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Looking Back At OS X's Origins
DJRumpy writes "Macworld Weekly has an interesting look at the history of OS X from its early origins in 1985 under NeXT and the Mach Kernel to Rhapsody, to its current iteration as OS X. An interesting, quick read if anyone is curious about the timeline from Apple's shaky '90s to their current position in the market. There's also an interesting link at the bottom talking about the difference between the original beta and the release product that we see today."
Check out Ars' run down too: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2010/09/macos-x-beta.ars
from the i-fail-at-history dept.
Don't also fail at English:
Macworld Weekly has an interesting look at the history of OS X from it's early origins in 1985
Its = belonging to It
It's = contraction for "it is"
Knowing these rules can save your life!!1!
Futurist Traditionalism
The only thing I really miss from Windows is the File Explorer. Finder works, but its horizontal scrolling mode, where the view is never as wide as the filenames, is really annoying.
This article is no such thing, I demand my money back.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
"Apple Computer -- proudly going out of business since 1977!"
Thank you, editors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextstep
I was in college when Rhapsody RC2 was in existence, I still have a copy or two floating around and the ISO's on my fileserver. Good times, good times.
Is Steves war on color in the Operating System. Every single release of OS X has removed significant amounts of color from the operating system and applications. The latest iTunes is just another example of that, I absolutely hate it because I cannot quickly glance at the icons and figure out which one is which. Maybe it's just a rationalization 20 years later for why Apple didn't adopt color graphics earlier.
Monstar L
I don't want to be a whiner, but I don't understand what OS X fans are so lyrical about. OS X still has no option to make my car fly, nor does it allow me to play tennis outside in my iTennisCourt, and swim in my iSwimmingPool. Do OS X fans also go crazy over other office equipment, such as staplers or paperclips?
The REAL history of OS X...
And on the sixth day, Steve Jobs said, "Let there be OS X" and OS X was created, and it was good.
That's how it goes, right?
Dear Slashdot,
I like to masturbate in a group of 3 to 4 men.
Also, I have a small penis and a Macbook Air.
Yours faithfully,
Amorous Badger
It is interesting to note that at that time MS also released their first real GUI OS, Windows NT. By 1996 MS has a credible OS, which remain useful until 2000, when XP became a reasonable successor. Like Mac OS 9, however, NT was not that consumer friendly.
In a world where the web has reached a point where social media consumption and creation is what most people do, neither Mac OS X or Windows 7 will be the solution. As much as pundits want to say that people spend their days typing reports, creating powerpoints, that is not what people to. They post to video blogs and watch videos and text. We will see machines that run Windows 7 for business, and Mac OS X for software development and creative content creation, but the that is going to be an increasing niche market. People will be buying iOS and Android devices, because these are going to let them do stuff for $300. An external keyboard and google docs will let them do anything they need for school. Windows Mobile is not going to do it. We have seen the succor to Mac OS X, and it is iOS.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It was OPENSTEP 4.2 --- which Apple actually sold for a time, along w/ providing free Y2K patches and free upgrades to NeXTstep 3.3 or OPENSTEP 4.2 to license holders of earlier versions.
Amusing rumour is that ``Yellow Box'' was so named because Bill Gates, when asked if he'd develop for NeXT stated, ``Develop for it? I'll piss on it.''
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/14/gates_says_jobs_saved_apple/
As nice as Mac OS X is though, I'd still rather have NeXTstep:
- Display PostScript
- built-in PANTONE colour library
- vertical, movable menu bar w/ tear off menus and pop-up menus
- top-level Print, Hide, Quit and Services menu
- TeX provided by default and supported by the nifty TeXview.app
- inspector-provided sort options for Miller-column filebrowser view
- re-sizeable Shelf which can store multiple file selections as a single icon
- nifty apps which made use of Services and Display PostScript like beYAP.app, Altsys Virtuoso, poste.app &c.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
could of used a screenshot or two of the historical operating systems. we all know what OS X looks like, but fewer of us have seen a living breathing Next cube
Sorry for self reply - my first Mac was a IIci; yes color was missing from the Mac between 1984 and '87.
Wish I could delete my previsou. post
You mean Bell Labs and the PDP-7?
A good book on the guts and history of OS X. Amit Singh's Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach. (www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321278542).
NeXTstep used a variety of cap options, NextSTEP......ah, the late 1980s-early 1990s!
Plato seems wrong to me today
copy and pasted from Wikipedia.
"Next, Inc. (later Next Computer, Inc. and Next Software, Inc. and stylized as NeXT) was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets.
The last time I checked, there still was no way to kick around the really old original 68k versions of NeXTSTEP other than buying a NeXT machine and its optical media off of eBay. I wish somebody would write NeXT emulator that emulated the original 68k machines. The x86 version is interesting and all, but the 68k version is where it all started.
I guess people only bother emulating platforms that have lots of games.
Actually, Apple used NeXT because they had to buy the worthless company for $400 million, bailing out Jobs' personal net worth, to get Jobs back.
Apple's in-house OS, MacOS 8, made it to first developer release before Jobs killed it. This is not what Apple eventually released as "MacOS 8"; that was a warmed-over System 7. The real MacOS 8 was a completely new kernel, with protected memory and a CPU dispatcher, both of which the original MacOS lacked. (Deep down, the original MacOS was like DOS - no memory management, no CPU dispatching, no I/O concurrency, and way too many low-level hacks into the OS at the app level. It had to fit in 64K, remember.) The claim was that using the Next OS would allow getting to market within a year. In fact, it took over three years before the desktop MacOS X shipped.
A real bottleneck was developing a "penalty box" in which old apps could run. The original "MacOS 8" didn't have that. Apple used to assume that they had enough control over their application developers to make them convert their apps to a new OS. But by 1997, the big application developers, especially Microsoft, weren't willing to jump through hoops for Apple. The PowerPC transition had driven away many developers; most of the engineering apps were never ported, because the PowerPC had a shorter FPU length than the M68000 or Intel x86 lines, there were major data compatibility problems. Jobs' real job at the time was to cut a deal with Microsoft to keep Office on the Mac.
The article states "the beta gave the general public their first taste of an operating system that would go on to win popular acclaim and attract scores of Windows users to the Macintosh." One score being 20, I guess that means maybe a couple hundred Windows users switched over?
I imagine it started out something like this:
#include nextstep.h
int main(argc, char *argv[]) //TODO: Insert OS here
{
}
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Huh. I wonder what happened to it? Because "worked quite well" is not a phrase I would use to describe Mail.app in any version of OSX that I've used (that is, Tiger and above).
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
From the article you linked:
When Jobs petulantly pouted that Windows stole the Mac's look and feel, Gates countered with "Hey, Steve, just because you broke into Xerox's house before I did and stole the TV doesn't mean that I can't go in later and take the stereo."
That pretty much sums it up right there. I know its probably meaningless for most people in the world, but when those who claim to be "in the know" start taking sides between Apple and MS on "innovation," they really need to just check that right there.
...of the fact that there was a not-particularly-private beta of OS X that ran on Intel hardware? Admittedly it ran on very little types of Intel hardware, but I managed to install it just the same. It was the release of 10.0 that was PPC-only; there /were/ x86 betas.
A "look back at the origins of OS X", and the acronym BSD doesn't appear even once in the article. WTF?
No matter how many years it's been, whenever I hear "OSX" I think Pyramid Technologies. "IMPLing..."
Left out of that history is the branch that almost happened: for quite a while the smart money was that Apple would buy Be, Inc. and use BeOS as the basis for their future OSes. More than a few developers (myself included) based their business models on this happening.
I am an unabashed Jean-Louis Gassee fan, having used Macs back in the 1980s and at the time wondered why they didn't allow me to use expansion cards like an Apple //, or even expand the memory (early 128K/512K Macs made that rather difficult!).
When BeOS came out, I was fairly thrilled at the idea, but had no idea how to get my hands on a Be box. A few years later, I got to see BeOS on an Intel box.
I was at first somewhat nonplussed, because this was a 160mhz 486dx2 style nightmare machine... but the BeOS made the thing haul ass. I have no other way to describe it; windows were snappy, file operations slow, but everything else not only ran quickly but synchronized well between different tasks.
History may well have delivered us the wrong "hero," and screwed one of the real heroes, because BeOS was amazing -- and light years ahead of Windows NT, and alternate universes ahead of MacOS 7, which you could freeze by holding down the mouse button.
Futurist Traditionalism
after I read this in the opening paragraph "ultra-modern, groundbreaking operating system".
I understand this article is at MacWorld but come on...groundbreaking? Nothing it did was new.
All I really wanted was an Unix I didn't have to meddle with. So I wasn't interested in Linux (at the time). I just wanted to move away from Windows. That left OSX as the default option for me, and I've been very pleased.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
The first Mac I ever played with was a Mac Plus, circa 1986. When I found myself in the market for a computer of my own shortly afterwards I looked at a Mac, but didn't end up buying one. Silly me. My girlfriend at the time needed to buy a computer for her company, and when she saw how blown away I was by an Amiga, she figured if I was impressed by it it had to be good, and that's what she bought. I played with a NeXT cube and was impressed by it, but couldn't begin to even think about buying one. I sent my resume to NeXT and got a nice letter back, but no interview.
Fast-forward to 1995 and I'm doing Mac development, System 7, in the transition from 68k to Power PC. My development box was a Quadra 650 with a PowerPC daughter board, so I could boot and run it either way. Our first PowerPC compiler didn't support fat binaries, but I had no difficulty figuring out how to use ResEdit to paste in CODE resources from 68k executables to make my own fat binaries. I had fun tracking down some memory management issues, the usual crash when switching back to your app in MultiFinder. Am I showing my age or what?
A couple of years ago I saw a Mac Mini in a store, thought it was cute (always a good reason to buy a computer!), played with it a bit, was impressed, and bought one. After a couple of years I bought an iMac, which is my current home computer. At work I have all the Linux and Solaris boxes I want, plus an XP box to read email on, but the computer I spend my own money on at home is a Mac.
...laura, long time Mac enthusiast and fangirl
There's nothing wrong with assuming a certain level of computer literacy in a technical venue (which is at least what Slashdot aspires to be, even if it doesn't always make the grade). There are many times that summaries include ambiguous, niche, and/or nonstandard terminology and acronyms, but this isn't one of them. There was certainly widespread awareness of NeXT OS in the nerd community, despite limited adoption, particularly since it was the birthplace of the web browser.
That's not to say there's anything wrong with providing your link in the comments section for people who are likewise in the dark, but I don't think the editors should take a hit for not providing one in the summary.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
It's the same story you run into with a lot of Windows boxes - by the time you replace enough of the innards to get it up to snuff, you could have just bought a new one. If it runs Tiger just fine, and you don't mind sticking with stuff that will run on Tiger, the most I would consider doing is a RAM upgrade. But more and more Mac software refuses to run on PPC hardware (including the latest version of the operating system and most of iLife), so my own opinion is that the G4 upgrade is just a waste of money. Bottom line: this box might be a fun way to play around with a Mac, but you might do better by buying a cheap refurb'd Mac Mini of more recent vintage.Tiger is getting pretty long in the tooth (so to speak) these days.
Here is a direct link to the article I was referring to detailing their GUI work on the Lisa:
On Xerox, Apple, and Progress
"OS"?
I find it upsetting that there is no mention of BSD or other open-source code Apple has integrated into their cr4ppy expensive proprietary products.
Taking code that a community built for the world to use freely, and then charging up the rear for it, is not cool.
Taking all the credit for that code, and not thanking the open-source community for all its contributions, or at least admitting to Apple's use of such code (legal theft since the licensing on that code permitted such use) is not cool.
On a side note...
Apple makes a terrible product anyway.
Their hardware is overpriced by at least 300%.
Their software platform is garbage (have u seen gameplay on a mac).
Any modern OS is capable of doing what OSx is capable of, but not vice-versa.
Steve Jobs is a scumbag.
The typical OSx user is a wannabe hipster, that knows nothing of computers, would bend over gladly and buy an iDildo for 1000$ if Steve Jobs said it was revolutionary, and wouldn't even be able change the battery.
On a side side note...
Thank you Steve Jobs for all the laughter.
Nowadays, when my friends and I are walking down a street, and we see someone using a mac, we yell "MACF4G!!!" and laugh.
One hundred percent of the time, the "MACF4G" just sits there and takes it.
LOL