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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'."
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)
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.
They all had different things that they excelled at. Diversi-Dos was fantastically fast and made a little buzzy noise when it was loading, which is why I installed it on most stuff.
There were also ones with 'built in' commands, and other such such hackery.
I wish I had it now, but I accidentally formatted it.
Anyone hear of such a thing?
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.
I don't have any of my old Apple disks anymore, but I do remember Diversi-DOS. Like you said, it was blazing fast. It also had a hex display in the bottom corner of the screen that displayed the disk, track, and sector being read/written.
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.
As crappy as Win95 is, OS7 and 8 were a lot worse in terms of stability.
I've never met a OS7 user who hasn't had to "rebuild his desktop" at least every other week.
>I wonder if they ever thought seriously about selling a version for PC hardware.
It was called Project Star Trek (where no Mac OS has gone before), and got as far as working code and a pitch to the the Board of Directors.
The BoD turned it down.
It might not have worked reliably in the chaos of PC hardware, but we'd be better off today if Windows had been exposed to that kind of competition.
Uh, I wrote this. And I own 4 G4's (and countless older systems). Truth hurts. NeXT did all of the hard work.
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!
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 ;)
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
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 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.
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.
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
I had something very much like that, if not the same thing. One disk full of DOSs, another full of Locksmith, etc., and there wasn't much you couldn't do.
I've still got an original DOS 3.1.1 System Master. I doubt it boots. I don't think floppies were supposed to last 25 years.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
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
JLG was asking $150 million for Be. 2 years later, they sold themselves to Palm for $10 million in stock.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I don't think floppies were supposed to last 25 years.
You'd be surprised, the vast majority of my 20+ year old C64 disks work just fine. (That's not to say I haven't made backups though.)
Eh, what's that sonny? I used a 6-button turbo trackball on the mac from system 8 on. But you're right about the crashy business, some machines just kept chuggin' along, and some just wouldn't go for more than a few minutes. System 7 - 9, any flavour of windows and NT, they all worked like a charm or had gremlins ('winfax' --- shudder). But we still got the work done.
There's nothing I hate more than being slave to my mouse.
I agree that having to hack the system (see above re: stability) folder in order to get full keyboard navigation was boneheaded design. But it didn't really matter after I got Keyquencer, which as an OS X'er I miss, since most important operations got reduced to a key combination macro -- fast, rock solid, make the machine do backflips, really, anything nearly, one program saved me months. But this newfangled 'nixy goodness is like being young again, roaming through the university network, even if the interface isn't as productive to old farts like me (I still boot up the old toastermac for fun sometimes), running with no reboot for 5 months at a time makes up for it.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I don't think floppies were supposed to last 25 years.
I installed Windows 1.03 from original 5-1/4" floppy diskettes * on an old Compaq Portable just last week. Floppy diskettes DO last a long time. If properly taken care of, and 3-1/2" disks are significantly less durable.
(* just because. doesn't *everybody* run Windows 1.03 on at least one of their machines??)
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I think I'm part of a new subcategory of Mac owners--I didn't get one until OS X 10.1, and so have no desire to run OS 9 or Classic apps.
And I go completely in the opposite direction. I used to revile Macs and Apple. My first Mac experience was poking around on a Mac Plus I got at a thift store long after it was obsolete, and then awhile later running NetBSD on an SE/30.
Now I'm becoming sort of an after-the-fact semi-expert on old Apple hardware. Primarily because it's been showing up at local surplus equipment auctions and I'm figuring it out, shining it up and testing it, and selling it to people on eBay and locally. I seldom have more than one or two machines on hand that I can run anything newer than OS9 on. And I've come to have a lot of affection for one machine in particular, my PowerBook 165c, which I paid $5 for and which is a great little machine for OS 7 but since it's completely unsalable (people don't buy anything older than 7300s unless there's 'classic' interest, like SE/30s, Classics, maybe nicer Quadras) I am keeping it around. It's a really nice little system for getting away from the modern madness of today, to retreat to Claris Works and do some writing.
So I'm a new Mac convert, someone who didn't 'see the light' until after OSX came out, who doesn't run, and in fact has never touched the keyboard on a Mac running OSX.
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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.
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?
Ok, sure, there are Windows versions of these programs. In fact there are PalmOS and BeOS (check Ethereal's web site if you don't believe me) versions as well, but are they in widespread use? Besides, they are open source so you could port them to just about any OS if you really wanted to, so you're post can apply to any operating platform out there.
I don't know what area of IT (or if you work in IT at all) you work in but it isn't in a UNIVERSITY setting like the one I was describing. We do have a PC (read Wintel) administration wing but the vast majority of the computers doing the workload (and using sysadmin tools like Nmap and Ethereal) are running OS X, AIX, BSD, and Solaris. None us sysadmins use Windows for Nmap or Ethereal, we use them for tasks like Lotus Notes accessing Exchange servers. The only people on campus that use Windows Boxes are doing Windows Server administration or are running the helpdesk.
You obviosly missed the point of my post, that Winows ME is more stable/reliable than OS X is a load of crap.
Sorry if I seem brash, I'm not feeling well, and I have karma to burn.
-- Is it a right to remain ignorant? -- Calvin
People who say it "Just Works" probably haven't spent much time using it.
/sw/bin and /sw/sbin to my path, and that was it. Period. I set up my network to go to 3 different places, with 2 printers with no problems (well, there was a kernel panic problem with the airport driver when switching locations but that has been patched).
Well, I havn't spent much time using it. About a month since I got this powerbook. And for the most part I can say, yeah, "It just works!".
I got my powerbook, brought it home. Plugged it in. Hit the powerbutton. And after answering a couple of questions I downloaded the updates over my wireless broudband connection that I had never used before, and was learning about my new OS in minutes. I downloaded fink, installed some of my favorite UNIX like apps. I checked out my dotfiles from CVS via ssh. Changed my default shell to zsh. Dropped my dotfiles in place and had to add
As far as I'm concerned, all other incarnations of MacOS sucked. "It just crashed". I could crash a mac in about 5 minutes doing stuff like web browsing, using the finder, or whatever. I had really bad luck with them.
This is coming from almost 10 years of Linux/UNIX usage that was pretty much exclusive. I did do Windows development for a couple of years, and yeah, that tought me I was barking up the wrong tree. We would do demos with a windows client and a Linux server for SSL and smartcard interaction, and have to tell the people giving the demos. "This is rover. Its a Linux based OS that does the backend stuff. All you have to do is turn it on this way and when your done turn it off this way. This is a windows box like your familiar with, when it fucks up, just hard shut it down and reboot it."
For a desktop OS, I couldn't be happier. "It just works!" I hated Macs a couple of years ago because of the little bomb icon, and having to see that happy face all the time rebooting them. Windows almost works (depending on the version, the time of last reinstall, the phase of the moon, the level of service pack you have, the proper drivers, and which applications you are runnint). Linux is a decent desktop os, but doing stuff like dual headed displays, installing software (I admin supercomputers, I know what to do OK), printing, dynamic devices like firewire and USB, whatever, is almost there, but not quite.
I'm still new to OS X, and am still learning about it. I have not developed anything for it besides perl and shell scripts yet. But I'm impressed. Its a little hard dealing with some of the "dumb downedness", like the lack of configuration options that comes with linux, but the defaults or what you can change are not bad.
I like how OS X integrated UNIX with a GUI. The role of root is unobtrusive and natural. It asks for my password for installing software, no viruses, no virus checker, no popups, no spyware, etc. Don't get me wrong. Its not perfect. But its the best end user os for me out there. Hands down.
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.
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
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.
Damn. Even at the very begining, Apple suffered from Motorola not supplying quality chips in a timely manner.
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
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.
Trying to keep that disk drive working was the bane of my childhood. Not only was it dog slow (even for the time) but they always went out of alignment. We went through several before I bought an "align it at home" kit. Then I would fix it every few weeks but it was a major PITA. Finally even that stopped working and the drive just wouldn't read disks.
Lasers Controlled Games!