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A History of Apple's Operating Systems
jpkunst writes "Amit Singh of kernelthread.com has written A History of Apple's Operating Systems. From the introduction: 'This document discusses operating systems that Apple has created in the past, and many that it tried to create. Through this discussion, we will come across several technologies the confluence of which eventually led to Mac OS X'."
all I know is at the time I could do everything with my Apple //e, word processing, visicalc, Apple BASIC. Hell, I even had the orig Castle Wolfenstein! Wow, those were the days.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
I'd like to remind everyone that the greatest computer ever created runs Mac osX native. As if it woudn't.
tcd004
Put the crack pipe down. All Apple did was modify the kernel to run as a userspace process on top of a Mach microkernel. I'm presuming those changes were eventually merged into the official kernel.
You just summoned an odd image of Jobs fighting McBride in my brain...
The screenshot of rhapsody makes me think something rather neat was lost to the world. While the inner workings of os9 hold no appeal for me I REALLY adored the look and feel of the UI. the simple raised grey windows and 'platinum' themed buttons/menus.
Personally, I'd prefer working in an environment with those windows/gui elements and the cartoonish crisp simple icon style, than that of OSX. I realise it's very much a subjective thing - pity we don't have the choice of looks in OSX to go back to that platinum look
(and no, shapeshifter themes are nothing like the real thing)
While using unstable Windows 95 at home, I admired apple for creating stable operating systems such as Macintosh OS, which I used in my university. Yes I believe Apple has always been better at making OSs than microsoft
Interestingly enough, correct me if i'm wrong here, Jobs tried to woo Linus to Apple around 1997, but obviously failed. Makes you wonder how it all would have turned out though, doesn't it?
Why are a large number of slashdot stories directly copied off other sites? They give no credit to the original site at all.
This story could have easily said: "jpkunst noticed over at macslash.org they are running a story about an article on kernelthread by Amit Singh etc etc...
In many cases these are copied word for word from the originating site, however thankfully our submitter took the time to rewrite a different summary for this particular story.
Isn't one of the main points of the GPL et al that you have to give credit to the original authors? How very hypocritical of the Slashdot editors to let things like this through.
I don't see it on the list.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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.
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!
Oh, by the way, he also killed OpenDoc, a very good technology that combined a strength of both Corba and DOM. And CyberDog, an OpenDoc based browser that back then was a a real competitor to both IE and Netscape Navigator.
And all that for what? For zealot-oriented Mac OS X? I don't get it.
Less is more !
I remember running Mac OS 2 through 4(!) on my Mac 512. Ah, back in the day when you could run your OS off of a floppy... and a 512k floppy no less ;)
Wow. While I've always like the Macs, I've never tried to build much of my career on them. And yet, between hobby and career, I have used nearly every version that saw the light of day, and read voraciously about the others.
A couple of tidbits he left off.
Secure A/UX. I forget what it was called, but a DOD-compliant (I forget the Orange Book classification) version of A/UX was developed by an Atlanta company called SecureWare, later bought by HP. It was one of the first (if not the first) Unix variant to get that classification.
X11 for NEXTSTEP. An Austin company called Pencom Software (later PSW Technologies) developed a version of X11 for NEXTSTEP, called co-Xist. It was never blindingly fast, but then a lot of things were that way on NeXT platforms. As more of the server was ported to a lower level, performance got better. Steve Jobs hated X11. It didn't fit in with his vision of the "perfect OS". I suspect he felt it sullied his beloved DPS. So NeXT never was interested in bundling co-Xist with NS. (There were a couple of other NS X companies as well, but co-Xist was the better product in my admittedly biase view. 8^)
Alas, the only Mac I personally own is a dead one I keep in my cube for visitors to sit on. No idea what the OS is on it, but the rounded top is more comfy than the typical, flat PC. 8^)
Hey, I loved OS 9 too, and even the older Mac OS' got my heart beating fast.
But I mean, OS X just has to be the next step. There's only so much Apple could have improved OS 9. I do VERY much agree with some here about the way OS 9 looked, I like it as much as/more than I like the look of OS X. If Windows XP is the "Playschool" interface, then OS X is the "Mattel" interface.
I really, really wish Apple would provide ways to completely skin the OS from System Preferences, such as making it look like OS 9 while keeping the features set. That would be nice. Even though some programs now can do that, I'd love Apple to do it.
In the future I can only see good things for Apple. And who knows, maybe they will get closer and closer to integrating Linux, though BSD isn't a bad option as it stands.
the screenshots in question are: rhapsody on intel
Yellow box on XP
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
It was introduced at a price of $666 that included 4K bytes of RAM and a tape of Apple BASIC.
;)
And you all thought Microsoft was the evil company.
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))
To each his own, I guess. On the rare occasions I see an OS 9 system, I think "I used to like that interface? It's ugly!" I'm an OS X convert, look and all.
my mac IICX, we tweaked the thing up to 32 megs of ram, 1.1 gig hard drive (80 interneral, 1.1 external), and os 7.5 The thing worked like a beaute, would boot up in 30 seconds and did fine on word processing and the occasional sim city. Ah good old times.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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, A/UX is floating around if you look carefully :-)
. ht ml ...it's still under copyright of course, but where to buy it? Anyway, on a slow sunday-afternoon I like to fiddle with it, I run it just for fun :-)
http://geektechnique.org/projects/aux-on-quadra
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.
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.)
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
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 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.