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

No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[Junks Jerzey]

This article is information overload in the extreme. What does Apple II DOS have to do with OS X? Or why Wozniak chose the 6502 over the 6800? Or the Apple III SOS or Apple II Prodos? Or Apple transitioning to PowerPC chips in 1994? Some of the newer stuff is interesting to know, for historical reasons, like the failed OS development projects that led up to OS X, but there's no way this should have been 140+ pages. It doesn't bode well for the rest of the book.

Re:Apple ][

[Gospodin]

It's not entirely irresponsible at all. We don't even know what the problems of the future will be that we caused! Take a look historically at the problems people thought they were creating for future generations — almost all wrong. Let's worry about how pollution affects us today and let the future worry about itself.