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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!
You just summoned an odd image of Jobs fighting McBride in my brain...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 ;)
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!
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.
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'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
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.
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.
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.)