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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'."

123 of 334 comments (clear)

  1. apple //e - DOS 3.3 by Chuck+Bucket · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by absurdist · · Score: 4, Informative

      We were using them for multimedia presentations at the Museum of Science and Industry in L.A. They controlled full motion interactive video using Sony LDP1000s, and all networked together to the mighty Corvus 5 MB (enormous!) hard drive. Reliable as a brick. And all this in 1984.

    2. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by teamhasnoi · · Score: 5, Interesting
      I remember having a 5.25 disk with about 20 different dos-es on it. Diversi-Dos, Double Dos, and a pile of others that I can't remember offhand.

      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?

    3. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by La+Gris · · Score: 2

      Then we got Prodos for //c and //e (worked nice on vanilla ][+ but required an 80columns card)

      Prodos was the base for the MAC OS Filesystem and continued. What are the filesystems on current MACs ?

      I just Keep My Apple //e and an older ][euro+ (PARL/50Hz/220V) working, turning them on and playing some disks on some times.

      I couldn't find any decent Apple][ emulator for current Linuxes. I keep my old hardware clean an in good working conditions, praying for it not to fail.

      --
      Léa Gris
    4. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by Dukael_Mikakis · · Score: 3, Funny

      The Apple IIe was godly. I was too young to own one, but my cousin got one when he was like 15 or something and the first thing he did was print off a huge banner: "THE APPLE IIe, THE ULTIMATE" in dot-matrix and hung it up across the family room.

      Hideous, but awesome.

    6. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by DynaSoar · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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
    7. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by larry+bagina · · Score: 4, Informative
      Prodos was the base for the MAC OS Filesystem and continued.

      That's incorrect. ProDOS was the same as SOS, the Sophisticated Operating System, developed for the Apple ///. They expected boot code in different sectors, so you could have a disk that booted on an Apple II and an Apple III.

      The first Macintosh used MFS, followed by HFS and then HFS+.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    8. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by bobthemonkey13 · · Score: 3, Informative
      What are the filesystems on current MACs ?

      Mac OS uses the Hierarchial File System (HFS), which has been extended to HFS+ for OS X and (I think) OS 9 and above (anyone care to confirm that?). Recent versions of Mac OS can also handle ISO9660 and FAT, and I think OS X can do BSD UFS.

    9. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by kommakazi · · Score: 3, Informative

      I think HFS+ first appeared in either system 7.6 or 8...I'm leaning toward 8 more... Actually you could create UFS partitions with old versions of Drive Setup on older Mac OS versions long before OS X came around.

    10. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by FuzzyBad-Mofo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.)

    11. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by Endive4Ever · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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??)

      --
      ---
    12. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by ZigMonty · · Score: 4, Informative
      HFS+ first appeared in Mac OS 8.1.

      Supported filesystems in Mac OS X. For some reason ISO9660 and NTFS aren't on the list but they're supported too. There's probably more.

    13. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by __aaittv7720 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I think ISO9660 and NTFS aren't listed because they are readonly.

    14. Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 by John+Harrison · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Ha! I am sure the C=64 disks that I have are fine. I could just never get the stupid 1541 to stay aligned for more than two weeks at a time.

      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.

  2. Powerstack by tcd004 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'd like to remind everyone that the greatest computer ever created runs Mac osX native. As if it woudn't.

    tcd004

    1. Re:Powerstack by addaon · · Score: 2, Funny

      Wow, your site has popups. Welcome to my foes list.

      --

      I've had this sig for three days.
    2. Re:Powerstack by ceejayoz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why do you foe people for your being stupid enough to not install Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, or the Google toolbar? /just sayin'

    3. Re:Powerstack by iminplaya · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Popups? What are those?

      Signed,
      Happy Mozilla user

      --
      What?
    4. Re:Powerstack by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Someone's foe list? Good God, no, anything but that. I'll be good, I promise.

    5. Re:Powerstack by iminplaya · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I saw it. I was just trying (ineptly apparrently) to be funny. Save yourself some frustration, and turn off the warning thingy. Sometimes ignorance can be very blissful.

      --
      What?
    6. Re:Powerstack by FredFnord · · Score: 2

      > As does anybody who puts campaign rhetoric in their sig file.

      That's right! Lord knows we don't want anything that would indicate that you actually give a shit about anything in your sig. After all, only self-absorbed, cynical bastards who would rather gripe about the way things are than actually do anything about it are supposed to be on Slashdot anyway.

      Right?

      Sheesh.

      -fred

      --
      Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
  3. Re:MkLinux by rekoil · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:MkLinux by negface · · Score: 5, Funny

    You just summoned an odd image of Jobs fighting McBride in my brain...

  5. Pity about the os9 GUI by baryon351 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)

    1. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I agree. I love OS X for its power and stability, but on the rare occasions I find myself looking at a Mac running OS 9 or previous, I remember how much better it looked. At those who discount aesthetics in OSs are idiots; when you're staring at a screen all day, you'd better hope it's easy on the eyes.

      Any iteration of the Mac OS, of course, is better-looking than anything that's ever come out of Redmond. ;)

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    2. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Alot of people don't understand the principle reasons for the GUI change. One was to make certain that people would see the distinction between the OS X and Classic modes. It was very important for Apple to get programmers to write native software that they make it very clear that the program they are using is not OS X native. Also, there was the necessity that older users be made constantly aware that this was a new OS and that it had very different capabilities. Apple wanted people to learn to use it differently. These are all really more important than the attractiveness of the UI. I really think they blew it on the way textures changed and a few other things. But, for the most part it is very good.

    3. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by Senjutsu · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I had some of the early developer betas for Mac OS X, which used the Rhapsody UI.

      Trust me, it would have elicited far more complaints than the OS X gui ever did. It was just a poorly thought out (with good reason, all the effort was going in to aqua) mismash of OpenStep and OS 9 concepts.

    4. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by Dukael_Mikakis · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yeah, Bill Gates never promised that you'd want to "lick" anything. But Microsoft doesn't make hardware.

      Apple had long been lauded for it's ease of use (read: intuitive and friendly UI), and for hardware that favored graphics processing, from what I could tell. Fair or not, Apple is regarded as the best platform for image/media/graphics processing and rendering (I'm not so familiar with the Apple hardware config, so verification, anybody?).

      It seems that pulling away from the good old intuitive interface and heading for a sleeker interface, and one that is based off of FreeBSD nonetheless, seems to indicate that they want to capture the trendier, more tech-savvy crowd. They've got their rep as the media processor of choice, so now they're trying to grab the cool hackers and developers who are sick of Windows and are tired of the command line.

      And I guess it's working. My roommate last year got a G4 running OSX and he loves it. This is after years of dealing with various versions of windows and trying over and over to get Mandrake on his system.

      Me? I'm still running a PC with Redhat, though.

    5. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by seanadams.com · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I was given a rhapsody developer's release for x86 some time in 1998.

      I was astonished at how easy it was to install on a PC, and how flawlessly all of the (supported) hardware worked. It was just bizarre to install an OS on a PC and have it work right the first time. I had never seen windows/linux/freebsd install that easily, but Apple managed to get it working just fine on an OS that they never even shipped!

    6. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by Bishop · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This highlights one of the problems I have with KDE GNOME. Both projects had the misguided idea that a gui that looked like Windows would be easier for users switching from Windows. Ofcourse the opposite is true. If a gui looks like Windows users are going to expect it to act exactly like Windows. When the behaviour is a little different users get frustrated and confused. It would be far better to have a completely different UI that is userfriendly.

      That said, I am not sure that Apple switched the UI for reasons of useability. 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. ;-)

    7. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by MarcQuadra · · Score: 2, Informative

      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
    8. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by gberke · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yes. The GUI sucks. I have NO idea why they didn't just plop OS 9 onto whatever OS they wanted. All the developers have to jump through their own ears anyway.
      I liken the MacX GUI on Unix to a large rug thrown over a floor with various imprefections in it, not a few of which are open to the basement.
      Oh, and did I mention: it eats the machine like Pacman! Gads, I get onto OS 9 sometimes and am shocked at the speed. Of course, thats until I use almost any modern wintel machine, which makes me feel like I've been living in South Carolina and suddenly I'm in NY City: it moves faster. And you do have to put up with a few unsavories.

    9. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by Endive4Ever · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      ---
    10. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by cosmo7 · · Score: 3, Funny

      I vote for the word "imprefections" to be added to the English language.

    11. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by idiotnot · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I get nostalgic, too -- here's proof. But using OS9 is just so painful in other ways, it's not worth it anymore. The biggest thing I can say is that OS9 is much better if you don't have a hi-res monitor. My toilet-seat iBook was fine at 800x600 under OS9, but a royal pain under OSX. I replaced it with a newer one mainly for that reason.

    12. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by llin · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There are plenty of retro themes out there. I've personally found Max Rudbergs's themes to be some of my favorites. Check out his Rhapsodized and Classic Platinum skins at his site.

      MacThemes.net is a good site w/ both theme reviews, news, and links to theming software.

    13. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by capmilk · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Mac OS X Server was even sold like that. I still have version 1.0 here and it makes me wonder every time I see it. :)

    14. Re:Pity about the os9 GUI by fermion · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I think you also have to take into account the change in technology and Apple's willingness to break compatibility to make use of current technology. This is good as it prevents the situation in which one is using kludged 20 year old assumptions on contemporary machines. Of course, to make these ancient machines look modern, various flavors of the month are tacked on.

      So remember that System and Finder was designed for a 9 inch screen, for a single application, for a single user, for a simple directory structure, for a machine that would be turned off and therefore had to start quickly.

      --
      "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
  6. Apple operating systems by n3m3sis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:Apple operating systems by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 4, Interesting

      >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.

    2. Re:Apple operating systems by Lars+T. · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Odd, I always had Windows 95 crashing even when only one app was running, and have little problems running multiple apps on classic MacOS as long as I don't run anything from Microsoft or Netscape.

      The point about Win95 (and 98 isn't much better)is: is it the app crashing that corrupts the Protected Memory, or is it the OS killing itself.

      --

      Lars T.

      To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck

    3. Re:Apple operating systems by slycer9 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Remind me again how hard it was to rebuild desktops as opposed to all you had to do with Win95/98?
      Hello, Memmaker anyone?

      --
      Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
    4. Re:Apple operating systems by n()_cHIEFz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm sorry but I have to cry bullshit on this post. I work for the the IT department for a reasearch university in New Mexico (yea, laugh now but our U pulls in loads of reasearch money and we have one of the top Engineering schools in the country and we're in the top 50 in Computer Science) and we have widespread use of OS X, mainly in OS X Server but you would be surprised at the ammount our of sys admins running Macs with OS X (our entire NOC is running OS X as admin computers). It's a great combination of useablility (i.e. MS Office and UNIX Sys Admin tools nmap, ethereal, etc.) that just doesn't happen in the Windows environment. And yes, I realize you aren't talking about system administration, you are talking about end users.

      I'm not sure what types of software that you were running but they must have been extremely poorly written. I mean OS X crashing more than ME?!? Come on, give me a break, I don't recall ever seeing a BSOD on a OS X (maybe the swirl that never ends) but if you know anything about *NIX in general, you can kill -KILL (PID) any process that is causing problems. Your comparison of Max OS X in general to ME is almost absurd as ME is based on partly on technology from the old DOS days, where OS X has compatability with classic, but the underpinnings are not the same. A much better comparison would be NT/2000/XP to OS X, but even there the reliability is not the same.

      I personally have a Mac running panther, along with 2 PCs, one (sadly requied) running Windows XP and one running Linux. My current uptime (not max, which is 66 days) on my Mac is 34 days (the MAX uptime i've ever had on my XP machine is 22 days), and security reboots aside I've never had a crash, lockup or any other problem with OS X. I can't say the same for any Windows operating system I've ever run, although with XP my reboots are occuring with less frequency. And NO I'm not a Mac fanboy, I really prefer working on my Linux system, Mac comes in at a close second. And working in IT for 12 years, Mac's are, if not the easiest to deal with, they are close. No wonder you post as AC, but the fact that you're post was modded up shows that those with mod points are on crack.

      --
      -- Is it a right to remain ignorant? -- Calvin
    5. Re:Apple operating systems by NuzzleMySack · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      Well, let me introduce myself. I ran System 7 or 8 on my PowerMac 7100 for over 6 years and never rebuilt the desktop or had unexplained crashes. I kept my system folder very clean and avoided any exotic extensions (i.e. Now Utilities) that hacked the OS.

    6. Re:Apple operating systems by Gropo · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I think the operative word in his recollection is the word "was"... Indicating that we're talking Mac OS 7 or Mac OS 8, not OS X.

      Regardless, a well administered mid-90's Mac was still arguably more stable than the average Windows 95 machine, 'pseudo protected memory' be damned...

      --
      I hate Grammar Nazi's
    7. Re:Apple operating systems by diamondsw · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
    8. Re:Apple operating systems by Gumber · · Score: 2, Informative

      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?

    9. Re:Apple operating systems by gobbo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There's a fileserver/database host pizzabox mac I set up in 1998 for a network-noob arts collective that ran sans reboot for two years, daily (even weekend) moderate use, until a power failure forced the issue. Some dude just changed the jaz disks every couple of days. I used to check up on them but it just worked, and finally I checked back a couple of years ago and it still chugged along, only a few reboots over the 4 years.

      System 8.1, filemaker 4 solution with 45 related files and 600K+ records, and 20K+ word and excel and email files, a cheap old headless mac. Set that config up a few times over the years, for small organizations, a lifeline to them, hassle free and useful.

      When I tried the same thing three years ago with an old win98 box (not enough cpu muscle for Win2k, and no budget, nada, zero), well, let's just say that after getting a few frantic phone calls ['it just shut down' - 'why do the fonts suddenly look all funny'] I went out and got another crusty old mac to do the job, problem solved. Not bad for a non-server OS, when scaled down properly.

    10. Re:Apple operating systems by Endive4Ever · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      ---
    11. Re:Apple operating systems by AmicoToni · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think the simple idea behind the desktop file is actually pretty powerful, and mostly overlooked by contemporary implementations. The idea is that you have metadata (icons, etc.) contained in the file itself, which allows the metadata to be moved together with the file, but at the same time having efficiency while scanning because the same data is copied transparently in a central database (which can be rebuilt at will).

      On systems in which a similar approach is not used, either the metadata is not part of the file, or the individual files may have to be scanned for icons and other info quite often (*ahem-windows*), which may take a substantial time.

      A file systems in which metadata is handled as part of the file *but* transparently stored in a special way should ease the problem. I guess that's what the people at M$ are trying to do with Longhorn, among zillion other things.

    12. Re:Apple operating systems by n()_cHIEFz · · Score: 2, Interesting
      The two "UNIX Sys Admin" tools you mention by name - Nmap and Ethereal - both run on Windows.

      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
    13. Re:Apple operating systems by Guy+Harris · · Score: 2, Informative
      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

      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....)

      but are they in widespread use?

      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).

      You obviosly missed the point of my post, that Winows ME is more stable/reliable than OS X is a load of crap.

      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.

  7. Re:MkLinux by deminisma · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  8. Plagiarism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Plagiarism by Stubtify · · Score: 5, Insightful

      As an avid reader of macslash, and knowing how slow the site can be on a normal day of the week, do you really want a link on the frontpage of slashdot? I mean I know it came from macslash earlier this week, and so do you, I think for me thats enough.

    2. Re:Plagiarism by spood · · Score: 4, Funny

      In other news, bloggers' plagiarism scientifically proven.

      "Wired has up a story about HP, as part of a larger drive to figure out how ideas ideas 'infect' large groups of people, scientifically proving what most people already knew: bloggers steal their ideas from other bloggers."

      --
      ---- Just another spud server.
    3. Re:Plagiarism by damiam · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Slashdot didn't steal this from MacSlash any more than CBS "steals" news from ABC. Something happened, both sites report on it. The article submitters are two different people who wrote two different summaries. What the fuck are you ranting about?

      --
      It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
    4. Re:Plagiarism by Gorimek · · Score: 3, Funny

      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.

  9. Newton OS by Ichijo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't see it on the list.

    --
    Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
  10. sigh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    My first love... System 6. : \

  11. Synopsis of history by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Synopsis of history by groomed · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Synopsis of history by larry+bagina · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

  12. System 7 was a fun ride by TheTranceFan · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I worked on System 7 at Apple (on TrueType), and besides my regular job, did two things that stuck around for a long time:
    • At the very last minute I personally made the Geneva 9 Italic bitmap font and put it into the build, which was important because the (then) new feature of Aliases showed up in italics in the Finder. (I made a Chicago 12 Italic too, which got cut from the installer when it pushed the install onto one more floppy *sigh*.)
    • There was this fat-plus-shaped cursor, used by spreadsheets, that had a mangled mask, which I had noticed years before but could never get Apple to fix. So I fixed it myself :-)

    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.

  13. If only he could get some of his stories right... by TylerL82 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  14. intel by minus_273 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
  15. nothing special until OS X by bodrell · · Score: 5, Informative
    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. There were three factors that made me get my Powerbook:

    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
    1. Re:nothing special until OS X by Junior+J.+Junior+III · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I am far from screwed on a mouseless Windows box. In fact, I can navigate just about anything using the keyboard. The keyboard in windows can be made to do anything the mouse can, if you know how. And often does so with greater speed and precision, especially if you're computing on a surface that is poorly suited to mousing.

      --
      You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
    2. Re:nothing special until OS X by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      "I'm part of a new subcategory of Mac owners--I didn't get one until OS X 10.1"

      You latecomer. You poser. You'll never be part of the club. NEVER!

      Resentfully yours,

      The Mac Elite

    3. Re:nothing special until OS X by base3 · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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. . . .

      CTRL-ESC R CMD works fine for me. Windows was originally designed to follow the IBM CUA guidelines, which required that the UI could be operated mouseless. Certainly, some apps stray from that, but you'd be amazed at what you can do in Windows, even today, with only the keyboard shortcuts.

      --
      One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
    4. Re:nothing special until OS X by Trillan · · Score: 2, Informative

      1 -- Finally can have a multi-button mouse (though it is a Logitech, and the trackpad still only has one button)

      Multi-button mouse have been available on the Macintosh for at least 10 years.

    5. Re:nothing special until OS X by gobbo · · Score: 3, Interesting
      1 -- Finally can have a multi-button mouse

      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.

    6. Re:nothing special until OS X by Endive4Ever · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      ---
    7. Re:nothing special until OS X by hackstraw · · Score: 4, Interesting

      People who say it "Just Works" probably haven't spent much time using it.

      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 /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).

      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.

    8. Re:nothing special until OS X by Moofie · · Score: 2, Informative

      I get so bored saying this.

      I had a four-button (and chording) mouse on my Mac in 1994. The flexibility and power of that mouse, coupled with the superb mapping utility, is unmatched on any platform to this day. This mouse was neither terribly expensive, nor terribly uncommon. I have used it almost daily for ten years.

      So sod off with your mouse button whining. It's stupid, and inaccurate.

      --
      Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
  16. Frameworks by Lank · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!
    1. Re:Frameworks by cosmo7 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Also known as a 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 .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.

  17. Re:MkLinux by axxackall · · Score: 3, Informative
    in 1997 Jobs came back, killed MkLinux project, killed AUX (or whatever they called their Unix) and pushed his Next to the mouth of a that time oblivious company.

    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 !
  18. Mac OS 2 by zhevek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ;)

    1. Re:Mac OS 2 by cpt+kangarooski · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
  19. That was cool. But... by Roadkills-R-Us · · Score: 5, Informative

    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^)

  20. OS X is a natural progression by Qweezle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:OS X is a natural progression by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > But I mean, OS X just has to be the next step.

      I'm sure that pun was intended! ;-)

      I don't really dislike the interface of OS X, it's the behaviors that bug me. Too much was changed from OS 9 for no good reason, e.g. using the "Control" key for all kinds of stuff instead of the "Command" key, filename extensions, mid-filename '...' abbreviations, leaving out labels, etc.

      The Finder windows in OS 9 were MUCH more understandable and consistent. Apple really should have kept the 'file browser' as a separate app instead of trying to integrate it into the Finder.

  21. screenshots by minus_273 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  22. Most evil.. by xzoon · · Score: 5, Funny

    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. ;)

  23. Re:MkLinux by deminisma · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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."

  24. NeXT by bsd4me · · Score: 4, Informative

    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))

  25. Funny, I feel the opposite by stewby18 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  26. I miss by pvt_medic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  27. Apple II Emu by BoomerSooner · · Score: 4, Informative

    Emulation links:
    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 //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).

    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.)

  28. Steve, is that you? by Gorimek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Steve, is that you? by raga · · Score: 2, Insightful

      IMHO, neither Scully nor Amelio had a vision of where to take a company like Apple. All they did was produce 15 different desktop models, each different from the other in trivial ways. I.e., they treated Apple as a hardware company, and let software development go down the drain. Weren't they stuck on OS7 for 6 years? (they did dabble in Copelan/Talligent etc. but for whatever reason seemed to lack focus in getting it to market)

      OpenDoc was perhaps the only thing I'd consider worthwhile that was happening those days. However, it too was canned due to a lack of developer's confidence in Apple's ability to pull it off. There were also rumblings of MS (behind the scenes) killing OpenDoc because it was going to compete with OLE (the great-grandpapa of AvtiveX)

      Given that Apple's strength has always been software (plus making some cool expensive hardware to run said software), it is not difficult to figure out why Apple started to flounder under JS and GA.

      Jobs may be a megalomanic and an egotist (and ten other things that you may care to add), but not giving him credit for having a vision for Apple is letting personal biases get in the way of an objective analysis of the data.

      cheers- raga

  29. Mostly Wrong by MarcQuadra · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Mostly Wrong by lrucker · · Score: 2, Interesting
      The on-campus attitude was quite snooty, from my understanding, and that makes innovation difficult.

      That's what Amelio thought, and it was a big reason for the culture clash between him & Apple - I was there at the time, and no, it wasn't snooty.

  30. Pre-release Copland by MarcQuadra · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  31. Re:It's simple by diamondsw · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  32. Re:If only he could get some of his stories right. by Galvatron · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
  33. Re:MkLinux by Doktor+Memory · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  34. Re:I'd believe it. by Bastian · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  35. What about a hist. of the visual interface design? by notchcode · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  36. Re:I'd believe it. by tyrione · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  37. Troll! by ms139us · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!

  38. Re:What about a hist. of the visual interface desi by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative
    See Susan Kare's site for some of that.

    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.

  39. Re:MkLinux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  40. The Lisa was a better machine than the Mac by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative
    The Lisa was a nice little machine. It was just too early. It had a hard drive and a protected mode OS, which wasn't bad for early 1983. You could actually get work done on a Lisa. It just cost far too much.

    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.

    1. Re:The Lisa was a better machine than the Mac by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Damn. Even at the very begining, Apple suffered from Motorola not supplying quality chips in a timely manner.

  41. Mac OS 9 still has one thing I miss... by Duty · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  42. Re:A/UX by mistermark · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, A/UX is floating around if you look carefully :-)

    http://geektechnique.org/projects/aux-on-quadra. 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 :-)

  43. Damn I thought I was old school by Lord+Kano · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  44. Funny story, true story by thatguywhoiam · · Score: 4, Funny
    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.

    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.
    1. Re:Funny story, true story by narratorDan · · Score: 2, Funny

      Another one is the name of the folder that is found in the trash after a crash, "Items rescued from [drive name]" I would name my drive "Chapaquitic."
      For those who don't know, google for "Chapaquitic"

      NarratorDan

      --
      "If you're not confused by quantum mechanics, you really don't understand it." - Niels Bohr
  45. Re:I'd believe it. by Rick+Zeman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  46. Re:I'd believe it. by ZackSchil · · Score: 3, Informative

    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!).

  47. Mistakes in OS X v OS 9? by wfolta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.)

    1. Re:Mistakes in OS X v OS 9? by wfolta · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Please, the inconsistencies were relatively minor considering the history. I mean, a menu which is overloaded and an inconsistent keyboard shortcut isn't exactly world shattering.
      Please, just because I list three or four does not mean that there are only three or four. I could list many more, but I thought I could make my point my listing a few that OS-9-ers insist are broken by OS X when in fact they were fixed.
      Just because you only use five applications for your work, doesn't mean that I shouldn't use thirty regularly.
      Ooo, hoo, hoo, who made you so smart? Just goes to show that all curmudgeons are the same. They all apparently assume that they've been using MacOS longer and that they use it harder than anyone else. (You forgot to use the standard curmudgeon terminology, "production work" to show you're a professional and I'm not.)

      I doubt that you're interested in facts, but just in case, I've been using MacOS since my original Mac SE. I make my living on a Mac doing video editing, music, special effects, etc. Some of my coworkers are PC users and are always amazed by how many programs and windows I have open at any one time.

      The same goes for the dock. You can only lock down one side, which means that either your regular apps will move or your trashcan will
      Awww... And MacOS 9's solution of having the trashcan on the desktop -- where it's either inaccessible or you have to warp your style to make sure it's always visible -- is better? I don't trash stuff often enough that a moving (but always visible) trashcan bothers me. In fact most of the time, I CMD-DEL and don't even bother with the drag.

      I'm not saying that MacOS X is perfect. But the "All bow to MacOS 9, the high point of UI for all eternity" chant really bugs me. OS X simply has fewer flaws for modern, multi-tasking usage. And most of the "broken" things are holdovers from the 9-inch-screen days.

      (How about another example of "broken" from a MacOS 9 viewpoint: clicking on a single window of an app doesn't bring all of its windows to the front. Annoying at first. (Annoying always for an OS9 bigot.) But how many times was I hamstrung on OS 9 trying to use, say, drag-n-drop when everything pops to the front, obscuring your target? In MacOS X, you can still get the old behavior in multiple ways, but OS 9 offers no alternatives to get the new behavior.)

    2. Re:Mistakes in OS X v OS 9? by wfolta · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The level of problems in OS X that I talked about is much more serious IMHO because you can't really adapt to them.

      Or more precisely, you (and other vocal critics) can't adapt to them. Many of us are doing just fine. While each OS 9 problem is not "world-shattering" there were so many layered on one another that it adds up. As you say, you get used to it and move on, but of course many people got used to DOS and moved on. The question is how inconsistent and warped is the result?

      The old one was not broken in the OS 9 (since it is suitable to a spatial Finder), but it would be broken in the OS X Finder.

      I'm not saying the old shortcut was totally broken in the context of the old Finder. I'm saying that the old Finder's shortcut worked differently from CMD-N in every app I've ever used and is thus broken in the context of the MacOS GUI.

      And that's the problem that OS 9 lovers miss: it was inconsistent in dozens of ways because it was a Frankenstein's monster, hacked together from various body parts over the years. Sure you adapt. But that's a far cry from being well-designed.

      I never claimed that using more apps makes me smarter, better or whatever.

      OK, I'll skip humorour references. (It was a quote from The Princess Bride.) You weren't implying you were smarter, but you did immediately leap to the conclusion that I must surely be using fewer windows/apps than you. This is the kind of bias I've encountered again and again from MacOS 9 advocates.

      Yes, the Dock is sub-optimal for managing dozens of windows/folders, though not applications. I can't think of an OS 9 alternative that was better. Two programs that were must-haves under OS9 and still are in OS X: 1) Drag Thing, and 2) Default Folder.

      Then you have a static target, in the most accessible place (just give the cursor a sweep to the corner), that doesn't take unnecessary screenspace. Give users the option of linking docks and they can do the same thing they do now. Unfortunately, after so many years, the dock is still one monolitic app.

      If you rarely use it, being a static target doesn't matter much. It's frequently-used things that need to rely on muscle memory. (Now that you've brought it up, it's another Finder inconsistency in OS 9: Undo. Who would buy an application with no Undo? Yet the almighty pre-OSX Finders had none. OS X has added this, making at least some trips to the trashcan unnecessary.)

      The Dock is not perfect. That's why I use it for absolute-must-have apps and managing running apps and some windows, but have Drag Thing for managing most (non-running) apps and documents. What gets me is how you can so vociforously criticize MacOS X for an incompletely-implemented feature, while praising OS 9 which is a no-show in that area.

      True, but it's the modern backend that makes up for the crappy interface. There is very little progress on the user-interface front (one step forward, two steps back).

      It's actually more like five steps forward and two back. It boils down to this: you had twisted yourself around OS 9's dozens of inconsistencies, limitations, and bugs and it worked well for you. OS X has fixed most of those (five steps forward) but broken two or three of your favorite things so you trash it.

      I could probably list pages of OS 9 limitations and inconsistencies. You would just look at each one and say, "not world-shattering". But the sum of them is world-shattering and OS X makes OS9 look more like Windows 3 by comparison.

      In that example, what's broken is not that all windows move to the front (which is perfectly appropriate when windows are related, which is often the case), but that there is no easy way to navigate between windows when you have a selection.

      Actually, it is broken. The direct manipulation metaphor says that when you click on something, you are selecting t

  48. Mac System 7 looks best to me by kisrael · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  49. Re:A/UX by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.
    http://www.aux-penelope.com/AUXInstallati on.html
    helped my a bit.

  50. Re:I'd believe it. by HeghmoH · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!
  51. Re:If only he could get some of his stories right. by donkeyDevil · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  52. Mac OS history at applemuseum.bott.org by itomato · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/os.html
    "The first Macintosh used MFS, followed by HFS and then HFS+."

    True.

    MFS (Macintosh File System) gave way to HFS (with nested folders!) with System 3.0 and the HD20.

  53. Re:MkLinux by IvanXQZ · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.