, but it ain't OSX.
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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.
Im pretty sure that some of the early Mac OS Server X builds (pre desktop OSX release) had the rhapsody interface. I remember installing it on a G3 tower, but I haven't seen it since. There just weren't many applications for it at the time- Netscape 4, Omniweb were the only web browsers I remember finding. But I guess it was designed for server programs anyway.
Also known as a bundle.
.frameworks extension on its directory name and by the Resources directory at the top level of the framework bundle. Inside the Resources directory is an Info.plist file that contains the bundle's identifying information. Your actual Resources directory does not have to reside physically at the top-level of your bundle. In fact, the system frameworks that come with Mac OS X put a symbolic link in this location. The link points to the most current version of the Resources directory, buried somewhere deep inside the bundle.
Frameworks aren't quite the same thing as a bundle.
Framework bundles use a bundle structure different from "modern" bundle structure used by applications. The structure for frameworks is based on an older bundle format and allows for multiple versions of the framework code and header files to be stored inside the bundle. Supporting multiple versions allows older applications to continue running even as the framework binary continues to evolve.
The system identifies a framework by the
A 512k floppy would be a hell of an impressive thing, given that the Mac 512k used 400k floppies, and was followed by the 512ke, which used 800k floppies.
The 512k figure refered to the amount of RAM it had.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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.
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.
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.
Well, A/UX is floating around if you look carefully :-)
. ht ml ...it's still under copyright of course, but where to buy it? Anyway, on a slow sunday-afternoon I like to fiddle with it, I run it just for fun :-)
http://geektechnique.org/projects/aux-on-quadra
Yes, I believe you for BeOS, but not for PalmOS; there's an entry that lists BeOS, and says "Be (Palm?)", but that refers to the "owner"/maintainer/distributor of the OS, and Be no longer exists, with Palm having bought their intellectual property - there's no entry for PalmOS. (Not only have I checked Ethereal's Web site, I've written much of the FAQ on that site - as well as much of the Ethereal code, including some of the Windows support....)
That appears to be the case for the Windows version - a number of the questions on the Ethereal mailing list come from Windows users (and a number of the Ethereal developers are doing their development on Windows!), and there are a large number of downloads of the Windows installer for Ethereal (47517 downloads of the Ethereal 0.10.0 installer in February, for example).
I wasn't addressing that point - which wasn't what you were addressing, either, in the part to which I was replying. Windows Me is "Windows OT", while OS X is "Mac OS NT"; the original poster was probably either trolling/flamebaiting or confusing "Mac OS OT" (pre-X) with OS X.
I was addressing the claim that Microsoft Orifice plus UNIX admin tools "just doesn't happen in the Windows environment", by noting that at least some of those "UNIX admin tools" are also available on Windows.
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!).
I cannot remmember the URL, but there are ISOs of the AUX installation cd(3.1), boot disk, and update(to 3.11, I think) floating around. I installed it on my Centris 650(40mb ram, 1gig hdd) and it runs like a champ. Its the best OS ever, if you dont mind the lack of modern software(c++ compiler, ssh, and so on). Very easy to install. Putting it on the internet was a little tricky.i on.html
http://www.aux-penelope.com/AUXInstallat
helped my a bit.
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.
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.