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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'."
i like cheese. cheese me please. i have WOLF ASS!
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
So spake Steven McGraTH
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
I think most Mac users would agree that they benefited tremendously from this event.
It's been 3 days since I've been back on my feet after my anal correction surgery. The doctors told me they have corrected as much of the damage as they could. I think I will get used to having to wear diapers the rest of my life, things could be worse. At least I am still alive, and I can still breathe the fresh air, smell the blossoming flowers, and hear the chirps of courting birds on a spring day. Although my life is much different now, I have the willpower and confidence to move on.
My name is Ben Stanfield (of Macslash fame). I got anally feltched too hard.
I remember the night like it was yesterday. Another fun and energetic Saturday at the discotech in the gay corner of town. I was being my normal flamboyant social butterfly self and talking to all the local cuties. There were a lot of muscly guys there and I must tell you the scent of raw, homosexual energy at the discotec always made the hair on my neck (and other places) stand erect. But there was this one guy who really stood out in the crowd. I would later discover his name was Jamal. The first time I saw his glistening ebony skin at the discotec I knew I wanted him inside me. I've always been good at picking up guys so I walked in my sharp female way, swinging my ass at each step, until I was right in front of that sexy piece of chocolate cake. He had short, frizzy hair, teeth whiter than milk, and a friendly smile that was out of this world. Man, I wanted his dick in my ass so bad. But I had to keep my groove. I said to him in my well crafted lisping tone, "Hey sweetie, I've never your sweet ass in these parts before, want to join me for a drink?" He smiled and replied in a deep yet touching voice, "Heh heh, I sure would you little sex muffin"
This really hit it off from there, We talked and danced and flirted like schoolgirls. I found out he was from a town a few hundred miles away, visiting the big city for a little fun. He had muscles like you wouldn't believe, obviously worked out a lot, I felt like a little strawman compared to him (I'm fashionably slim). I was on top of the world, the envy of every boy at the place, a star. When we were resting from the thumping disco-house music, I asked Jamal if he wanted a bump of crystal meth. He gladly accepted, telling me that in the town where he came from it was hard to find good crystal. I took a bump myself. My nose is no stranger to this wonderful stuff! The energy from the crystal really made us move. His dancing skills were on par with mine (which are excellent, I have danced in a couple of small Broadway-style plays before). I was really getting hot and horny at this point though, I knew we had to find a quiet spot of our own.
We walked very quickly to the bathroom; I couldn't keep my hands off his luscious abs. We found an empty stall and stormed into it, it was a whirling hurricane of passion. The speed made us very energetic. We didn't make out for long before things became hot and heavy. I slipped my hand into his tight leather pants and grabbed his sweet man package. I was thinking at this point 'how did a fire hose end up in here?'. Then I realized this was his cock. It was the longest, thickest anaconda of a cock I ever witnessed. I pulled down his pants, which was difficult because he was getting real hard, real fast. I don't even want to guess how long his penis was, at least 12 inches, maybe more. And it was so think I couldn't even grab around it all with one hand. His cock was sweaty and glistened. I wanted this black staff real bad. I pulled off my own pants and bent down. I stuck the head of his cock in my mouth but it was just too big. I licked the rim a bit but I knew what I REALLY wanted. I turned around and assumed the position I have assumed so many times before. Face down, ass up. That's the way we like to fuck. My anus was not prepared for this brutal thrashing however. I've always described the sensation of anal intercourse as taking a long, incredibly enjoyable shit. But this didn't feel right at all. The walls of my anus were ripping, "PLEASE! Be g
Faggots as far as the eye can see.
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)
Dear Apple,
I am a homosexual. I bought an Apple computer because of its well earned reputation for being "the" gay computer. Since I have become an Apple owner, I have been exposed to a whole new world of gay friends. It is really a pleasure to meet and compute with other homos such as myself. I plan on using my new Apple computer as a way to entice and recruit young schoolboys into the homosexual lifestyle; it would be so helpful if you could produce more software which would appeal to young boys. Thanks in advance.
with much gayness,
Father Randy "Pudge" O'Day, S.J.
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
Dear Father O'Day:
Thanks for your letter. Being Catholic myself, I know exactly what you're talking about! It has always been our plan here at Apple Computer Inc to revolutionize personal computing with our high-quality and highly gay products.
I'm happy to answer your letter by letting you know that YES we will be releasing an entire hLife ("homo-life") software line. You'll be able to recognize it in stores by the small stylized logo depicting a large cock entering a tight anus with an Apple logo on it. ("Suddenly it all comes together" indeed!).
Anyway, I hope you and other members of our community will join us on our mission, and purchase the exciting new hLife boxed set. Only the boxed set comes with translucent cock rings!
Sincerely,
Harry Rodman
Vice-president
Homosexual Liaison Services
Apple Computer, Inc.
Write crappy OS.
Add hierarchical filesystem.
Buy NeXT.
Change GUI.
?
Profit!
Nice content, but the page design is less than stellar. Why did it have to use such a nonstandard aspect ratio?
the mundane chorEs may do, may not
omg i prolly fail even the 52nd yes i do
i am an idiot
WHAT DOES AN INJUN KNOW?
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'm drunk. You suck. Eat my penis.
Mac OS sucks. Long live Windows.
I don't see it on the list.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
My first love... System 6. : \
Even after all these years Apple is nothing but an overpriced eye candy computer builder for gays and freaks.
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.
... that it took several minutes for my last post to be modded troll. Just goes to show Mac OS is dead. That's what happens when a dead OS like BSD is used as the base.
NOT!!!!!
If BSD is dead then Mac OS X must be dead too :-)
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
Skinner: Children, the times they are a-becoming quite different. Test
scores are at an all-time low, so I've come up with these
academic alerts. [hold stack of cards] You will receive one as
soon as your grades start to slip in any subject. This way
your parents won't have to wait until report card time to
punish you.
Martin: How innovative. I like it!
Kearney: Hey Dolph, take a memo on your Newton: beat up Martin.
[Dolph writes "Beat up Martin" which the Newton translates as
"Eat up Martha"]
Bah! [throws Newton]
Martin: [being bonked on the head] Ow!
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
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 ;)
sanctions, and and, 47ter initial
Since quitting the Navy six months early at age 27 so he could run for Congress on an antiwar platform, John Kerry has built a political career on his service in Vietnam. His unsuccessful 1970 congressional bid lasted only a month, during which it proved impossible for even he to get to the left of the winner, Robert Drinan, but it forged a conflicting political persona - one hammered out between his combat medals earned in the Mekong delta and the common cause he made with the enemy upon his return home.
Now, at age 60, the junior Democratic senator from Massachusetts is milking his veteran status once again in an effort to show that he's tougher and more patriotic than the man he seeks to replace, President George W. Bush. And, as unrepentant as ever for his pro-Hanoi activism, he is just as conflicted in 2004 as he was in the 1960s.
If there is any consistency in Kerry's political career, it is his in-your-face use of that four-month stint in Vietnam. He enlisted like many other young men of privilege, trying to serve without going to the front lines. When in 1966 it looked like his draft number was coming up during his senior year at Yale University, and already having spoken out in public against the war, Kerry signed up with the Navy under the conscious inspiration of his hero, the late President John F. Kennedy. As a lieutenant junior grade, Kerry skippered a CTF-115 swift boat, a light, aluminum patrol vessel that bore a passing resemblance to PT-109. He thought he'd arranged to avoid combat. "I didn't really want to get involved in the war," he later would tell the Boston Globe. "When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling, and that's what I thought I was going to do."
Soon, however, Kerry was reassigned to patrol the Mekong River in South Vietnam, a formative experience for his political odyssey. The official record shows that he rose to the occasion. It was along the Mekong where he first killed a man, aggressively fighting the enemy Viet Cong and reportedly saving the lives of his own men, earning a Bronze Star, a Silver Star for valor, and three Purple Hearts in the process.
Kerry opted for reassignment to New York City, where - as a uniformed, active-duty officer - he reportedly began acting out the antiwar feelings he had expressed before enlisting. Press reports from the time say that he marched in the October 1969 Moratorium protests - a mass demonstration by a quarter-million people that had been orchestrated the previous summer by North Vietnamese officials and American antiwar leaders in Cuba (see sidebar, p. 27). Kerry had found his purpose in life. The New York Times reported on April 23, 1971, that at about the time of the Moratorium march, Lt. Kerry had "asked for, and was given, an early release from the Navy so he could run for Congress on an antiwar platform from his home district in Waltham, Mass."
For Kerry, politicizing the nation's war effort for partisan purposes was the right thing to do, in contrast to the violent revolutionary designs of colleagues who were out to destroy the system. Kerry didn't want to take down the establishment. He wanted to take it over. His aborted, monthlong 1970 congressional campaign was a victory for him politically, as it landed him on television's popular Dick Cavett Show, where he came to the attention of some of the central organizers of the antiwar/pro-Hanoi group known as Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).
VVAW was a numerically small part of the protest movement, but it was extremely influential through skillful political theater, the novelty of uniformed combat veterans joining the Vietniks, and a ruthless coalition-building strategy that forged partnerships with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), its Trotskyite rival, the Socialist Workers Party, and a broad front that ranged from pacifists to supporters of the Black Panthers and other domestic terrorist groups.
Kerry signed on as a full-time organizer and member of th
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
lube or We sell of pro6ress. of BSD/OS. A hobby. It was all
What's the difference between dog shit and niggers? When dog shit gets old it turns White and quits stinking.
What's the difference between a jew and a pizza?
A pizza doesn't scream in the oven.
What's the difference between a nigger and a snow tire? A snow tire doesn't sing when you put chains on it.
What would you call the Flintstones if they were black? Niggers.
Why don't sharks eat niggers? They think it's whale shit.
What do you call a nigger in a tree with a briefcase? Branch manager.
How come there aren't any Mexicans on Star Trek? They don't work in the future, either.
Why do niggers cry during sex? The Mace.
How do you stop a nigger from drowning? Take your foot off the back of his head.
How do you get a nigger out of a tree? Cut the rope.
What did the Alabama sherriff call the nigger who had been shot 15 times? Worst case of suicide he had ever seen.
What do you get when you cross a retard with a gang banger? Someone who spray paints on a chain link fence.
Why do niggers stink? So blind people can hate them too.
What do you get when you cross a nigger and a spic? Someone too lazy to steal.
Why don't niggers take aspirin? They refuse to pick the cotton out.
What do nigger kids get for Christmas?
Your bike. What's a niggers idea of foreplay?
"Don't scream or I'll cut you, bitch."
Why do spics drive low-riders? So they can cruise and pick lettuce at the same time.
What do you get when you cross a jew and a gypsy? A chain of empty retail stores.
Why don't nigger kids play in the sandbox? Cats keep covering them up.
What do you call an apartment full of niggers? A COON-dominium.
Why are there no nigger astronauts? Their lips explode at 50,000 feet.
How do you babysit a niglet? Wet his lips and stick him to the wall.
How do you get him down? Teach him to say "Motherfucker."
How else do you babysit a niglet? Put Velcro on the ceiling and tell him to jump.
How do you get him down? Invite the spics over, blindfold them and tell them it's a pinata party.
Why do jews have big noses? Air is free.
What is a nigger on a bike? Thief.
What's long and black and smells like shit? The welfare line.
What do you call 50 niggers at the bottom of the ocean? Good start.
What is the worst 3 years of a niggers life? First grade.
How was break dancing invented? Niggers trying to steal hubcaps from moving cars.
Why do niggers keep chickens in their back yards? To teach their kids how to walk.
How do you know Adam and Eve were not black? You ever try to take a rib from a nigger?
What is a nigger? Proof that skunks fuck monkeys.
What's the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead nigger in the road? The dead dog has skid marks in front of it.
What did Abe Lincoln say after a 3 day drunk?
"I set WHO free?"
Why are chimps always frowning?
They know in a million years they are going to turn into niggers.
Why is interrogating a Mexican like a pool ball?
The harder you hit it the more English you get.
How many jews can you fit in a VolksWagon?
All of them if you put them in the ashtray.
A nigger and a spic jump off the Empire State Building, who hits the ground first?
Who cares.
A nigger and a spic jump off the Empire State Building, who hits the ground first?
The spic, because the nigger had to stop on the way down and spray paint "motherfucker" on the wall.
Why don't spics have barbeques? The beans keep falling through the grill.
You hear about the new car made in Israel?
Not only can it stop on a dime, it will go back and pick it up.
What do you call an Ethiopian with a pickle on his head?
A quarter-pounder.
How many Ethiopians can you fit in a phone booth?
All of them.
How do you start a foot race in Ethiopia?
Roll a doughnut down the street.
How many niggers does it take to pave a driveway?
One if you spread him real thin.
How do you blindfold a chink?
Dental floss.
How do chinks name their kids?
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.
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
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
Props on the fp.
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
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
Where's the part M$ windows eat Apple alive?
Where's the part apple stole the mouse idea from Xerox?
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.
Lisa
Macintosh
Windows 3.1
Windows 3.1 with more junk
Windows 3.1 with more, more junk
and so on.
-------
FM Clan
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.
AFAIK, Apple's only had one OS: OS X. Everything before that was really only program loaders and not a full-fledged OS. There was no protected memory, and no virtual memory--things that Windows 3.1 had back in 1989!
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!
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
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.
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
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.
history of apple machintosh os
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"