Close, but not quite. Perhaps it's time for an Apple OS and Code Name refresher.
First off, and totally unrelated, is Apple's first unix OS from the mid 1980s, A/UX. This OS made its way thru several revisions, eventually ending up around 3.1. A/UX was available for certain 680x0 CPU based machines only and was never ported to PowerPC as at that time Apple had been hoping to move completely to Copland.
http://applefritter.com/ui/aux/
(The move from the 68K to PPC is also an interesting story, especially the small side storys of Apple's lab experience with later model 68Ks (68060, etc), the 88K, Alpha, 5x86, and MIPS CPUs.)
Apple's first attempt to upgrade and overhaul the Macintosh System software (Mac OS) was with Blue and Pink. Blue eventualy became System 7.0 and was a significant upgrade over previous versions of the OS, but still lacked many modern architectural features that were even present on the Lisa's OS in 1983 (in the Macintosh's defense, the Lisa had almost 10x as much RAM and cost 5x as much when it originally shipped). Blue was to be followed by Pink, a modern OS to be designed by Apple and a startup known as Taligent. Pink died a horrible political death and never saw the light of day.
Following the demise of Copland, Apple continued development of Mac OS 7.X (at the time at 7.5.X and 7.6.X). A version with some of the Copland features and appearance was developed as 7.7 but released and marketed as 8.0. Today this series is known as "Classic" Mac OS and is currently at 9.2.1. Since 8.0, Classic has undergone several major microkernel changes, driver architecure tweaks, and VM overhauls.
At the same time, Apple began a new OS search. Their options were to revive Copland, license Windows NT, or buy someone such as Be or NeXT. They decided to buy NeXT (which came with Apple and NeXT cofounder Steve Jobs).
Apple's most recent OS attempt, the the one that made it out the door, was Rhapsody. This project began at NeXT porting and updating their "OpenStep For Mach 4.2" (formerly NEXTSTEP 1.x - 3.3) OS to Apple PowerMacintosh hardware. The first devloper release of this was Rhapsody DR1 and came in three flavors... Rhapsody for Mac, Rhapsody for x86, and Rhapsody for NT (essentially a runtime framework to run Rhapsody apps atop Windows). Apps could be crosscompiled into a single fat binary to run on both platforms.
Rhapsody went thru several developer releases and was first publically shipped as Mac OS X Server 1.0, which had a GUI that resembled both Mac OS 8 and OpenStep. OS X server eventually reached version 1.2. 1.2 was codenamed Rhapsody 5.5. This can also be seen by doing a uname -a.
Later Rhapsody developer releases were known as Mac OS X Developer Previews, eventually gaining the Aqua look and perhaps most importantly, Carbon support. Previously, Rhapsody supported only two types of binaries -- Classic (non-ported Classic Mac OS apps running within a virtual machine, originally called Blue Box, later simply called Classic) and Yellow Box (applications specifically written for Rhapsody, based on the NS framework from the NEXTSTEP/OpenStep era. Yellow box is now known as Cocoa). Carbon was created to allow something no previous Apple Macintosh OS attempt had - an easy upgrade/porting path. Apple cleaned up the Mac APIs and supported them on both Classic Mac OS versions (starting with Mac OS 8.6) and on Mac OS X. The average developer now only had to modify 1% - 5% of his code to make it run on both Mac OS X and Classic Mac OS.
When Apple decided to release the source to the OS's internals, they replaced the Rhapsody name with Darwin. Today the current version of Mac OS X is 10.1, aka Darwin 1.3.1.
Yeah, it uses a port of aalib to display alpha-channel drop-shadows on a 40-column text screen.;-)
Remember, Apple II had HighRes and Extended HighRes graphics modes. One of the Woz's design goals was to make it a machine that could play decent games.
The very coolest thing about X-Plane is the extensive set of flight physics. Land the Space Shuttle, Fly on Mars. They sound cool, but are rightfully difficult! (but fun)
Any word on the price of X-Plane? Is there a chance it may be GPLed? Or at least priced lower than the Win/Mac versions?
Because Mac OS Classic's multithreading was app-dependant, only "pro" apps such as Photoshop supported the additional CPUs. But when they did, whoa, did that thing ever haul.
But it was on the PowerMac version of BeOS that the DayStar really shined. The coolest thing was the CPU meter app in BeOS. You could click on and click off CPUs at will. Turn off two CPUs and watch the load on the other two increase. Click off all four, and poof, the OS halted! (they later fixed that "feature").
Anyway.... yeah, the old DayStar Genesis was awesome.
I would highly recommend a G4/533 or better, any slot-loading iMac, or the new iBook. Macs hold their value *very* well, so you're almost always better off buying new.
Disks are IDE, keys/mouse are USB, video/storage/etc are Firewire. RAM is common SDRAM. PCI slots are standard 33 MHz, 64-bit.
If you can stand 1024x768, a slot-loading iMac is the way to go. Add some RAM and maybe a faster IDE drive and OS X will be zippy.
Avoid the older tray-load iMacs, they have a much slower bus and graphics and are slow buggies when it comes to OS X.
Cost. My old PowerPC 604-based Macs are still good performers, but in my mind are not worth the $80 - $130 cost of Mac OS X. Even though OS X has no CD key and no activation, I wouldn't feel right about pirating it. Especially since my business is audited enough for other things the way it is.
Some of my oldest PowerMacs are running mkLinux, LinuxPPC, and YellowDog Linux. But I think I may start using Darwin or GNU-Darwin on my old PowerMac 9600s and G3s. Why? Straight binary compatibility. If it runs in Darwin, it'll run in Mac OS X. (The other way around is somewhat true, but keep in mind that Darwin does not contain the higher-level components of OS X... such as Aqua).
While there are scads of OS X "tips" sites, most of which are newbie unix introductions, I have found the following to be very useful with a wide variety of tips and other neat hacks:
The coolest thing about OS X's window compression (off by default) is that is actually *improves* performance, as well as conserving a lot of memory. Because most CPUs are limited by a RAM thruput bottleneck, compression of window data will actually improve performance by transfering far less data to and from the CPU. The compression/decompression routine does indeed consume CPU cycles, but it almost trivial with modern CPUs.
I love simple, free little performance boosts like that.
The current $50-a-game policy is about to implode and kill the entire gaming world. The future promises free games, designed by teams throughout the world, many of whom have never or will never meet each other. Internet colaboration and the spirit of open source software will soon merge to provide top-notch free gaming engines, games, graphics/levels, and mods. The future is bright.
Re:Heh, .9.5? Foolish.
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 2
...the first release of ANY software should be 1.0, and it starts to get good around 3.2.
Gotta love SDSL. I hope to have 2.4.11 running on my workstation tonight and on the servers at work tomorrow.
Anyone happen to know if there's a RH 7.X-friendly.rpm available for those that are too timid to compile and install their own kernel? Several folks at my office will only install.rpm kernels. Would be nice to get 2.4.11 going at work as soon as possible. I only know a small about of rpm voodoo, so I suppose I'll give it a shot if one isn't already available.
Thing is, the replaced the old black slim adapter with the one that now ships with the PBG4 and iBook.... a huge silver UFO-looking thing. I want my old adapter back.
one way to show off your girlfriend. not too shabby. incase you're wondering what i'm talking about, take a look at SkyOS's latest screenshot. Not the most flattering picture, though, lol.
Mac OS is a great OS for some tasks, but it is far from mainstream. Even Apple admits the fact on this page. With 5% of marketshare, they have even fewer users and new adopters than Linux. This doesn't make it any less of an OS. We've had no problems thus far with our OS 9.2, Final Cut Pro 2.02, & DVD Studio Pro 1.1 setup. It's no SiliconGraphics machine, but it doesn't cost nearly as much either.
in my neck of the woods Win32 variants are on the desktop and Linux and Solaris are in the server room. Though we do have a few Apple G4 machines running Mac OS 9.2 for video editing of MiniDV and DVCAM. The OS and software have been working great and we're looking foward to seeing what will come about with Mac OS X. Our local VAR has been showing off some HD video work (Sony HDCAM source through a Cine card with Ciprico 7000 fibrechannel RAIDs via an ATTO FC card). Looks neat, but a bit kludgy compared to doing the same thing on, say, an SGI Octane2. (Plus I'd take IFX Piranha over FinalCutPro any day).
a LAN party shouldn't be about extreme hardware or exotic projection systems. It should be about fun. We started ours in a small one-car garage and they've only gotten better. But looking back, it was the least-planned parties that were the best. We even had one in my tiny apartment -- in fact it got so cramped that we had to move the furnature to the bedroom and outside and even balance a monitor on the edge of the kitchen sink. But know what, it was a blast! We played games for over 18 hours, most of us surviving thru the whole thing.
You'll need a dimish room for it to be effective, but we tend to have our lan parties in darkened rooms anyway. 16 monitors keeps things bright enough to walk around, yet dark enough for the projector to work fine.
Didn't anyone see this coming?? I can't belive Apple would allow such a dumb "feature".
I do have one question, though... being a Unix-derrived OS, does the average user on a Mac OS X system have sufficent privlages to destroy anything outside of his home directory?
I would imagine we'll be seeing 1.30 for Windows, Linux, MacOS Classic (8.x, 9.x) and MacOS X. But has there been any word on a port to SiliconGraphics IRIX? I recall one being started about a year ago, but I haven't heard anything since. Quake and Quake2, I know, have already been ported. Q3A would be a nice additional diversion on our machines at work. We fire up a Q2 deathmatch on our old Octanes every now and then.
Apple has changed, Apple is no longer the company it once was. Aside from the fruit-shaped logo and the menubar running across the top of the screen, Apple Computer is pretty much a modern consumerish NeXT. I've used Apple machines since my former job bought a small group of Lisas in 1983. While I mainly used Amiga and Windows machines at home, I had grown to love the Mac and it's various shaped beigeish gray enclosures. Over the years Apple had made one hellofa a platform. By 1992 we were using Quadra 950 and 800 machines stuffed full of ram, video and graphics nubus cards, and all sorts of wild accelerators. The MacOS (System 7.1 at the time) had no problem with our multiple monitors or our 640x480@30fps streams of mjpeg compressed video. Color correction, TrueType fonts, postscript, ethernet networking (both TCP/IP and AppleTalk/Ethertalk) worked great right out of the box. Macs in that era were ungodly expensive and worth every penny. Perhaps they still are today, though in a slightly different way.
Then came 1993 when Apple start seeding their early PowerPC machines, and eventually began selling them in 1994. Apple forgot how to make great hardware. They began to rely on the CPU to do everything. Sure the PowerPC had some great oomph, but it alone could not make up for poor design elsewhere. Luckily, the second generation of PowerPC based macs in 1995 (7500, 7600, 8500, 9500) were **very** improved, yet still nothing like the Quadras were back in their day. Eventually the third generation (G3) of Macs shipped, first in beigish gray boxes and later in the funky blue&white swing-down enclosure. By now Apple was bring back the performance, incorporating USB and Firewire. But what they had was nothing much more than a modern PC with a different CPU and OS. The G4 machines with their mighty PowerPC 74X0 CPUs have allowed us to do some pretty exciting things with the CPU alone, but again, it's nothing too special.
So what has Apple done to differentiate itself? When Steve Jobs returned he and his gang of NeXT thugs took the marketing and software angle. They introduced a funky new interface that looked nothing like MacOS, NeXTstep, or Windows. They created some cool consumer and pro apps (iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro) that made use of the G4 architecture and other features of their machines. They've also become far more mainstream with their retail stores, online ordering, and strict warranty policies.
It comes to me as no shock that Apple wants to defend it's GUI look-and-feel. I love the Macs I use at work, but to be honest, Apple is always on the brink of disaster. Consider the following: PC makers, along with motherboard designers integrate more cutting edge features that ever, and do so with great stability and success. Software makers, especially Microsoft, cater to both the newbie while still offering powerful professional features (much like FontSync and ColorSync) all while maintaining tight integration with said PC makers. Drop the price a bit, woo some users. Build some cool enclosures that both look nice and are a dream to work with. Boom. No more need for Apple.
If you think about it, this is already happening. And fast. As every month ticks by, Apple has to work harder, better, and faster to keep up. It should be no surprise that Apple wants to defend one of the very things that differentiates itself from the commodity Wintel PC market.
Apple has done some great things over the past 25 years, perhaps more so than any other company short of maybe SiliconGraphics and IBM. I applaud their efforts and love working with their products. I also wish them the best.
... that I've been asked to help with. The URL will eventually be http://networking.beyondboxes.net. Several folks around here, a few even from my company, have been working on it for quite some time. FAQ's, message boards, howtos, and even some insight on the future trends of networking. It should be a great help when it's done sometime in October. Until then, I'll see if I can't dig out some good URLs to paste on this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
Rhapsody is not OS X
9 95/q3/950508.pr.rel.copland.html h tml
Close, but not quite. Perhaps it's time for an Apple OS and Code Name refresher.
First off, and totally unrelated, is Apple's first unix OS from the mid 1980s, A/UX. This OS made its way thru several revisions, eventually ending up around 3.1. A/UX was available for certain 680x0 CPU based machines only and was never ported to PowerPC as at that time Apple had been hoping to move completely to Copland.
http://applefritter.com/ui/aux/
(The move from the 68K to PPC is also an interesting story, especially the small side storys of Apple's lab experience with later model 68Ks (68060, etc), the 88K, Alpha, 5x86, and MIPS CPUs.)
Apple's first attempt to upgrade and overhaul the Macintosh System software (Mac OS) was with Blue and Pink. Blue eventualy became System 7.0 and was a significant upgrade over previous versions of the OS, but still lacked many modern architectural features that were even present on the Lisa's OS in 1983 (in the Macintosh's defense, the Lisa had almost 10x as much RAM and cost 5x as much when it originally shipped). Blue was to be followed by Pink, a modern OS to be designed by Apple and a startup known as Taligent. Pink died a horrible political death and never saw the light of day.
Apple's second attempt was Copland, which was to be later followed by Gershwin, a heavily OpenDoc container based platform. Copland came close to being finished, Apple had released an early developer release (DR0) to select developers and had already started a Mac OS 9 marketing campaign. Copland was canned for a number of reasons, application compatibility (or the lack thereof) was a major factor.
http://product.info.apple.com/pr/press.releases/1
http://www.bozosoft.com/copland.html
http://www.macworld.com/1995/04/news/550.html
http://www.macworld.com/2000/09/buzz/windingroad.
Following the demise of Copland, Apple continued development of Mac OS 7.X (at the time at 7.5.X and 7.6.X). A version with some of the Copland features and appearance was developed as 7.7 but released and marketed as 8.0. Today this series is known as "Classic" Mac OS and is currently at 9.2.1. Since 8.0, Classic has undergone several major microkernel changes, driver architecure tweaks, and VM overhauls.
At the same time, Apple began a new OS search. Their options were to revive Copland, license Windows NT, or buy someone such as Be or NeXT. They decided to buy NeXT (which came with Apple and NeXT cofounder Steve Jobs).
Apple's most recent OS attempt, the the one that made it out the door, was Rhapsody. This project began at NeXT porting and updating their "OpenStep For Mach 4.2" (formerly NEXTSTEP 1.x - 3.3) OS to Apple PowerMacintosh hardware. The first devloper release of this was Rhapsody DR1 and came in three flavors... Rhapsody for Mac, Rhapsody for x86, and Rhapsody for NT (essentially a runtime framework to run Rhapsody apps atop Windows). Apps could be crosscompiled into a single fat binary to run on both platforms.
Rhapsody went thru several developer releases and was first publically shipped as Mac OS X Server 1.0, which had a GUI that resembled both Mac OS 8 and OpenStep. OS X server eventually reached version 1.2. 1.2 was codenamed Rhapsody 5.5. This can also be seen by doing a uname -a.
Later Rhapsody developer releases were known as Mac OS X Developer Previews, eventually gaining the Aqua look and perhaps most importantly, Carbon support. Previously, Rhapsody supported only two types of binaries -- Classic (non-ported Classic Mac OS apps running within a virtual machine, originally called Blue Box, later simply called Classic) and Yellow Box (applications specifically written for Rhapsody, based on the NS framework from the NEXTSTEP/OpenStep era. Yellow box is now known as Cocoa). Carbon was created to allow something no previous Apple Macintosh OS attempt had - an easy upgrade/porting path. Apple cleaned up the Mac APIs and supported them on both Classic Mac OS versions (starting with Mac OS 8.6) and on Mac OS X. The average developer now only had to modify 1% - 5% of his code to make it run on both Mac OS X and Classic Mac OS.
When Apple decided to release the source to the OS's internals, they replaced the Rhapsody name with Darwin. Today the current version of Mac OS X is 10.1, aka Darwin 1.3.1.
Yeah, it uses a port of aalib to display alpha-channel drop-shadows on a 40-column text screen. ;-)
Remember, Apple II had HighRes and Extended HighRes graphics modes. One of the Woz's design goals was to make it a machine that could play decent games.
The very coolest thing about X-Plane is the extensive set of flight physics. Land the Space Shuttle, Fly on Mars. They sound cool, but are rightfully difficult! (but fun)
Any word on the price of X-Plane? Is there a chance it may be GPLed? Or at least priced lower than the Win/Mac versions?
I hear the port to the MOS 6502 8-bit CPU is coming along better than expected. Should be out this spring, probably very early in April.
The DayStar Genesis mac clone series was wild! (For those that aren't familar, see this: http://www.lowendmac.com/daystar/ and this: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ULTIMATE_MAC/Elvis/inde x.html). Back in the day, it was one hellof machine. Up to four PowerPC 604e CPUs on the CPU card. 16 DIMM slots, 6 PCI slots. Not bad for 1997.
Because Mac OS Classic's multithreading was app-dependant, only "pro" apps such as Photoshop supported the additional CPUs. But when they did, whoa, did that thing ever haul.
But it was on the PowerMac version of BeOS that the DayStar really shined. The coolest thing was the CPU meter app in BeOS. You could click on and click off CPUs at will. Turn off two CPUs and watch the load on the other two increase. Click off all four, and poof, the OS halted! (they later fixed that "feature").
Anyway.... yeah, the old DayStar Genesis was awesome.
I would highly recommend a G4/533 or better, any slot-loading iMac, or the new iBook. Macs hold their value *very* well, so you're almost always better off buying new.
Disks are IDE, keys/mouse are USB, video/storage/etc are Firewire. RAM is common SDRAM. PCI slots are standard 33 MHz, 64-bit.
If you can stand 1024x768, a slot-loading iMac is the way to go. Add some RAM and maybe a faster IDE drive and OS X will be zippy.
Avoid the older tray-load iMacs, they have a much slower bus and graphics and are slow buggies when it comes to OS X.
RAM:
Beige G3 = PC66
Blue&White G3 = PC100
Slot-load iMac = PC100
G4 = PC133
iBook = PC100 SO-DIMM
PowerBook G4 = PC100 SO-DIMM
... and let me tell you why.
Cost. My old PowerPC 604-based Macs are still good performers, but in my mind are not worth the $80 - $130 cost of Mac OS X. Even though OS X has no CD key and no activation, I wouldn't feel right about pirating it. Especially since my business is audited enough for other things the way it is.
Some of my oldest PowerMacs are running mkLinux, LinuxPPC, and YellowDog Linux. But I think I may start using Darwin or GNU-Darwin on my old PowerMac 9600s and G3s. Why? Straight binary compatibility. If it runs in Darwin, it'll run in Mac OS X. (The other way around is somewhat true, but keep in mind that Darwin does not contain the higher-level components of OS X... such as Aqua).
But that's just me.
While there are scads of OS X "tips" sites, most of which are newbie unix introductions, I have found the following to be very useful with a wide variety of tips and other neat hacks:
http://www.ResExcellence.com/osx/index.shtml
Some of the more low-level hacks are probably pretty obvious to NeXT vets and Darwin & GNU-Darwin users.
The coolest thing about OS X's window compression (off by default) is that is actually *improves* performance, as well as conserving a lot of memory. Because most CPUs are limited by a RAM thruput bottleneck, compression of window data will actually improve performance by transfering far less data to and from the CPU. The compression/decompression routine does indeed consume CPU cycles, but it almost trivial with modern CPUs.
I love simple, free little performance boosts like that.
The current $50-a-game policy is about to implode and kill the entire gaming world. The future promises free games, designed by teams throughout the world, many of whom have never or will never meet each other. Internet colaboration and the spirit of open source software will soon merge to provide top-notch free gaming engines, games, graphics/levels, and mods. The future is bright.
...the first release of ANY software should be 1.0, and it starts to get good around 3.2.
My thoughts exactly, as a NeXTSTEP 3.3 user!
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks
or
Redundant Array of Inexpensive DIMMs
Gotta love SDSL. I hope to have 2.4.11 running on my workstation tonight and on the servers at work tomorrow.
.rpm available for those that are too timid to compile and install their own kernel? Several folks at my office will only install .rpm kernels. Would be nice to get 2.4.11 going at work as soon as possible. I only know a small about of rpm voodoo, so I suppose I'll give it a shot if one isn't already available.
Anyone happen to know if there's a RH 7.X-friendly
Thanks in advance!
http://exchange.info.apple.com/exchange/
Thing is, the replaced the old black slim adapter with the one that now ships with the PBG4 and iBook.... a huge silver UFO-looking thing. I want my old adapter back.
one way to show off your girlfriend. not too shabby. incase you're wondering what i'm talking about, take a look at SkyOS's latest screenshot. Not the most flattering picture, though, lol.
Still pretty cute, though...
Mac OS is a great OS for some tasks, but it is far from mainstream. Even Apple admits the fact on this page. With 5% of marketshare, they have even fewer users and new adopters than Linux. This doesn't make it any less of an OS. We've had no problems thus far with our OS 9.2, Final Cut Pro 2.02, & DVD Studio Pro 1.1 setup. It's no SiliconGraphics machine, but it doesn't cost nearly as much either.
in my neck of the woods Win32 variants are on the desktop and Linux and Solaris are in the server room. Though we do have a few Apple G4 machines running Mac OS 9.2 for video editing of MiniDV and DVCAM. The OS and software have been working great and we're looking foward to seeing what will come about with Mac OS X. Our local VAR has been showing off some HD video work (Sony HDCAM source through a Cine card with Ciprico 7000 fibrechannel RAIDs via an ATTO FC card). Looks neat, but a bit kludgy compared to doing the same thing on, say, an SGI Octane2. (Plus I'd take IFX Piranha over FinalCutPro any day).
a LAN party shouldn't be about extreme hardware or exotic projection systems. It should be about fun. We started ours in a small one-car garage and they've only gotten better. But looking back, it was the least-planned parties that were the best. We even had one in my tiny apartment -- in fact it got so cramped that we had to move the furnature to the bedroom and outside and even balance a monitor on the edge of the kitchen sink. But know what, it was a blast! We played games for over 18 hours, most of us surviving thru the whole thing.
http://www.hublan.com/hublan09/HubLAN9-6.jpg
http://www.hublan.com/hublan09/HubLAN9-7.jpg
My best Lan Party investment to date was the nifty little Sony CPJ-200. Street price is under $800.
2 00projector.htm
http://www.supremevideo.com/internet_specials/cpj
You'll need a dimish room for it to be effective, but we tend to have our lan parties in darkened rooms anyway. 16 monitors keeps things bright enough to walk around, yet dark enough for the projector to work fine.
I can't think of a better case for Mozilla or OmniWeb (the way cool browser that came over from the NeXT world).
You're using Mac OS X, why have *anything* to do with Microsoft?? Forget MSIE and use Mozilla or OmniWeb.
Though.... I have to admit that MS Office X looks kinda neat. I just hope Corel hurrys up and makes a "Corel Office Suite X".
Internet Explorer on the MAC has nothing to do with Microsoft. It's developed, published, and installed by Apple.
Didn't anyone see this coming?? I can't belive Apple would allow such a dumb "feature".
I do have one question, though... being a Unix-derrived OS, does the average user on a Mac OS X system have sufficent privlages to destroy anything outside of his home directory?
I would imagine we'll be seeing 1.30 for Windows, Linux, MacOS Classic (8.x, 9.x) and MacOS X. But has there been any word on a port to SiliconGraphics IRIX? I recall one being started about a year ago, but I haven't heard anything since. Quake and Quake2, I know, have already been ported. Q3A would be a nice additional diversion on our machines at work. We fire up a Q2 deathmatch on our old Octanes every now and then.
(Prepare to lose all karma)
Apple has changed, Apple is no longer the company it once was. Aside from the fruit-shaped logo and the menubar running across the top of the screen, Apple Computer is pretty much a modern consumerish NeXT. I've used Apple machines since my former job bought a small group of Lisas in 1983. While I mainly used Amiga and Windows machines at home, I had grown to love the Mac and it's various shaped beigeish gray enclosures. Over the years Apple had made one hellofa a platform. By 1992 we were using Quadra 950 and 800 machines stuffed full of ram, video and graphics nubus cards, and all sorts of wild accelerators. The MacOS (System 7.1 at the time) had no problem with our multiple monitors or our 640x480@30fps streams of mjpeg compressed video. Color correction, TrueType fonts, postscript, ethernet networking (both TCP/IP and AppleTalk/Ethertalk) worked great right out of the box. Macs in that era were ungodly expensive and worth every penny. Perhaps they still are today, though in a slightly different way.
Then came 1993 when Apple start seeding their early PowerPC machines, and eventually began selling them in 1994. Apple forgot how to make great hardware. They began to rely on the CPU to do everything. Sure the PowerPC had some great oomph, but it alone could not make up for poor design elsewhere. Luckily, the second generation of PowerPC based macs in 1995 (7500, 7600, 8500, 9500) were **very** improved, yet still nothing like the Quadras were back in their day. Eventually the third generation (G3) of Macs shipped, first in beigish gray boxes and later in the funky blue&white swing-down enclosure. By now Apple was bring back the performance, incorporating USB and Firewire. But what they had was nothing much more than a modern PC with a different CPU and OS. The G4 machines with their mighty PowerPC 74X0 CPUs have allowed us to do some pretty exciting things with the CPU alone, but again, it's nothing too special.
So what has Apple done to differentiate itself? When Steve Jobs returned he and his gang of NeXT thugs took the marketing and software angle. They introduced a funky new interface that looked nothing like MacOS, NeXTstep, or Windows. They created some cool consumer and pro apps (iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro) that made use of the G4 architecture and other features of their machines. They've also become far more mainstream with their retail stores, online ordering, and strict warranty policies.
It comes to me as no shock that Apple wants to defend it's GUI look-and-feel. I love the Macs I use at work, but to be honest, Apple is always on the brink of disaster. Consider the following: PC makers, along with motherboard designers integrate more cutting edge features that ever, and do so with great stability and success. Software makers, especially Microsoft, cater to both the newbie while still offering powerful professional features (much like FontSync and ColorSync) all while maintaining tight integration with said PC makers. Drop the price a bit, woo some users. Build some cool enclosures that both look nice and are a dream to work with. Boom. No more need for Apple.
If you think about it, this is already happening. And fast. As every month ticks by, Apple has to work harder, better, and faster to keep up. It should be no surprise that Apple wants to defend one of the very things that differentiates itself from the commodity Wintel PC market.
Apple has done some great things over the past 25 years, perhaps more so than any other company short of maybe SiliconGraphics and IBM. I applaud their efforts and love working with their products. I also wish them the best.
... that I've been asked to help with. The URL will eventually be http://networking.beyondboxes.net. Several folks around here, a few even from my company, have been working on it for quite some time. FAQ's, message boards, howtos, and even some insight on the future trends of networking. It should be a great help when it's done sometime in October. Until then, I'll see if I can't dig out some good URLs to paste on this thread.