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

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.