Slashdot Mirror
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
"Apple Computer -- proudly going out of business since 1977!"
Thank you, editors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextstep
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?
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.
Double click the resize knob at the bottom of the column, it will size itself to fit all file names in.
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
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.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
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.
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
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.
You can do a "New Finder Window" in OS X. There might be something similar in Windows, but I haven't found it. Of course I'm still on XP, so ...
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.
When did Ubuntu announce a new release?
When you need to do it every time you select a new directory, it gets old real quick. There should be an auto-resize option.
A "look back at the origins of OS X", and the acronym BSD doesn't appear even once in the article. WTF?
Total Commander.
My blog
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.
In XP, hold down either CTRL or SHIFT when you double click on a folder. In Windows 7, right-click on a folder and "Open in new window".
You're buying into Bill Gates' bullshit. Apple didn't "steal" anything; they had an agreement with Xerox. Many of the guys who worked on the Mac were hired from Xerox.
Several conventions originated at Apple, such as the "File Edit View Window Help" menu or the phrase "cut and paste." Lisa was already in development when Apple visited Xerox to see what they were working on, so while they were influenced by what they saw, it wasn't an inspiration to go in some whole new direction.
Much of this is detailed at Herztfeld's site, including sketches and screenshots of their GUI work.
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
Apple did not steal the GUI from Xerox. They got to tour PARC with permission from Xerox's upper management and compensated Xerox with pre-IPO shares. What the Mac did with the ideas from PARC was very different from what Xerox did with the ideas out of PARC. This is also very different from Microsoft sending an employee to copy implementation details from Apple. Do go waving some out of context quote around without knowing the actual history of the situation.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
"Knowing these rules can save your life!!1!" Oh, really? I'm trying to imagine a scenario in which knowing these rules might save my life. Hmmmm. Alright, maybe if an army of zombies were attacking, and some of those zombies happened to be grammar nazis before they became zombies, then, just maybe - uhhh - Help me out here, alright? It's just to lame for me to do it all by myself!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
See, the idea that Apple stole the GUI lock/stock from Xerox and then accused Microsoft of the same thing is a massive myth. Have you even looked at the Alto/Star GUI? It used modal buttons along the bottom of windows; windows were tiled and could not overlap. Yes, the general concept of the GUI was developed at PARC, although that wasn't entirely original (see Douglas Englebart's 1960s demo. Apple made a huge contribution to modern GUIs. Check out the photographic record of the Lisa/Mac GUI development. Apple invented the pull-down menu whilst developing Lisa/Mac, they also invented the clipboard, and the idea of dragging and dropping files, to name just three things. All of these were totally copied by Microsoft, although they failed at it by replicating the menu bar at the top of every window, which some people like now, but was a total waste of screen space 25 years ago.
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.
That's "too lame", and even now the Hounds of Grammardalos are moving through many angled space, coordinating on your upcoming position in the 6-dimensional Calabi Yau manifold that underlies real space-time. Your extraction into one of the many trillions of quintic grammar-spaces itself will (theoretically) be painless, but then you will (gasp!) see them in their partly rugose, partly squamous glory. Knowing these rules could have saved your life, your sanity, and your (soon to be topologically inverted and transmuted to Bismuth) spleen, but it's already too late now.
(By the way, the standardised UK English spell-checker does not recognise "rugose", even under the variant "rugous", but actually did accept squamous. That's progress of a sort for you - we'll get it to accept "eldritch" yet.)
Who is John Cabal?
Are there people still arguing about this? I mean, at this point, who cares? Yeah, both Apple and Microsoft stole from Xerox. Actually, Apple and Microsoft and Google and lots of other companies continue to steal from each other. Patent issues aside, the important question is not who thought of the idea first, but who has the best implementation.
My understanding of the situation, from years ago having watched that Robert X Cringley documentary as well as Pirates of Silicon Valley (admittedly, not a documentary) is that Jobs and some developers visited Xerox and were totally blown away by the GUI and decided to go and create one of their own.
Microsoft was contracted to write some of the applications that would be available at launch for the Mac, like Word and some other stuff. To accomplish this, they were given a great deal of access by Apple, in addition to hardware and software to test against.
Microsoft then showed up shortly there after with the first version of Windows, and was pushing Windows as a stop-gap between DOS and the planned release of OS/2, which it was collaborating on with IBM.
Apple claimed Microsoft stole everything from them. The point of the Gates quote seems to be that even if Microsoft got a leg up on developing Windows because of their work on Mac software, they were both basically just building on what Xerox had done before Apple.
I don't think that's out of context at all. Sure, I probably don't know all the details, but I wasn't alive when a lot of that was going down (I'm only 26), so I don't have first hand knowledge of it. It doesn't change the fact that Apple and Microsoft were basically just clunking around doing business as usual until they touched the obelisk.
Apple gave us, in terms of innovation, Grand Central, Webkit, Aqua and made the decision to make WiFi ubiquitous in it's offerings.
Microsoft has given us IIS and Clippy.
How about no.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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
Sounds like Typing of the Dead to me.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
Ubuntu releases always use alliteration. Meaning that the first letters are the same. Amorous Badger therefor would not be an Ubuntu release.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
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
Umm... has the meaning of the "!!1!" meme been forgotten so soon? I guess it has been 25 years or so since its inception.
Futurist Traditionalism
No, the worst part of Finder is not being able to navigate it with just the keyboard. Why in the world is the "return" key mapped to "rename file/folder"?
Because it's not Windows. Ever since the original Macintosh (before Windows came along) the return key renamed a file. It was Windows that changed the meaning of the return key. To open a file under Mac OS you use command-o. That's "o" as in "open".
Why would anyone assume that return means open? If anything return would mean close, after all it ends a line when you are typing. You learned that return equals open because that's how Windows defined the action, not because it's an intrinsic meaning. Under the Mac OS Finder return means "toggle editing the name", another defined action which at least makes a little sense since return ends the editing just like return on a typewriter ends the current line.
It makes more sense to have to use a key combo rather than a single key to perform an action which will likely bring you from the Finder to another program. That way it's harder to accidentally hit a key and have 50 windows open up because you had the contents of an entire folder selected. If you hit return with a bunch of selected items in the Mac Finder then nothing happens. It's a ton better than having to deal with the mess of open windows you'll get in Windows.
You're used to hitting return to open something because you are used to Windows, take some time with Mac OS and you'll find that opening a file with command-o is just as natural as using return. It's all what you are used to.
Also, you can completely operate the Finder using only the keyboard. In fact, you can operate nearly every aspect of a Mac using only the keyboard. Much of it can be done using keyboard shortcuts built-in to the Finder, however if you want to use some menus, controls, and such using only the keyboard you may have to use the "Universal Access" System Preference Panel to enable some additional keyboard and mouse navigation. If you want to see the keyboard navigation shortcuts then just go to the "Keyboard" System Preference Panel, there's tons of useful shortcuts in there.
Sapere aude!
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
This is one of those things that make you really wonder about all of the praise heaped upon them over their interfaces...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> You're buying into Bill Gates' bullshit. Apple didn't "steal" anything;
> they had an agreement with Xerox. Many of the guys who worked on the
> Mac were hired from Xerox.
Ok. Then just change the retort around a bit...
"Just because you bought there TV, it doesn't mean I can't buy their stereo."
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Apple didn't give anyone Webkit. They took it from someone else.
Forcing a feature down everyone's throat is not innovation. It's abusive nonsense.
Next you'll be telling us they invented USB or the first ones to offer it pervasively.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Can't agree with you there... return means a lot more than just "new line". It also means "complete action"; for example, hitting return in the google search box will perform the search and show the results. There may be an argument for taking other actions on hitting enter, but I myself certainly would never choose something so odd as "rename file".
Wrong on Webkit. It wasn't "taken", for one thing. And Webkit bears little resemblance to KHTML these days.
for example, hitting return in the google search box will perform the search and show the results.
Not anymore. Now it's all "instant" as you type. (unless your google leads to porn, where the instant results sometime seems to be supressed)
I still hit the enter key, though, and wonder why nothing happens.
Maybe Amorous Badger is where they'll go once they get past Zygotic Zebra
Command+Down works as well.
You forget another more frequently used name for "Return" is "Enter".
Why would anyone assume that return means open?
Because it had meant "take whatever I wrote, execute it and show me the results" for decades before Macs, and "take whatever I selected, and try to show it to me" is the closest analogue in the graphical world.
Under the Mac OS Finder return means "toggle editing the name", another defined action which at least makes a little sense since return ends the editing just like return on a typewriter ends the current line.
Oh no, it really doesn't. The logical jump from "end current line" to "edit selected item's name" is far too large to call it "[making] a little sense", larger still than the aforementioned "execute" -> "open" one which also has the benefit of being an analogy to another kind of computer rather than a whole different (and very much dead and forgotten) class of machines.
Sorry, but as much as it may pain some of the Apple crowd around here, Microsoft *did* actually go with the saner choice here.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
While you're right on all points, it must be said that Command-O is hardly a convenient navigation shortcut (though to retain UI consistency, it is a necessity). For efficient keyboard navigation, one would use cmd-downarrow and cmd-uparrow. Your fingers never have to leave the arrow keys.
There's a clear choice here. Either you chose a sensible size that lets you see ~3/4 columns at a time, allowing the view to actually be useful, or you chose to resize columns arbitrarily to show the one single file in the directory that's got an extremely long name, and end up negating all the benefit of the view – essentially changing it into a worse list view.
You're right, this is one of those things that make you really wonder about all of the praise heaped upon them over their interfaces... because they, unlike most geeks would, made the right choice.
The one thing that can't be done with keyboard and that drives me insane is switching to the non-default option in Yes/No boxes. Neither arrow keys, nor Tab works. You have to use the friggin mouse (or touchpad) :@
Black holes suck.
The one thing that can't be done with keyboard and that drives me insane is switching to the non-default option in Yes/No boxes. Neither arrow keys, nor Tab works.
System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts, at the bottom you'll see Full Keyboard Access, select All Controls
You can also hit control-F7 to toggle it without going into System Preferences.
Now tab to the button you want to activate (click) and hit the space bar to activate the button. You can also shift-tab to move backwards in the tab order, which helps because usually the rightmost button is the default active one.
Some other shortcuts:There is a nice summary of various Mac keyboard shortcuts here:
Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts
Sapere aude!
The logical jump from "end current line" to "edit selected item's name" is far too large to call it "[making] a little sense", larger still than the aforementioned "execute" -> "open" one which also has the benefit of being an analogy to another kind of computer rather than a whole different (and very much dead and forgotten) class of machines.
At the time of the Macintosh introduction the typewriter was hardly dead and forgotten, in fact it was still the primary document creation tool for the majority of people and one on which they had been trained their entire lives. Keyboard entry on computers was still a newfangled thing that few people had experience with. For these people the return key meant "end/begin a line to type on", not "execute a sequence of commands". Remember that the intention of the Macintosh and its GUI was to introduce these people to computing through metaphors with common, familiar objects such as files, folders, desktops, and even typewriters! Most of the actions of the GUI were designed with this in mind and, for better or worse, the edit toggling was one of these design choices.
The logical jump is that return ends the editing. Once you make that jump there's a second logical jump that since return ends the editing maybe it should toggle the editing and thus put both starting the edit and ending the edit on one key rather than two. In Windows I believe it's the F2 key to edit the name and the enter key to end the editing, in Mac OS the return key does both. That's one less shortcut to have to remember, plus it frees up one of the limited number of F-keys for some other shortcut.
In a command-line environment it makes sense that you should be able to execute a statement with a single key press. You took the time to set up the statement and it's part of a larger sequence so (hopefully) you've put some thought into hitting return. Plus, for the most part, you'll remain in the same window after the execution and not suffer a contextual switch.
In a graphical environment you generally don't want a single keypress to execute (open) a file since it's probably going to switch your context and you may have many items selected, causing a large number of context switches and clutter. Under a GUI the execute action should be a more complicated action, like a keyboard chord, so that it is most likely a purposeful action, not an accidental one.
There's also the difference in user expertise, someone using the command-line is most likely a more advanced user than the average GUI user. Immediate execution with a single keypress makes more sense on the command-line than in the GUI because it's a more advanced way of using the computer and an expert should know exactly what effect that keypress will have before they perform it. A GUI user should have more safety nets than a command-line user and keyboard chords protect the GUI user from accidentally executing something.
In the end it's not a major distinction, both schools of thought have their reasons and merits. Your choice of OS dictates which one you're going to have to get used to.
Sapere aude!
Why would anyone assume that return means open? If anything return would mean close, after all it ends a line when you are typing.
Return ends a command. I guess you haven't spent much time at a CLI, have you? To those of us who were using computers before the broad acceptance of the GUI, hitting enter is how you make things happen. Also, everyone but Apple will open a file if it is selected and you hit enter, at this point they're just being obstinate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Try Gentoo. It's a clone of Directory Opus for *nix using GTK2. Very nice tool, extremely configurable.
My blog
I guess you haven't spent much time at a CLI, have you? To those of us who were using computers before the broad acceptance of the GUI, hitting enter is how you make things happen.
Ad hominem much? I spent many years working in command line environments before GUI became widely-available. I still stand by my explanation of why Apple made their decision for the return/rename action, They also were pretty much the first ones to do it, the return/open action used in Windows et al. came later.
Read some more of my responses and if you have anything positive to add to the discussion, please do! If you just want to be cranky and combative then > /dev/null
Sapere aude!