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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."
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 ][.
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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/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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
MAC OS is cool and all, but is this really necessary?
:)
Too early for existential type questions. I think I need my coffee
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Daring Fireball wrote about this recently. Here's the most important quote of the article:
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.
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...
Anybody feel like digging? :)
Dark Reflection
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.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
This is what happens when you get a contract that says you're paid by the word.
-David
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.
- Good multi-user support.
- Pre-emptive multitasking.
- 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.
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"The Apple I was introduced at a price of $666.66." Coincidence? Conspiracy? Nah, just a good price.
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
In your post, it says "I give up sometimes I really do..."
:P
NO YOU DON'T, YOU JUST WASTED YOUR TIME explaining, "This page is intentionally left blank" SO YOU HAVEN'T GIVEN UP!!!
GPL Deconstructed
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.
Constitutionally Correct
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.
In Soviet Russia YOU fix old TV's.
Uh, wait.
My other first post is car post.
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.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
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.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
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.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."