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."

Comments

Amit's Book

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Apple ][

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

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 :-(

Lisa OS

[MooseDontBounce]

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.

Re:Apple ][

[beadfulthings]

My Aged Mum, now in her eighties, bought the first Apple ][ ever sold in her small Southern city and shortly thereafter traded up to the ][c. She was an artist by trade. The first thing she did was to construct a couple of cables that she needed for her work (video was one that I recall). Then she sat down with the manuals, learned Applesoft BASIC, and wrote a program or two that enabled her to generate patterns for complex weaving with a large loom. Eventually she acquired an interface that allowed the Apple to actually drive the loom--it was a complicated system of switches and relays that raised and lowered the various harnesses or frames on the loom. She did all of this when she was past fifty and with no prior training at all, though she was regular in attendance at users' group meetings once a users' group was formed.

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.

Not as good as the Beeb though

[Space cowboy]

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

Re:Apple ][

[Mattintosh]

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.