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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
"Apple Computer -- proudly going out of business since 1977!"
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
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.
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
Actually, System 8 (Copland) had a ton of problems without including Jobs. The problem was, it was a disjointed effort where nothing was getting done. If anything blame Ellen Hancock for purchasing NeXT because when she was hired she basically said "screw this, it isn't ever going to get shipped" so they bailed out Jobs.
Copland wasn't going anywhere so Apple decided to cut their losses.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
As others have pointed out, Jobs didn't kill Copland (the OS you're referring to). Apple's pre-Jobs executive team of Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock did. As of about the time when that developer release was "released" (only to device driver developers because it was too dysfunctional for anybody working at a higher level, and actually too dysfunctional even to do device driver development on, but they had missed so many deadlines there was a lot of pressure to release something), Amelio and Hancock were convinced that Copland was going nowhere fast, would require a ground-up rewrite to meet specifications, and that the software development management at Apple was too broken to accomplish that rewrite. On top of which, Apple was in sorry shape financially and had a huge 3rd party developer confidence crisis to manage (it wasn't only insiders who knew that Apple's organization was a mess; a lot of Apple's current obsession with secrecy dates from those days when internal Apple political wars were routinely fought out in the press through deliberate leaks). So, they decided to cancel Copland and seek an outside OS for the next generation MacOS through merger or acquisition, because if they didn't have a credible OS story quick developers were going to bolt. The winner of that search was eventually NeXT.
And you know, they weren't wrong. If you'd ever tried to install and run that Copland developer release, you'd know why.
(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.)
It most certainly did have memory management. There were system calls for allocation and deallocation, and by making applications use handles (double indirect pointers) for allocated memory instead of raw pointers, the OS could even move allocated blocks around behind the application's back in order to defragment free space. Better yet, it could even temporarily unload some types of allocated memory resources not currently in use to make room for other things. A clumsy-yet-ingenious workaround for the lack of a MMU, in other words.
It was actually the relative sophistication of what they did in the 1980s which came back to bite them. A lot of it was a horrible fit to preemptive multitasking and MMU-based memory management.
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.
Oh, what a load of garbage. The engineering apps were ported early, and enthusiastically. The lack of 80-bit FP was no barrier because few applications truly depended on it (*), and the performance leap from 68K was extreme.
* - Have you noticed that these days x86 is slowly but surely migrating away from 80-bit FP too? It's only supported in x87, and the modern preferred way to do FP on x86 is through SSE (it's not just for vectors). SSE doesn't support 80-bit FP formats, only 64-bit. Also, you seem to be under the delusion that this creates a _data_ compatibility problem. It doesn't. 80-bit IEEE mode for both 68K and x86 was internal-only. When you load and store doubles, they're read and written in the 64-bit format. There is no valid in-memory 80-bit format. The 80-bit extended precision is only maintained so long as values stay inside processor registers. Soon as you write to memory, it gets rounded to 64-bit. So all that really happens is that some algorithms see less precision during calculation chains involving intermediate values which aren't written to memory.
Jobs' real job at the time was to cut a deal with Microsoft to keep Office on the Mac.
More trollish garbage...
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.