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A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems
An anonymous reader writes "As part of his 1680-page book Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach, Amit Singh of kernelthread.com wrote a very detailed technical history of Apple's operating systems. Since he had to cut down on the history chapter because of the book's already too-large size, most of this chapter didn't make it to the printed book. Singh has made available the history chapter as a free PDF. The file is 140 pages long, and is generously filled with figures and screenshots. It starts with the internals of the original Apple I and goes through a tour of all operating systems Apple dabbled with, including internals of A/UX, Lisa OS, and such. It even covers details of outside influences like the Xerox Alto, STAR System, Smalltalk, and Sketchpad, and closer to home things like Mach, NeXTStep, and OpenStep."
I remember making "awesome" games in the 40x40 graphics mode. Not too easy to make a game in a couple hours anymore ;)
http://religiousfreaks.com/I did a technical review of the book, and I can thoroughly recommend it (I got a free copy). It's very technical in places (lots of code snippets) but does a very good job of explaining the 'why' as well as the 'what' and 'how' of XNU.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
was that Apple Computer included the schematics for *all* of the motherboard and CPU design.
:-(
God, we have come a long way haven't we - now Apple will cease & desist you for linking to their Service Manual.
God, how I miss the old Apple
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I had an old sony tv that needed a delay loop replaced.. it isn't a hard task when you have the schematics.. i called sony.. they said they could sell them to me for 150$.. i told them they where crazy.. and i bought a new tv
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Of course, time went on, and things changed radically since then, but Mac UI development was, in its early days, miles beyond what Microsoft could muster.
Now - why MacOS decided to stick with the same setup in spite of Win95/98? Dunno.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I loved Mac OS 8. I never really used OS 9 but by then it was going up againist win2k.
Mac OS 8 went head to head with win98. The only better choice at that time was BeOS . Yet another good OS killed by an illegal monopoly of a bad OS.
Hell BeFS featured a database File System of the likes MSFT still can't create. and they did it on hardware that even Linux would require recompile and lightweight window manager to run on.
MSFT to this day is still trying to copy cool features found in competitor's now old products.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
My CS Prof. at the time (Summer of 1982 or 1983, an old retired IBM'er who worked on the first computers for the Military) had a daughter that worked for Apple on the Lisa project. He had a pre-production model on his desk with a serial number under 300. She needed Steve Jobs personal okay to send him the computer for his testing. (So I was told) I remember it was the coolest thing I'd every seen back then. We took the cover off and his daughter's name was one of the names inscripted on the inside cover. Blew away the Apple II & Trash-80's we were using at the time.
I still have (and treasure) bits of cloth of complex, intricate design, created and produced with the aid of that Apple. She truly made it an extension of herself.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
There right here.i e=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=41.72969,-111.877846&spn=0.0029 75,0.006099
http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=logan,+ut&
For me, the best 8-bit computer ever was the BBC micro - I doubt it ever gained any traction over here in the US, but *man* was that a well-designed and elegant machine.
...
The OS was fully vectored and modular, the BASIC language had procedures and functions, as well as a built-in assembler that could access BASIC variables, but the hardware design was what made it stand out. It had every i/o port under the sun - serial, parallel, "user i/o", other dedicated ones for a network (Econet), to support floppy disks and hard disks, and even plug in a second co-processor (there were 8086, Z80 and 32000 variants I think). You could get Pascal and C for it, and it supported 80-column text on a monitor.
And to bring it slightly back on-topic, the documentation was simply excellent - the "Advanced user guide" told you just about everything you needed to know about the machine, from the event i/o to interrupt-programming, documenting the OSxxx calls, and all the port i/o etc.
Nothing since has come close to the flexibility of that machine given the design limitations at the time, and it's a tribute to the designers.
Of course, such largesse can be abused [grin] See My first and only virus-writing incident
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
As the new maintainer of the A/UX FAQ, I keep hoping to learn more about it. Unfortunately the author didn't bring up anything I didn't already know. That said, the page or two he had is a good summary for those that have never used A/UX before.
Constitutionally Correct
Very true. However I too used a Mac originally. It was my first computer, the first one I owned. I played with Commodore 64s, etc. when I was younger. But when I got to college Apple was the defacto standard. I bought myself a Macintosh Performa for like $1500 and on that machine not only learned computers (my high school didn't have the best technology programm back from 89-93), but I eventually taught myself to program. I walked down to Powell's Technical in Portland, Or. and I picked up "Learn C on the Macintosh" by Dave Mark. Great book for me at the time and a great introduction. It was very easy, very painfree and I put my toe in the water, knowing that I didn't have to worry because the Mac *just worked*.
13 years later this is what I do for a living. So no matter how bad the Mac was back then, for many, including myself, it was a jump start into the world of computing and programming in large part because it just did its job and was easy to use. It was a good place to start. I now run Linux at home and have no interest in Macs any longer. But even without multi-tasking or a robust operating system, the Macintosh did its job for the time.
It's a rather misleading description, though. More accurately: UNIX/Windows NT/OS X
Umm, the memory management issues changed long before OS X existed and this predates even Windows NT for the most part. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to describe, but you fail to describe either the state of the art now, or the situation as it existed in the past, but rather have presented a muddled, mix of both, while leaving out most of the concepts of modern memory management. "if there is no more memory to give, the program is terminated" is certainly not the case with any modern UNIX or with OS X, as it jumps to swap and then frees memory from other systems according to how they are "niced" among other things.
Repeat ad infinitum, all the while gritting your teeth and reciting the mantra "this is better than Windows, this is better than Windows" until you almost believe it.
The first computer I ever personally owned was dual motherboard, dual processor 66mhz ppc and 486/66 simultaneously running both Windows 3.11 and MacOS 7.x (with a cool key combo to swap the input and display and some nifty utilities to copy and paste between them). I'm about as close to an impartial observer at the time as you could have ever had. The fact was, Windows memory allocation was in theory, much better than MacOS, but in practice was so unstable that it caused an even bigger problem than it solved. If you don't remember this than you either never ran both side by side or you are looking at the past with rose tinted glasses.
If companies would package their products to include tech specs and schematics, people who don't want to mess with their purchased property wouldn't have to, but the people who want to modify, repair, or extend their purchased property could do so with ease.
And don't give me the old, tired, whiny excuse that people would simply build their own from the specs they got from a friend. It's not true. As you alluded to, most people aren't hobbyists and don't want to be bothered to build their own. And there isn't a problem from a commercial competitor, either, since patents and copyrights are there to protect against this exact form of abuse. There are adequate legal protections against ripoffs.
Companies should be required to include specs with every electronic and mechanical device they sell, whether it's as small as a wristwatch, or as large as a car.
Spoken like a person who never used BeOS.
I did I. I wis I could of used it more often(the lack of apps was the thing i missed)
IM members appear in tracker as files. Contacts got stored in such a way that you could search through them with the same program that you used to locate files, or documents. BeOS could display multiple movies at the same time back when running one with quicktime or real could slow down a box.
It's taken literally a decade for OS X and Windows to catch up and they still lag behind some of the innovated ideas that were in BeOS. Ideas that people would love to have if they only knew they existed.
I know one tech who in 1996 installed BeOS on a Quadra Mac for the lab tech at a local college. Every lab tech how used that machine loved at how stable and fast it was compared to Mac OS and Windows 95.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
IBM did it for different reasons though. They made the BIOS assembly code publicly available so it would be more difficult for clone manufacturers to hire coders who could legally reverse engineer the BIOS because they hadn't seen the original code.
GSOS and the Apple IIGs was quite the sophisticated platform and I'm surprised the author left out the little bit about how Apple alienated a large majority of its customers thanks to the Apple IIGS. The GS was my first "real" computer as a kid. My parents had and I had dabbled with an Amiga long before the GS, but the GS was my first real "work" computer where I did word processing and more with it. It was also my entry point into the early days of the internet and the first computer I ever upgraded with double density disk drives, a 40mb hard drive, various dial up modems, etc.
For me the AppleIIGS was really the "begining" of my current career in the computer industry. It was also a really slick operating system. But the most significant impact the AppleIIGS had on the market was it was the start of Apple's trend of abandoning old technologies. Almost as soon as the AppleIIGs was released, Apple had abandoned it and the Apple II platform for its new Macintosh systems. When Apple did this they abandoned the large majority of their customers. The early Macs were relatively expensive versus the bargin prices on Apple IIs, and a number of schools were deeply invested in the Apple II platform.
When Apple abandoned the II with the GS it was the start of the first major shift in the personal computer marketplace. A number of Apple customers felt gilted by Apple so they began to look for alternatives. Compared to the expensive Macintosh, the relatively cheap PC clone industry seemed like a huge bargin. It was at this moment that Microsoft really took control of the Operating System/platform market as a large portion of Apple's customer base abandoned the company and switched over to PC clones powered by Microsoft's Operating Systems. In truth, it has only been with Mac OS X and their Mactel platforms that Apple has truly succeeded in significantly expanding their marketshare since the AppleIIGS fiasco.
As I said, for an operating system and product that had such a profound impact on the future of Apple, I'm surprised to see so little mention of the AppleIIGS and GSOS.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
She is unfortunately now experiencing dementia, and the loom with its interface was donated to an artists' school in North Carolina about three years ago. The company that manufactured it is still thriving--it is called AVL, and the loom is called the CompuDobby. I believe they got their start making large looms for manufacturing processes. Hers was, I suppose, a medium-sized loom, though it occupied almost an entire room in her house. It wasn't an artsy-craftsy thing but a serious piece of work. The Apple ][C is long gone, but I believe I still have several notebooks full of the patterns she devised with her home-grown software. They were intended to be printed out and followed in the traditional manner.
My recollection of the operation of the loom interface is a bit sketchy, as we lived very far apart while she had it, and I only got to see it a couple of times. As I recall it was connected to a serial port on the computer and then to a mechanical device that was in turn connected to the harnesses on the loom. (Harnesses are the square frames through which the threads of the warp are run, and the loom had sixteen of them.) The software was then provided with the desired pattern, and the correct harneses were raised in the proper sequences. The (human) weaver was responsible for sitting on the bench, throwing the shuttle, and making whatever adjustments weavers make. The harnesses are normally raised and lowered by means of foot pedals.
Hopefully this isn't either too much or too little information. The examples I have of her work are all fairly complex patterns, such as Scottish tartans, small tapestries, and textiles in a Colonial style called overshot that somewhat resembles brocade.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green