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

Apple ][

[BWJones]

One of the coolest things about the Apple I and Apple ][ was that Apple Computer included the schematics for *all* of the motherboard and CPU design. Everything was documented so that users could build interfaces with both the software and the hardware with a minimum of fuss. So, even though Amit Singh calls the manual included with the Apple ][ as a "preliminary manual, it was remarkably complete.

Despite how far we've come, there are time I really miss my old Apple ][.

Re:Apple ][

[zlogic]

*sigh* I remember when TVs made in the Soviet Union contained schematics so that you could repair them yourself (I'm not joking!)

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 :-(

Re:Apple ][

[Amouth]

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

Re:Apple ][

[Ucklak]

TVs sold in the US used to contain schematics. I haven't bought any recently butI did install a DLP recently and it didn't have any schematics.

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.

Re:Apple ][

[booch]

I think that's what they wanted you to do. Even if you didn't buy a Sony TV, a substantial percentage of people will, so Sony wins by making you buy a new TV instead of fixing your old one. Or they win by charging you an outrageous price for the schematics and repair manuals.

And the reason that they do this is that they (and you) don't have to pay the real cost of disposing of the old TV. Instead of recycling the TV and reclaiming all the materials, you'll probably just toss the old TV in the trash. And the hazardous chemicals will leak into the soil. Our descendents will have to clean that shit up eventually, which will cost tons of money. But we don't have to pay that, so we just go get a new TV cheap.</rant>

Re:Apple ][

[booch]

The Commodore 64 also had a schematics fold-out in the back of the system manual. They appeared to be quite complete.

Re:Apple ][

[drinkypoo]

The Commodore 64 also had a schematics fold-out in the back of the system manual. They appeared to be quite complete.

At least some Amigas came with them as well, I think at least all the OCS Amigas, but I only had a manual for my A500. I'm pretty sure A1000 and A2000 also came with schematics.

Re:Apple ][

[gb506]

That's rock and roll all day long.

Re:Apple ][

[Gospodin]

Our descendents will have to clean that shit up eventually, which will cost tons of money.

Or they'll have developed pollution-eating bacteria and it'll cost about a nickel. We really don't know, do we?

Re:Apple ][

[squiggleslash]

They were still doing this in 1991, when I bought my A500+. And I remember thinking "Damn, this thing's barely documented" when I got it. Full circuit diagrams, and a guide to Workbench 2.

I don't think I got a printed manual at all with the Thinkpad I bought a few months ago, just a fold-out set-up card.

Re:Apple ][

[operagost]

Consider this post modded +1, Fantastic.

Re:Apple ][

[nogginthenog]

That used to be not uncommon. Even my Amiga 500 (1989) came with schematics. At some point computer manufacturers stopped.

Re:Apple ][

[Lord Kano]

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 :-(

A few days ago, I was feeling the same way.

LK

Re:Apple ][

[mrchaotica]

That doesn't change the fact that assuming that the future will magically fix all the problems is entirely irresponsible.

Re:Apple ][

[Overly Critical Guy]

God, how I miss the old Apple :-(

Translation: I miss the days when home computers were the domain of elitist hobbyists and their collected technical specs instead of the general public.

Re:Apple ][

[infaustus]

No, we can just keep dumping them in the third world.

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.

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.

Re:Apple ][

[Mister Whirly]

Oh yeah...I miss the days when people had to wait one at a time for the BBS line to open up, just so they could rant away at a smokin' 300 baud...

Re:Apple ][

[tie_guy_matt]

And then Apple themselves came out with an ad that said, "to use a PC you have to read all of this!" A huge stack of manuals would then fall in front of a PC. They would then point out that, "to use a Mac you only have to read this!" At which point a tiny little manual would fall in front of the Mac. From that time forward products only came with a few instructions (if you were lucky your manual might even be written in English -- instead of just having pictures showing you what to do) and the 800 number you have to call (and stay on hold for hours on end) if you can't get it to work. I remember my hercules monochrome card came with complete specs and as a 12 year old I was able to figure out how to draw pictures from basic by poking into the video ram. What type of manual do you get with your graphics card today? I guess the problem is that people got scared when their computer came with information they couldn't understand and wouldn't need.

Re:Apple ][

[alfredo]

My first radio started as a schematic. It was a crystal radio. I later added a tuner made out of wire, a toilet paper roll and a piece of scrap metal. The earphone was WWII army surplus. It sat on my night stand and I would lay in bed and listen.

Re:Apple ][

[sgtrock]

Translation: I miss the days when I could actually get all the information that I needed to modify my car any way that I chose.

Oh, wait.

Re:Apple ][

[GregNorc]

Thanks for the story!

Re:Apple ][

[les_c_gulde]

Does she still have any of that hardware? I'd be interested in seeing pictures of that setup.

Re:Apple ][

[Anonymous Coward]

She truly made it an extension of herself.

So your mother was the world's first human/loom cyborg? I hope she used her powers for good.

Re:Apple ][

[PhotoGuy]

One of the manuals even had a complete assembler listing of the BIOS. Very educational reading, as a young kid (no sarcasm intended). Same with the schematics; seeing how every bit tied together was incredibly educational. Down to the detail of the discrete logic chips that created the colour video output; very cool stuff.

Re:Apple ][

[beadfulthings]

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.

Re:Apple ][

[DeathElk]

I, for one, welcome our new pollution eating bacteria overlords and their cane toad militias (yawn)...

Re:Apple ][

[jdbartlett]

Translation: I prefer these new days when home computers are the property of elitist corporations and their collected technical specs instead of the general public.

Re:Apple ][

[toadlife]

Is that you dad?

Re:Apple ][

[tehcyder]

Our descendents will have to clean that shit up eventually, which will cost tons of money.

Or they'll have developed pollution-eating bacteria and it'll cost about a nickel. We really don't know, do we?

Yeah, and the sun might blow up tomorrow so what's the point in worrying about anything?

What a fuckwit.

Re:Apple ][

[Diag]

Hehe. I stopped reading kuro5hin when it seemed like nobody was posting there anymore. I guess nothing's changed.

Re:Apple ][

[Diag]

The parent is not a troll - the poster makes a valid point. Whether it's right or wrong, liability and warranty issues are most likely the reason manufacturers don't like us fiddling with their product these days. I've worked for several big IT equipment manufacturers, and my current employer is the first that doesn't mind the customer servicing their own gear if they want. But the customer basically has to sign an agreement releasing the vendor from any liability of what may happen with the device in future, or any damage it may cause.

Re:Apple ][

[alfredo]

Kiss me and I'll tell you.

Re:Apple ][

[MonkeyBoy]

Right now if you want to get schematics of your purchased product you have to pay $X to the manufacturer, and may be required to sign Y non-disclosure agreement, etc. But you can still freakin' get them if you want them, you just need to be persistant and have a willingness to open your wallet.

Under your proposed system, every purchaser of the device would subsidize this minor number of owners who want access to this information. Rather than having the minority foot a large bill for getting access to this detailed info, every purchaser would have to foot a small bill so that this minority has access to detailed information this smaller fee.

Do you see how unfair this is to the average owner? Yes, I understand you get to pay less for the information. But why should Joe Buyer have to pay for your convenient access to information? He sure as hell isn't going to use it.

Those were the days...

[gasmonso]

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/

Re:Those were the days...

[drinkypoo]

Fuck you. I turned sigs off. I don't want to read about your lame ass site, asshole.

One wonders just what the ratio of CommentsBitchingAboutTheSig(bytes) to Sig(bytes) is like.

The test in parentheses would be subscript, but slashdot doesn't allow it. I can have sup, but not sub?

Re:Those were the days...

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad you got modded down. gasmonso isn't trying to annoy people with sigs disabled. No, he's abusing Slashdot to try and increase his site's PageRank.

Sigs get the rel="nofollow" attribute added to them, as do all posts. (Check it out: view the source for this link, and see the rel="nofollow" added.) There's one exception: posts posted with the +1 Karma Bonus. Posts made with the Karma Bonus do NOT include rel="nofollow". Go ahead, check out the source of gasmonso's comment: no rel="nofollow" because he posted using the karma bonus.

gasmonso always posts with his not-a-sig at the bottom to enable him to spam Google with that link.

(To check the source, I'd highly recommend using Firefox and it's "View Selection Source" feature. Just select the text around the link, right click, and hit "View Selection Source". Then check for rel="nofollow".)

So the "fuck you" is totally appropriate, although not just for people who have disabled sigs. gasmonso's acting like a spammer, trying to leach of Slsahdot's PageRank.

Re:Those were the days...

[soft_guy]

Not too easy to make a game in a couple hours anymore

I think that depends on what kind of game you are trying to make.

Re:Those were the days...

[HAKdragon]

I think that depends on what kind of game you are trying to make.

Hello World's Grand Terminal Adventure.....2!

Re:Those were the days...

[alfs boner]

> http://religiousfreaks.com/ Put that shit in your sig, asshole.

Re:Those were the days...

[Abcd1234]

Well I'll be damned, that is really interesting... pity you posted as AC. Maybe I'll start appending a link to this post to every one of my comments... :)

Re:Those were the days...

[jdbartlett]

Try Space Invaders. In Flash/ActionScript. Fastest game you'll ever write.

What I want to know is

[Clockwurk]

Who liked MacOS prior to OSX?

What were you smoking?

Where can I buy some?

Re:What I want to know is

[Penguinisto]

Actually, it wasn't that bad... in the earliest iterations, it was miles above what Windows could provide, and for ordinary users, it was rather slick. I remember as a 16-year-old the day I saw the Macintosh 'Classic' for the first time when my mother brought it home from work for the weekend (the Mac Classic form factor was fairly brand new then) - compared to the Windows 2.0/DOS rig on my parents' shiny new Amstrad "2286" (remember DOSSHELL? - Windows 2.0 it was pretty much like that)? The Mac blew away Windows/DOS in usability, presentation and performance. It was damned slick.

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.

/P

Re:What I want to know is

[peragrin]

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.

Re:What I want to know is

[Raqem]

Who liked MacOS prior to OSX?

What were you smoking?

Where can I buy some?

++

Years ago I hated Mac. When a coworker told me to try OS X, I loved it! I'm a huge Mac fan now; I only own Macs (iMac G5 and a MBP).

I always knew the pre-OS X Mac fans were smoking something... ;-)

Re:What I want to know is

[TomHandy]

It's not so much that Apple "decided" to stick with the classic Mac OS for so long despite Win95/98 as much as that they were just in a total mess in terms of their next gen OS stuff. Apple spent a lot of the 90's trying to figure out a new Mac OS, and a lot of the future was supposed to be in the original projects codenamed Copland and Gershwin (the original Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9...... what eventually came out as Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 had little to do with this). Copland was originally supposed to be a totally modern OS, and Gershwin would apparently have had even more radically new elements, a lot borrowed from the Taligent collaboration with IBM on an OS codenamed "Pink". But none of this ever panned out, and all Apple could do was release the commercial Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 OS's as stopgaps. Apple had considered buying BeOS once it became clear that the internal Copland project wasn't working out, and they ultimately ended up buying NeXT. For all intents and purposes, Apple became NeXT, and Mac OS X can be seen in many ways as the ultimate development of NextStep, rather than the classic Mac OS.

Re:What I want to know is

[0racle]

Be died because there were few apps for it and the first versions you had to by the BeBox. BeFS was not new either. There was no good reason to use Be, it solved no problem that couldn't be solved with existing OS's.

Re:What I want to know is

[TomHandy]

Actually, looking through the Mac OS X Internals PDF, there's a whole section there about Apple's quest for a new OS........ this goes into a lot of detail about all the options Apple considered. This is actually some great reading if you're curious about all of this.

Re:What I want to know is

[TheRaven64]

The features that MacOS Classic lacked were mainly:

1. Good multi-user support.
2. Pre-emptive multitasking.
3. Protected memory

If you wanted these three, you had two choices; UNIX or Windows NT[1]. Other consumer operating systems didn't have them. Windows gained Pre-emptive multitasking with Windows 95, but it didn't get the other two until MS abandoned 9x in favour of NT. BeOS didn't have the first, but did have the second and was quite popular with Mac users.

What it did have was a heavily Raskin-influenced GUI, which left pretty much anything else in the dust when it came to usability. NeXTStep was in the same area, but much more expensive.

[1] Or VMS and a few others if you had a huge budget.

Re:What I want to know is

[drinkypoo]

When the latest MacOS was version 6, it was way the hell better than Windows. IMO 7.x was a huge step backwards, I got more reliability out of 6.0.8 with the multifinder. 7 through 9 are garbage. 6 was crap too but it was small, light, and quite reliable, at least on the IIci :)

Re:What I want to know is

[truthsearch]

Apparently you never saw it because it had super-slick multimedia capabilities which blew away any other OS at the time.

Re:What I want to know is

[SamHill]

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.

Maybe today you'd need a lightweight window manager, but at the time (1997-2000), my 132 MHz PPC 604e PowerComputing machine was smoking fast with Linux, especially when compared with its performance under Mac OS 7 and 8. (I ran WindowMaker back then.)

But BeOS was pretty cool. Unfortunately, it never really picked up enough interest to make it more than a niche OS.

Re:What I want to know is

[Jeremi]

BeFS was not new either.

In every way that mattered, it was. Having a concept proved in an academic setting is not the same thing as having a working, well-tuned commercial product that is developed to the point where people can actually use it.

There was no good reason to use Be, it solved no problem that couldn't be solved with existing OS's.

BeOS solved the problem of clunky, slow, primitively designed OS's. It gave you an OS that was fast, lightweight, pretty, had all the modern features, and worked really really well. Unfortunately, the trade-off for all that was that there were few applications and thus few users. The world decided it valued access to lots of apps more than flashy OS design, and given that most people use their computers to get specific things done, not as design fetish objects, that was a reasonable decision.

Re:What I want to know is

[operagost]

If you wanted these three, you had two choices; UNIX or Windows NT[1].

Or OS/2, on the last two. A third-party whose name escapes me had a great multi-user add-on. Regardless, you did have file system ACLs with HPFS386-- you just didn't have a system logon.

Re:What I want to know is

[no reason to be here]

The only part of your post that is totally true is the first part. Ultimately, Be died b/c they could get no major app developers to commit (and then Be went and shot themselves in the foot with their "focus shift" just as companies began to be interested, but that's another story).

The requirement to buy a BeBox went the way of the dodo with the first real commercial release (R3), which could run on any ppc architecture comp for which you had drivers. The BeBox-only versions were all developer releases.

And there was a good reason to buy the BeOS if one dealt with real-time multimedia-esp. audio. This was my good reason. It did it better than Macs did (at the time, OSX is much nicer), and did it much, much better than a wintel box. I accomplished much more using BeOS as a audio recording and production platform than I did with windows (exact same hardware set up for both OSs). Maybe Be didn't solve a problem that you had with PCs at the time, but it did solve one that I had.

I'm moving on to OSX now, but for a long time I've been happy dual-booting BeOS and GNU/Linux, and I'll probably always have a computer that runs BeOS or one of its derivatives (/me is wondering if he could get BeOS to run on an Intel Mac).

Re:What I want to know is

[handsome b]

1. Good multi-user support.

...
Windows gained Pre-emptive multitasking with Windows 95, but it didn't get the other two until MS abandoned 9x in favour of NT.

What version of Windows NT have you been using? Their multi-user support sucks to date.

Re:What I want to know is

[peragrin]

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.

Re:What I want to know is

[jimicus]

I ran WindowMaker back then.

By modern standards, WindowMaker is a light window manager. "Light" does not have to mean "hideous".

Re:What I want to know is

[jimicus]

Going from context, I suspect they're referring to the idea that "different people can use the system and person A can't trample over or even read person B's files", not necessarily "at the same time.

Re:What I want to know is

[BK425]

As a college newspaper editor, every new quarter I had 20-60 new "reporters" whose teachers required them to write (at least one) article for our weekly. They were learning -writing-, some were learning layout and advertising, NONE of them were there to learn how to operate a computer. Mac OS6 was awesome. I sat them down in front of our meager supply of mac SE's and after a half hour introduction and maybe a half hour on their own they were composing stories on my systems that other students setup in quark express. We did automatic copy flow on 9 inch screens with inexperienced learners and got awards. It was awesome for our needs.

When I started that I was also employed in the student computer labs. The Mac lab and the PC lab. On the dark side we were running win 3.1 (for a short while). Guess which hardware had a much higher failure rate and wich systems required -orders of magnitude- more maintenance? And no, Win95 did not help. Me and -one- other student employee... Tom had a lot more patience with IRQs at that time then I did and I gotta admit I probably should have taken his advice to join him in PSS (of course they didn't call it PSS then...) but I'd have had to do a lot of "smoking" to cope with that stuff and since I don't smoke anything (family history of cancer) windows just wasn't the route for me back then.

Re:What I want to know is

[Jeff DeMaagd]

One OS 9 user related to me that OS9 had an awful problem with extensions, that they interfered with each other in baffling and unintelligible ways. The way to clear up the problem is to unload a bunch of extensions and reload them one (or a few) at a time to narrow down where the problem was. Frankly, I'm glad I avoided all that. I didn't have any such problems with Windows NT, but I was using it on an Alpha processor. The only real issue I had was a leak in the RAS service, which leaked to about 128MB, so at 100 days uptime (I'm not lying) I restarted the system.

Re:What I want to know is

[identity0]

Now, you guys modding down 0racle need to get some perspective. He's harsh, but he does have a point.

I had BeOS for x86. It was a nice OS, but that's all it was - a nice OS. It just did not have the application support that people needed.

I remember the web browser had the usual problems with plugins, no good Office replacement, plus and no real games. Even more so than MacOS.

It did have very good performance with video and other multimedia, but it did not get decent marketshare in the field. Be did not make a good video editor for it, and its marketshare was too small for Adobe to port their video editor software. IIRC, Amiga still had a bigger presence in the film industry than BeOS did in its heyday. I know my friend who did anime fansubbing still used an ancient Amiga and had never heard of BeOS. Lots of shows like Babylon 5 and SeaQuest did special effects on Amiga Video Toasters, how many did so on a BeBox?

As for consumers viewing video on a PC, the storage and bandwidth available to PCs in the mid-90s did not really give them the ability to get large, high quality video files over the internet or from friends, so Windows and Mac were adequate for the small videos they had available then. This was really before DVDs became big, and VCD never took off over here.

BeFS was interesting, and it could have been revolutionary if they had really explained it well and marketed it. Unfortunately, they were busy trying to sell themselves as the "Multimedia OS", and went under around the time they decided they were really an "Internet Appliance OS" company.

Re:What I want to know is

[RedWizzard]

Now - why MacOS decided to stick with the same setup in spite of Win95/98? Dunno.

MacOS didn't compare well to AmigaOS and that came out in 1985. By 1995 MacOS was just a joke. Cooperative multitasking, ugh.

Re:What I want to know is

[godless dave]

Imagine using Windows 95 in 1990. That's what using MacOS was like before Windows caught up and Apple stagnated.

Re:What I want to know is

[Pope]

I did! Having grown up with a VIC 20 and IBM Pc jr, there was nothing I hated more than the constant typing typing typing of DOS commands to make the damn machine do anything. It broed me to fucking tears.

When I first got ahold of a Mac with HyperCard back in 1990, it was a total revelation. Of course, I still had to learn HyperTalk to program, but having the overall interface be a a GUI led me back to viewing computers as a useful tool for interesting things, rather than a typewriter for my essays and an occasional game.

I still had a PCjr, later a 386, because they were cheaper at the time. Once I got my first Mac Quadra for a graduation gift, I never looked back. System 7 to 8 to 9, and now OS X.

Every once in a while I'll boot my G4/900 MHz machine back into MacOS 9 and be amazed at the speed and simplicity of the GUI. It's too bad there's no "classic theme" available for OS X that would look like Rhapsody DR2 did, all the shadows and crap in OS X can be annoying, as well as slow everything down (not so much an issue anymore with a 2x2 GHz G5 and 3GB of RAM!). I wouldn't trade away the guts of it though!

Re:What I want to know is

[mdwh2]

It's interesting how people treat Mac OS X as just a continuation of classic MacOS, when it's a very different OS. I mean, OS X appears to be very popular here on Slashdot, and many of these people refer back to things like Mac beating Windows in the classic era. But I can't help wondering how many of them were actually classic MacOS advocates at the time, especially when you consider that many of the strengths of OS X that people talk about have no relevance to classic MacOS at all (e.g., anything related to UNIX).

Re:What I want to know is

[mdwh2]

Windows 95 surely had some protected memory - as I understand it, application memory was protected, so bad pointers didn't crash the system, but some driver/system space wasn't, which caused crashes. That's certainly way better than nothing.

You're right it's unfair to criticise it for lack of multi-user support, and protected memory before '95, though there were other OSs that had pre-emptive multitasking, along with the easy to use GUI, not to mention a decent command line to use as an alternative.

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:who cares?

[Midnight Thunder]

MAC OS is cool and all, but is this really necessary?

Too early for existential type questions. I think I need my coffee :)

I did

[LKM]

Daring Fireball wrote about this recently. Here's the most important quote of the article:

The difference between the old Mac OS and Mac OS X isn't that it used to suck but now it's great. The difference is that Mac OS X's appeal is broader; it is good in more ways than the old Mac OS was.

Yeah, I did use and like Mac OS 9, Mac OS 8 and System 7. I did smoke lots of weed, but that had nothing to do with it. There are two things to consider: First, it went up against crap like Windows 3.11 and Windows 95. Second, it was the prettiest, most easy-to-use OS, even with cooperative multitasking and lack of memory protection.

Mac OS X added a lot to what makes a Mac great, but Mac OS 9 had a lot going for it, too.

Re:I did

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

... it was the prettiest, most easy-to-use OS, even with cooperative multitasking and lack of memory protection.

Memory protection used to be explained in the following way:

• UNIX - if a program needs more memory, the system gives it more memory
• MacOS - if a program needs more memory, the system tells you and you have to give it more manually and try again.
• Windows/DOS - if a program needs more memory, your computer just crashed.

For all practical purposes this was the state of things for many years.

Re:I did

[Penguin Programmer]

Second, it was the prettiest, most easy-to-use OS, even with cooperative multitasking and lack of memory protection.

Exactly. Graphical file managers _never_ got better than the one in Mac OS 9. In fact, they've gone downhill from there (OSX's is a piece of shit). I use the command-line instead of a graphical file manager now (and have since I quit using Mac OS 9 in 1999ish), just because it's easier, faster and better than any graphical file manager.

Re:I did

[LKM]

Graphical file managers _never_ got better than the one in Mac OS 9. In fact, they've gone downhill from there (OSX's is a piece of shit).

I tend to agree. The spatial Finder was a great idea. I like the addition of the NeXT-style browser in Mac OS X, but unfortunately, the new Finder really feels like Frankenstein's Monster, taking parts from everywhere without properly integrating them.

I use Mac OS X's Finder, and it's better than Windows or Nautilus, but there's still a huge amount of work to be done. Unfortunately, we get iWeb instead :-)

Re:I did

[Haeleth]

For all practical purposes this was the state of things for many years.

It's a rather misleading description, though. More accurately:

• UNIX/Windows NT/OS X - if a program needs more memory, the system gives it more memory; if there is no more memory to give, the program is terminated.
• Windows 9x - if a program needs more memory, the system gives it more memory; if there is no more memory to give, your computer crashes.
• MacOS 8/9 - if a program needs more memory, the system tells you and you have to fiddle around with a fussy little dialog box to give it more manually and try again, at which point another program will complain that it no longer has enough memory. 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.

Re:I did

[TheRaven64]

if there is no more memory to give, the program is terminated.

On most UNIX systems, if there is no more memory to give then malloc() fails (returns NULL) and you can then try freeing memory elsewhere and trying again, or go into some recovery mode (typically make sure everything is saved and then quit).

On Linux, if there is no more memory to give, then a random process is terminated.

Re:I did

[LKM]

So your personal mantra would be "crashing is better than telling me if there's a memory problem"?

Re:I did

[TrekCycling]

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.

Re:I did

[Kadin2048]

1) Windows 9x - if a program needs more memory, the system gives it more memory; if there is no more memory to give, your computer crashes.
2) MacOS 8/9 - if a program needs more memory, the system tells you and you have to fiddle around with a fussy little dialog box to give it more manually and try again, at which point another program will complain that it no longer has enough memory. 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.

You think Option 1 is better than Option 2? I hope you don't have any say in the design of things like aircraft or cars ... all those fussy little gauges; so much more obnoxious than just crashing.

If a program crashed because it was out of memory, and you consequently raised its memory limit and then tried to reopen it, and had insufficent memory, that was your cue to either buy more RAM, or quit some other programs. (Or increase the virtual memory limit, at the expense of speed.)

Beats the hell out of just crashing in my book.

Re:I did

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

Re:I did

[operagost]

Let's face it: the classic OS didn't hold up well against a preemptively multitasking Windows 95 or OS/2 2.x (with the OO GUI). But before 1992, it was king.

Re:I did

[gEvil (beta)]

If a program crashed because it was out of memory, and you consequently raised its memory limit and then tried to reopen it, and had insufficent memory, that was your cue to either buy more RAM, or quit some other programs. (Or increase the virtual memory limit, at the expense of speed.)

Or reboot, because even though you might have had enough available free memory to run an application, it might not have been enough contiguous free memory.

Re:I did

[TheRaven64]

The spacial Finder is great when you have relatively small numbers of files.

The NeXT file manager is great when you have large numbers of files.

The OS X Finder is great when you don't have to use it.

Joking aside, one of the nicest things about NeXT/OS X is being able to type 'open .' into a terminal and have the current directory open in the graphical file manager.

Re:I did

[hackstraw]

On most UNIX systems, if there is no more memory to give then malloc() fails (returns NULL) and you can then try freeing memory elsewhere and trying again, or go into some recovery mode (typically make sure everything is saved and then quit).

On Linux, if there is no more memory to give, then a random process is terminated.

Actually, on most UNIX systems (and Linux) today, this is not true. Recently, I have only seen malloc() return NULL when there are explicit resource limits on the memory that a process via limit or ulimit or some other way to ensure that a process does not go beyond an arbitrary amount.

What I have seen is that malloc() will return a pointer, and the OS will not actually give the memory to the app until its actually needed. And in the event of the machine running out of memory, the OS will slap the application with an OOM exception.

Re:I did

[revscat]

If you haven't done so already, you may want to check out Quicksilver. It's technically an app-launcher, but it has by-and-large replaced Finder for me. You can use it for all your file operations: open, move, unmount/eject, move to Trash, etc.

Re:I did

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

i used to make fun of my graphic artist cubemates 'apple boing of death'

Re:I did

[Just Some Guy]

First, it went up against crap like Windows 3.11 and Windows 95.

It also went up against good stuff like AmigaOS 1.1 (with color displays and preemptive multitasking since '85). Unfortunately for Apple, AmigaOS was superior in every conceivable way. Fortunately for Apple, Commodore had the worst marketing department in the history of sucky marketing departments.

Re:I did

[LKM]

It also went up against good stuff like AmigaOS 1.1 (with color displays and preemptive multitasking since '85). Unfortunately for Apple, AmigaOS was superior in every conceivable way.

Uhm... Try no? I owned an Amiga. The OS was technically superior the Apple's System. In every other way, it sucked balls. It was an unusable ugly piece of trash.

Fortunately, it was only used to start games and this one application which copied pirated floppies, so nobody cared about its suckyness too much :-)

Re:I did

[paulmer2003]

You cannot shittalk Windows 3.1. It was great in the day - it NEVER crashed. Ever. I remember messing around with mspaint and such in it as a child. I loved it.

Re:I did

[toddestan]

Actually, if I remember right the big complaint about the Mac back then is that you just didn't have enough memory free, you had to have large enough continous block free. Hence, you often couldn't run a large program even if all you had open was a couple of tiny programs and had tons of free ram. Combine that with the fact that multi-tasking didn't work all that well to begin with, and it really was a pain in the ass. Windows didn't suffer from those particular problems, generally the smarter Windows users learned where their system's limit was after taking it down a few times and tried to stay below it.

The real fun with Windows though is when you run out of memory and enough free disk space for the page file. I've taken down Windows 2000 systems that way.

Re:I did

[LKM]

You cannot shittalk Windows 3.1. It was great in the day - it NEVER crashed.

Come on, Ballmer, your user names is giving you away :-D

Re:I did

[tehcyder]

MacOS 8/9 - if a program needs more memory, the system tells you and you have to fiddle around with a fussy little dialog box to give it more manually and try again

I seem to recall having to do something similar with early Windows versions of Photoshop, which was basically a ported Mac program.

Re:I did

[mdwh2]

First, it went up against crap like Windows 3.11 and Windows 95.

So, it was good if you compare it to something crap - oddly this seems to be the same way that people advocate Mac OS X today ;) Except at least then, there were plenty of other alternatives to Windows, unlike now...

Re:I did

[mdwh2]

Let's face it: the classic OS didn't hold up well against a preemptively multitasking Windows 95 or OS/2 2.x (with the OO GUI). But before 1992, it was king.

Well there were preemptive multitasking OSs before 1992. Try "before 1985, it was king".

Re:I did

[mdwh2]

I'm curious as to your reasons why the OS "sucked balls"?

Re:I did

[LKM]

As I said: It was an unusable ugly piece of trash.

I suspect it was designed by robot monkeys with a serious crack habbit. What makes an OS usable are the small things, like the exponential acceleration of the mouse cursor on Macs, or the fact that a pixel is actually one pixel in size and square, or the fact that the OS doesn't look like it was written as a DOS application which was subsequently squashed horizontally because mother monkey sat on it.

Fortunately, I hardly ever had to boot into Workbench itself, as I used the Amiga mostly to play games.

Re:I did

[mdwh2]

As I said: It was an unusable ugly piece of trash.

As opposed to MacOS, which had the same ugliness, only in black and white?

What makes an OS usable are the small things, like the exponential acceleration of the mouse cursor on Macs, or the fact that a pixel is actually one pixel in size and square,

The non-square pixel was a hardware limitation, not an OS one (until the ECS chipset, square pixels meant a choice between 320x256 which was rather low, or 640x512 which had interlace flicker). Yes, annoying, though if we're comparing graphics hardware, the Amiga beat the Mac in other ways (e.g., number of colours).

Of course the small things matter, but the AmigaOS had its own small but important advantages too (e.g., I found non-proportional scrollbars annoying on the Mac). The Amiga did have a mouse acceleration option, but I don't know if it was present in AmigaOS 1.0. I don't see how it's more DOS-like than MacOS of the same time.

Thankfully I never had to use Macs for anything serious, and it certainly didn't do games well, but it was good enough for Classic Daleks at least.

First, the Earth cooled.

[ettlz]

Then, the UNIX came, bit it got too big and fragmented, but it didn't die out, and turned into BSD.
Then Steve Jobs came, and he brought forth NeXTStep.
And then Apple bought up NeXTStep, added some more BSD, and gave it some pretty clothes and called it OS X. I couldn't believe it. They opened the closet, took out the best eye candy, and walked straight into town...

Re:First, the Earth cooled.

[ashayh]

I think you meant to link this (Gospel of Tux)..

Archeological dig

[OakDragon]

From TFPDF:

Lisa was discontinued in 1985. In September 1989, Apple buried about 2700 Lisa computers in the Logan landfill in Utah. The value of the computers had depreciated so much that the tax break received from scrapping the computers resulted in more money for Apple than could be obtained by selling them.

Anybody feel like digging? :)

Re:Archeological dig

[another_fanboy]

Might be worth quite a bit now if any still work.

Re:Archeological dig

[Anonymous Coward]

There right here.
http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=logan,+ut&i e=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=41.72969,-111.877846&spn=0.0029 75,0.006099

Re:Archeological dig

[boarder8925]

I'll go with you, just so long as we make a video of it like these guys did when they dug up E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the 2600. ;)

1680-page book ?

[DavidD_CA]

This is what happens when you get a contract that says you're paid by the word.

Re:1680-page book ?

[UnknowingFool]

I'm just glad it wasn't one of the O'Reilly "In a Nutshell" series. 1680 pages is one large nut!

Re:1680-page book ?

[TheRaven64]

A lot (probably around 40%) of the content of the book is listings from the Darwin source code. The book would be a lot shorter without these, but then you'd need to read it in front of a computer and read the code from the screen.

Re:1680-page book ?

[SteeldrivingJon]

Could be worse.

In the early 90's there was a fat book about the NeXT computer, which was significantly padded by an appendix consisting of the output of "ls -lR /"

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:Lisa OS

[soft_guy]

You are talking about the Lisa, or the Mac?

For 10K, the Lisa certainly SHOULD have been better than a TRS-80.

Re:Lisa OS

[shawnce]

My father had a Lisa at his office back when Apple was doing some external distribution and I used it to make the display collateral for my science fair project (trying to find the exact year...) which won in the junior division. Folks at the science fair had never really seen graphics and typesetting like that... some didn't believe I actually made it myself on a personal computer.

That's not Memory Protection

[LKM]

Technically, that's not memory protection, but memory consumption. Memory protection protects the address space of each application from other applications, so applications can't overwrite other application's memory data.

Prior to Mac OS X, all Mac applications shared one common memory space, which had the advantage that hacking was simple, but had the disadvantage that one rogue application could crash everything, or even worse, change other applications' data without anyone noticing.

Learn concepts, not imlementations

[LKM]

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.

That's why you should always learn concepts instead of implementations. Concepts remain useful and can be used to judge new implementations, while implementations always go away eventually.

Re:Learn concepts, not imlementations

[cockroach2]

I couldn't agree more...

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:Not as good as the Beeb though

[TheRaven64]

I had[1] a copy of the original BBC manual. It was hard backed, and had hand drawn circuit diagrams for the board in an appendix. A classic bit of documentation.

The BBC was the only computer of the era that I used with an analogue input device, which was fun for connecting potentiometers to in various projects; you could quite easily make a digital etch-a-scetch with a BBC Micro, two potentiometers, a DC power supply and a few dozen lines of BBC BASIC.

One of the projects that CDT students at my school did was build a buffered I/O box for the BBC with 8 inputs and 8 outputs, which connected to the user port (I think). You could then connect all sorts of things to this. PEEKing and POKEing a specific memory location allowed you to read whether the inputs were open or closed, and connect/disconnect the output pins. Since it was buffered, you didn't blow up the BBC when you accidentally put a bit too much power through it...

A classic machine, and a superb teaching tool. If I had had to learn on PCs, I doubt I would be as interested in computers as I am today.

[1] Had being the operative word. It was in my mother's house, and when she moved she stored it somewhere where the damp got to it and destroyed it.

Re:Not as good as the Beeb though

[jimicus]

A classic machine, and a superb teaching tool. If I had had to learn on PCs, I doubt I would be as interested in computers as I am today.

I worked in a school back in 2000. Even then, there was one program which was used by the science department for demonstrating something (I forget what exactly) which nobody had found an equal to on the PC. So once a year, when the relevant class had got to that point in the syllabus, the BBC was wheeled out, the dust blown off and the program fired up.

I would not be in the slightest bit surprised if the same is true in a number of other schools up and down the country.

Re: Not as good as the Beeb though

[gidds]

Ah, now you're talking!

My Beeb was the only machine I really understood inside-out. Its OS was incredibly well-designed, and they squeezed far more stuff into 16KB of ROM than you'd think possible. It was highly extensible; I blew my own EPROM with extra utilities, including a new screen mode. (Yes, that Advanced User Guide was very, very familiar! I had to get the hardback cover for it, coz the paper one was falling apart. Another great book had annotated disassembly of the ROMs.)

It had a phenomenal amount of software; I learned FORTH on it, and had Pascal and BCPL too. Tons of games, of course (the original and best version of Elite was born on the Beeb, as was Repton, for example), but also DTP and lots more. You could get a (three-button) mouse and a ROM that gave you a GEM- and Mac-like GUI interface and various apps.

But it was adding hardware where it excelled. My old Beeb contained a real-time clock, an expansion with 128KB of RAM and space for the same amount of ROM, a hardware speech synthesiser (at least until someone wrote one that worked entirely in software!), and was usually connected to a TV, disk drive, external sound system, analogue and digital joysticks, a music synthesiser, a music keyboard, a printer, and probably more that I've forgotten. Today that doesn't sound like much, but 20 years ago having stuff like that available and affordable wasn't common!

I wrote loads of music on it, a basic loop-based sequencer, games, educational software... Ah, the memories! I wish machines today were as accessible.

Re:Not as good as the Beeb though

[Arcane_Rhino]

I would not be in the slightest bit surprised if the same is true in a number of other schools up and down the country.

It surprises and saddens me that any school would still be so far behind.

Regrettably, this is exactly what my experience was and I entered the wrong career field because of it. Every year from 6th to 10th grade they hauled us out of math class, en mass, to type a 16 line program in basic. I still don't know what it was supposed to do but, what ever it was, my program never did it.

So, 20 - 30 years later, having avoided programming courses in university like they were the plague, I pursued a liberal arts degree - and got the type of office job one would expect. To process the BS faster, I now spend as much time as I can writing scripts in a non-robust proprietary language that syntactically is similar to python (without the higher functionality). It is a definite bummer that my early exposure of any type of programming was about as fun as a kick in the nuts because I love this type of programming. It would be nice to get paid for it rather than only doing it for a hobby.

-------

Clever trolls are master baiters of the worst kind.

Re:Not as good as the Beeb though

[jimicus]

Heh.

I cut my teeth on BASIC, and I'm now a sysadmin, so a fairly healthy chunk of my job consists of scripting things.

The thing which I think you should bear in mind is that the tool used is nowhere near as important as the teacher using it. A good teacher can make watching paint dry sound interesting.

If it's any comfort, there's a lot of people in IT who didn't start out there - one of my former managers was originally a tube (subway) driver.

Re:Not as good as the Beeb though

[Arcane_Rhino]

The thing which I think you should bear in mind is that the tool used is nowhere near as important as the teacher using it.

I think you are 100% correct. Unfortunately, I didn't know that at the time.

If it's any comfort, there's a lot of people in IT who didn't start out there

Actually, it is a comfort. Since I do not have the where-with-all to go back to school at this time, I am learning what I can in my spare time. MIT rocks. http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

-------

Clever trolls are master baiters of the worst kind.

Hating Macs

[LKM]

You hated a specific brand of personal computers, yet you think Mac users were the ones smoking something?

What did those poor Macs do to you? Steal your lolly when you were in kindergarden?

Re:Hating Macs

[Raqem]

You hated a specific brand of personal computers, yet you think Mac users were the ones smoking something?

What's so difficult to understand? I didn't like a product, and I don't understand those that did. Since we're all hip here on /., I said they must have been smoking something.

What did those poor Macs do to you? Steal your lolly when you were in kindergarden?

They didn't do what I wanted them to do. Plain and simple.

Re:Hating Macs

[LKM]

You hated a specific brand of personal computers, yet you think Mac users were the ones smoking something?

What's so difficult to understand? I didn't like a product, and I don't understand those that did.

S: (n) hate, hatred (the emotion of hate; a feeling of dislike so strong that it demands action)

Hating PCs or an OS is absurd. Well, maybe if you're forced to use it...

What did those poor Macs do to you? Steal your lolly when you were in kindergarden?

They didn't do what I wanted them to do. Plain and simple.

This is almost too obvious, but what the hell, it's Slashdot: You weren't capable of using the most usable OS available? Heh.

Re:Hating Macs

[Raqem]

Hating PCs or an OS is absurd. Well, maybe if you're forced to use it...

I was forced to use them at school, they did a horrible job at handling everything I needed to do with them, they didn't work well in multiple user environments, they didn't have nearly enough of the software I was allowed to use under Windows, and I think it's absurd to hate a perfect stranger, but plenty of people do that!

It wasn't the most usable OS available. Perhaps most usable in a home environment, but not in a work or school environment IME. I didn't hate Mac just for the sake of hating Mac. Once they got their act together with OS X, I jumped on board.

Re:Hating Macs

[LKM]

I was forced to use them at school

Well, in that case, I hereby grant you a one-time voucher which allows you to hate pre-OS X Macs for no more than two hours a day during the next five years.

they did a horrible job at handling everything I needed to do with them

Like what?

they didn't work well in multiple user environments

What do you mean by "not well"? Before Mac OS 8, there was no support for multiple users.

That's not "not well", it's "not at all".

they didn't have nearly enough of the software I was allowed to use under Windows

Ah, now I get it. You couldn't play games on your Macs.

It wasn't the most usable OS available. Perhaps most usable in a home environment, but not in a work or school environment IME.

I don't think "usable" means what you think it means :-P

Macs did not have true multi-user capabilities before Mac OS X. That means if several people had to use the same Mac with separate accounts for each Mac, you were likely to run into problems. That doesn't make the OS itself any less usable for the end user, regardless of whether you're sitting in front of your Mac while in school, at home or at work.

Re:Hating Macs

[Raqem]

Ah, now I get it. You couldn't play games on your Macs.

My favorite game is Tetris Max 2.9, available only in Classic (OS 8/9).

As far as the multiple users issue goes, imagine using a computer with just one profile with five other users (who are idiots). That's not going to be any fun. The first time I set up OS X, I had it auto login into a guest account, and I had a separate login for me.

The most annoying issue for me was the stickies. I'd want to make a small note of something, and someone else would eventually open up Stickies (without knowing what it was) and close all of the stickies (never saving them, of course). Gah!

Re:Hating Macs

[LKM]

My favorite game is Tetris Max 2.9, available only in Classic (OS 8/9).

My favourtie Mac Tetris is Quinn, but the Tetris Company has put a stop to it. Oh well, I still got Tetris DS, which has online multiplayer and a few nice new variations on the Tetris theme.

As far as the multiple users issue goes, imagine using a computer with just one profile with five other users (who are idiots). That's not going to be any fun.

I agree. If you're in a situation where multiple people use a single Mac, you got two options: Use something like At Ease which makes sure nothing gets broken, or tell people to save to a disk and re-install the whole Mac from an image once a week.

The most annoying issue for me was the stickies. I'd want to make a small note of something, and someone else would eventually open up Stickies (without knowing what it was) and close all of the stickies (never saving them, of course). Gah!

Heh :-)

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:No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[w3woody]

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. -- George Santayana

Re:No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[DurendalMac]

Believe it or not, there ARE people out there who are interested in this kind of detailed history. Simply because you're not interested doesn't mean that others don't want to read it.

Re:No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[Vanieter]

Of course, if you'd read TFA or the PDF, you'd have known that only 30% of this text is found in the final book ... the 30% concerning Mac OS X

Re:No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[SickLittleMonkey]

"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 ..."

Um, because every later decision made depends on relevant history up to that point?
Actually the author left out lots of interesting Mac-relevant bits from the Apple II section (which is all that I read).

Why did the Mac use 800k floppies? Because of the GCR encoding from Woz's brilliant Apple II 5.25" floppy interface.
Why doesn't the Mac have cool onboard sound stuff? Because the Apple IIGS did, prompting the Beatles to sue Apple.
Apple's first machine to use ADB? The Apple IIGS.
Apple's first graphical GUI? System 6 ... for The Apple IIGS.

Why did I switch to using Acorn's cool ARM RISC machines, and then PC's rather than the Mac?
Because Apple researched but never released emulation bridges from the IIGS to the Mac.
If you're forced to replace your entire software library, you may as well choose another supplier.

Remember that when you're buying all your new MacIntel software, kiddies ...

SLM

Re:No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[Junks Jerzey]

Believe it or not, there ARE people out there who are interested in this kind of detailed history. Simply because you're not interested doesn't mean that others don't want to read it.

And I'm one of them. But this is a book about OS X, not the Apple II.

Re:No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[Junks Jerzey]

Why did the Mac use 800k floppies? Because of the GCR encoding from Woz's brilliant Apple II 5.25" floppy interface.

But Macs haven't used floppies since before OS X was available.

Why doesn't the Mac have cool onboard sound stuff? Because the Apple IIGS did, prompting the Beatles to sue Apple.

And this has nothing whatsoever to do with current Mac sound hardware or OS X.

Apple's first machine to use ADB? The Apple IIGS.

And this has nothing whatsoever to do with OS X.

Apple's first graphical GUI? System 6 ... for The Apple IIGS.

And this has nothing whatsoever to do with OS X.

Remember, this is a book about OS X, not the history of Apple computers from 25 years ago.

Re:No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[niteice]

Remember that when you're buying all your new MacIntel software, kiddies ...

Are you kidding? Most companies are offering free (or very cheap) universal binary replacements for their PowerPC-only software.

Re:No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[OwnedByTwoCats]

The book is about MacOS X. The PDF is about the history of Apple's operating systems.

Re:No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[jeremyp]

That'll be why most of the chapter was cut from the book, as the intro says if you care to read it..

Re:No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[slriv]

Pretty common response from people today...

"The world didn't exist before OSX"

or... 15 years before that

"The world didn't exist before Macintosh"

The mac and OS X are merely a sum of the history of Apple. You know, before they had the Mac Mini and your beloved iPod, they actually did some interesting things with a few spare parts and couple of off-the-shelf chips.

Re:No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[Junks Jerzey]

The mac and OS X are merely a sum of the history of Apple. You know, before they had the Mac Mini and your beloved iPod, they actually did some interesting things with a few spare parts and couple of off-the-shelf chips.

Of course. But this is a book about OS X. It isn't a book about operating system history or Apple history. The author took a subject that could have easily been covered in 5 pages and expanded it to 140+.

Re:No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[SickLittleMonkey]

[snip irrelevant comments] ...

Remember, this is a book about OS X, not the history of Apple computers from 25 years ago.

Yes, the book is about OS X, but the Slashdot article everyone is discussing (except you) was about a chapter the author wanted to put in the book about the history of - wait for it - *ALL* Apple operating systems.

How is that relevant to OS X? Read the chapter!

SLM

Re:No wonder the book is 1680 pages

[jdbartlett]

"Remember that when you're buying all your new MacIntel software, kiddies..."

Why, because of all those Classic apps we still have kicking around? Puh-lease. Out of my entire library of applications, these are the only ones for which I have not already been given a replacement universal binary by the developers:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Macromedia Flash
• Adobe Macromedia Fireworks
• Adobe Macromedia Freehand

That whopping list is all. Fortunately, I don't use Microsoft Virtual PC (or any other Microsoft product on my Apple machine - what's the point?)

For these four apps, there's Rosetta. Not quite as fast as I'd hope to see Photoshop running, but at least (contrary to your claim) Apple went to some effort to see that it does run.

Why it didn't appeal to christians...

[winphreak]

"The Apple I was introduced at a price of $666.66." Coincidence? Conspiracy? Nah, just a good price.

Re:What a load of crap

[2nd Post!]

In your post, it says "I give up sometimes I really do..."

NO YOU DON'T, YOU JUST WASTED YOUR TIME explaining, "This page is intentionally left blank" SO YOU HAVEN'T GIVEN UP!!! :P

Re:What a load of crap

[avalys]

I don't understand what you're complaining about.

wished for more about A/UX

[ChristTrekker]

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.

Re:wished for more about A/UX

[0racle]

I just wish I could find a copy.

Re:wished for more about A/UX

[ChristTrekker]

I wish I could find a machine to run it on. (My IIsi died.)

Re:wished for more about A/UX

[Mancat]

E-mail me.

wysoft#hotmail.com

Re:What a load of crap

[Rik Sweeney]

I don't understand what you're complaining about.

--
This space intentionally left blank.

Arghhh!!!!!!!

I bought this book - it is very good.

[soft_guy]

I pre-ordered this book and I received it maybe 10 days ago. It is a very good book.

Re:1680 page book?

[tomstdenis]

Those are all works of fiction though. I'm talking about a real concrete book about science.

[hehehe yeah I am joking].

Chances are if your book is 1680 pages you should divide and conquer that sucker.

I mean I could write a book called "All there is to know about computers" and cover software, hardware, design, engineering, algorithms, etc, in one huge 32,618 page book. That doesn't make it a good idea.

Tom

Re:What a load of crap

[Kadin2048]

Just a piece of advice for you: don't ever try to work for the government, okay?

Excellent form of promotion

[QuantumFTL]

I think it would be cool if more authored did this - releasing the "deleted scenes", so to speak, of their works for free, as a promotion for what they kept... especially if they were still high quality. It probably increases sales quite a bit (I wasn't even considering buying this book until after looking at the sample), and gives something useful directly to the community.

Re:Excellent form of promotion

[roguenine19]

Remember that most things that get deleted from books/movies/CDs, etc. were deleted for a reason. If a band gave away crappy b-sides for free on their Web site, would that make you want to be the actual CD? Have you seen the deleted scenes on most DVDs? The vast majority of them are not very good at all, even when viewed in context.
 
  The only case I can think of where this is a valid option is if you have too much decent material, as is the case here. Giving away the cast offs can be good, but it can also work the other way if the deleted bits aren't that good.

Re:Excellent form of promotion

[QuantumFTL]

Yes, that's why I qualified my comment with the statement that it was good promotion, as long as the cut material was also good, which, in the case of LOTR, it very much was.

Re:Apple ][-Uphill both ways.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

God, how I miss the old diseases :-(

Oh yes, I agree with you completely - Apple closing off their service manuals is just like wiping out a disease.

Probably even more beneficial to the human race in many ways - thanks for your insight.

What was the book written in?

[tyrione]

Word? The random choice of fonts, and crappy layout makes it clear that this highly skilled engineer, "Doesn't know LaTeX!"

Re:What was the book written in?

[TeknoHog]

Please note again that this document is not the same as the book's first chapter. In particular, this document was not copyedited, composited, or proofread by the publisher. I prepared this PDF from my "raw" manuscript. Therefore, this document is not an example of the book's final typesetting or other production aspects.

If you use LaTeX, even a 'raw' version will look great. (Although LaTeX won't help much with proofreading.)

Schematics included

[the_doctor_23]

Miele washing machines in Germany ship with complete schematics and timing diagrams taped to the underside of the hood.

1680-page "nut"?

[Anonymous Coward]

No! THIS is a large nut.

No they didn't

[LWATCDR]

"One of the coolest things about the Apple I and Apple ][ was that Apple Computer included the schematics for *all* of the motherboard and CPU design."
1. Apple didn't make the cpu. MOS did. It was a 6502 just like the one that runs Bender.
2. At no time did apple include the "schematics" of the 6502.
My Commodore64 also came with the schematics and the pin outs of all the ports.

Are you kidding me?

[wandazulu]

I wish there was *more* information. It might not be your cup of tea, but there are those folks who like the history of computers and operating systems as much as others are interested in the American civil war, WWII, dinosaurs, whatever.

One person's curio is another person's obsession.

Re:1680 page book?

[tomstdenis]

Well of course I don't know Jack. We haven't met yet.

Geez, you people think I'm psychic or something?

Tom

In Soviet Russia...

[Cryptnotic]

In Soviet Russia YOU fix old TV's.

Uh, wait.

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[oscarmv]

In Soviet Russia the TV fixes YOU.

Uh, wait...

Re:1680 page book?

[tmasssey]

I'm glad you stopped where you did. 150 more pages and you'da needed an unsigned int...

Never mind...

Re:What a load of crap

[LoveGoblin]

Now, now. Let's be fair. He said only gives up sometimes...

:eyeroll:

Being too greedy?

[ContractualObligatio]

I was always a fan of BeOS. A presentation and demonstration of it was part of the interview process that got me my first consultant position. Always thought was a shame it didn't make it. Now, if that chapter is to be believed (p100 of the pdf), they could have were it not for the boss being too greedy. After managing to negotiate upwards from an initial valuation by Apple of $50m up to an offer of $200m, he still tried to get more and got no deal at all.

That's a little heart breaking, actually. I've been lucky enough to avoid the whole "my company's gone bust" thing, but what I've seen others go through isn't nice. It would really piss me off to find out that the boss, with $200m on the table and only $20m having been put into the company, still was too greedy / crap at negotiation to take it.

"Ten times return on our investment? Ha! I think we'll do better trying to compete with Microsoft in the OS market!"

Yeah, real smart...

Anyone know whether Jean-Louis Gassee really could have accepted the $200m offer and closed the deal, e.g. if even Apple didn't end up putting BeOS at the heart of their OS strategy?

Re:Being too greedy?

[Muramasa]

Yeah, that was a pretty big fuck up on JLG's part. I was an avid BeOS fan at the time and was pretty heart-broken when I heard the news, because BeOS at that point already had one foot in the grave.

In the long run aquirring NeXt was probably better for Apple. Be had a lot of talented people working for them, but NeXt had Steve and their platform was more suitable for a modern OS. The BeOS's micro kernel design and the fact that it lacked support for multiple users meant it would have required a lot of work to create something like Mac OS X. The best part of the BeOS was the file system, which is still un-paralleled.

Re:Being too greedy?

[MacDaffy]

A bunch of us engineers spent the time between Copland's abrupt halt and the NeXt acquisition trying to figure out which operating system the company was going to try. There was a lot of experimentation with MkLinux and some talk about beefing up A/UX but the biggest buzz was coming from the BeOS. A few of us made the pilgrimage to Menlo Park, saw their presentation, and were mightily impressed with its performance, but we agreed that the lack of available consumer applications made it a non-starter.

From the time Copland died in the summer of 1996 until we got laid off in March of 1997, we waited for the Big Decision and learned a lot about UNIX-based operating systems because we knew that's where the company had to go. NeXt and Steve Jobs's return were complete surprises. Smartest move Gil Amelio made--just as was Steve's immediately getting Gil out of the way and resuming leadership. Apple's customers needed a reason to believe and Gil only provided silence. As one Rumor-Monger wag said, "he couldn't market pussy in a prison."

Re:IBM did this too...

[Sam Haine '95]

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.

BEOS + NEXTSTEP Best of Both worlds

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

OSX really is both. Okay its more like 80 % nextstep sprinkled with Beos. BEOS was created by ex apple engineers and after Jobs came back to the company via Next they were also rehired and reimplemented a lot of the things they had done with Beos. I personally think it would have been better if they had bought both. Beos is a better system but the realtiy distortion field was missing. Every succusful OS needs one. Apple now has Jobs the originator of the technique, Windows had an army of marketing execs that tell me each version of Windows is "faster" and "more secure", and Linux has a gazillion people who will disagree with any percieved slight of the OS with responces such as "it works for me" and "RTFM".

Re:BEOS + NEXTSTEP Best of Both worlds

[TomHandy]

Ahh, didn't know that about some former BeOS people coming back to Apple anyway and working on OS X. That's cool to know. Seems like BeOS really just petered out and died......... didn't Palm acquire it for around $10 million in the end? I get the feeling like nothing else may ever be done with it (I think I read that Palm had planned to use BeOS technology in a future Palm OS, but I'm not sure if that would still happen now with the Access Linux Platform stuff).

Surprised at so little mentioned about GSOS

[Solr_Flare]

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.

Re:Singh is an idiot - so many errors

[inaddrany]

Why is the parent poster getting modded up as informative? I'd trust Amit over what appears to be an obvious troll. I'd also trust the 6500 spec sheet and the original Apple manual that I managed to dig up.

For example, it says in the Spec sheet "Addressable memory range of up to 65K bytes", "On-the-chip clock options: Crystal time base input", etc:

6500 data sheet

"Microprocessor Clock Frequency: 1.023 MHz"

Apple I Manual

etc.

First was ][c era? Not a small city, a hick town.

[HornWumpus]

Seriously: She bought the first Apple ][ sold ih town, then shortly upgraded to a ][c? (somebody refresh my memory, the ][c was near the end of the ][s run, Macs were already out IIRC)

It must have been a very small town. Or the story has grown in the retelling.

Re:First was ][c era? Not a small city, a hick tow

[beadfulthings]

Nopers, it was an actual city and still is--Birmingham, Alabama. I think her first Apple ][ may have been a Plus, but she did end up with a ][C.

MacOs 8-9

[djdavetrouble]

In the late 90's I started doing desktop support for macs, at the 8.6 - 9.0 era. I also supported NT and 98 desktops at the time. What I liked about
OS 8-9 was how obvious everything was. There were extensions and preferences, just a few hidden files that you had to know about, and once you knew
your way around it never got too complex to maintain. My 3 recurring problems then were AdobePS crapping out (delete prefs or reinstall), Quark Crashed (sigh), Desktop won't load (job stuck in desktop printer or font from the server added to suitcase usually). If we needed a more stable machine, we stripped unnecesary stuff and used it for one purpose (RIP, Audio Work, Video Work, etc). Of course there were the memory issues that could never be fixed, you just had to learn to save often and as editions. There was frequent filesystem corruption (caused usually by the crashes and forced restarts) that was the root of many problems. Oh yeah, security was crap too, good thing noone cared about pwning a mac back then. We still have a few running 9.2 as RIPs for a certain plotter, I never have to touch them.

It's not in the book, that's the point.

[GrahamCox]

Is this history in the right book?

No. That's why the publisher cut the chapter and it's been published as a free download.

It just is, okay?

[jdbartlett]

Whkshh, LaTeX.

DocBook's better.

Re:Is this history in the right book?

[LKM]

Even considering everything the others have said, you'd still be wrong.

If you wanted to learn a new language, knowing about its predecessors, knowing what the language builds on, why this was decided, who first came up with the concepts and why; all this would be extremely valuable.

Re:Singh is an idiot - so many errors

[Ancient_Hacker]

Singh may be really good at the newer stuff, but the old stuff he obviously did NOT dig into the hardware or software first hand. There ARE LOTS of of errors, half-truths, and very important omissions in this chapter! Let's list a few:

• The 6502 had an alleged crystal-control capability, but in every 6502 board I've seen (almost a dozen), every one of them uses a separate clock oscillator.
• You can only get 16 addressing "modes" if you count each register as a different mode. And the indirect Y mode I don't think anybody ever found a use for. More like 6 usable modes.
• Dunno where he got the 65 cycles reserved for refresh stuff. The CPU had no refresh mode built in.
• The Apple ][ came with a DC power cord?
• The Lisa could not have a on-chip MMU, as there was no MMU available for the original 68000.
• The discussion of memory management on the Lisa is all wrong. The Lisa used a 68000 CPU, which had a major flaw-- memory faults were not restartable, plus there was no virtual memory management unit on the CPU or available. SO virtual memory was extremely constrained:: Apple had to design their own (slow and very limited) MMU, AND page faults were completely disallowed! A program had to obey a certain page-touching protocol to succesfully run. All stack expansion had to be first pre-flighted by touching a lower stack location, otherwise the system would hang. Not a pretty state of affairs.
• The writer obviously has never tried using or programming the Lisa Office System. Some tidbits:
  • It took about 30 seconds for the calculator to pop up. Then when you typed "1+2", it took about another 30 seconds of disk-whirring for the system to load the SANE numeric library and cough up "3".
  • Any system API call took nearly forever. You dared not poll for input very often as that would chew up a lot of time and slow down the whole system. But you couldnt try polling every so often, because just the call to get the system tick count took forever. Catch-22 ala big-time.
• The UCSD p-system was not command-line driven, it used top-line menus and single keystrokes.
• The UCSD editor was "modal", as it did have insert nad delete moes, but perhaps more importantly it was perhaps the first FULL SCREEN EDITOR accessible to the masses. Speedy too, as long as your file would fit in RAM.
• The Mac did not have a four-voice audio synthesizer. there was only one 8-bit audio D/A. Any multiple voicing had to be faked in software.
• Very cursory and obviously second-hand discussion of the Mac Toolbox API's. Not a mention of the revolutionary concepts introduced, such as the memory manager, memory ptrs, memory handles, resource forks, system hooks, drivers, etc...
• Multifinder was an outgrowth of Andy Hertzfield's "Switcher", and very very slick for a cooperative multitasking non-memory protectred system enhancement.
• Opinions may differ, but to many many people, System 7 was in no way a gigantic leap forward. Some of its "features":
  • Roughly a doubling of the basic API's, all of them implemented as RAM-hungry patches.
  • A Color QuickDraw, which was SEVENTEEN times slower at drawing text than the previous QuickDraw in ROM. Andy Hertzfeld eventually released a recoding of this to speed it up considerably.
  • A completely redone and completely unusable sound management API.
  • A basically unsable virtual memory system, trying to squeeze memory through a slow 8-bit SCSI port.
  • Proprietary "publish" and "subscribe" info sharing API's, which nobody ever used.
  • A rewritten Finder, with many many faked features, such as font and system resources presented as fake folders of "files".
  • Poor support for TCP/IP, threading. No support for SLIP or PPP.
  • A completely redone networking stack, based on all new, slow, and lousy code.
  • Much higher memory usage, very slow in places.
  • Many of us stayed with system 6 as long as possible, even Apple re

Re:Singh is an idiot - so many errors

[psmears]

• You can only get 16 addressing "modes" if you count each register as a different mode. And the indirect Y mode I don't think anybody ever found a use for. More like 6 usable modes.

Nonsense, I used it all the time. A typical use would be calculating the start address of a screen line, storing the address in zero page, then iterating along that line using the Y register as an index.