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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 took OS comparison course in MIT's business school some years back, and must say of all the courses I took in computer science, that one became the least useful the quickest. OS's seem to be changing faster than computer languages, and much faster than good SE techniques like design patterns.
I'm guessing that it is because the underlying hardware is changing rapidly- many hardware sectors increase in size and performance a magnitude every five years, making some resource algorithms less meaningful. Plus novelties like flash, MRAM, cores, cells, and GPUs, etc. all have to be integrated in.