A History of Apple's Operating Systems

jpkunst writes "Amit Singh of kernelthread.com has written A History of Apple's Operating Systems. From the introduction: 'This document discusses operating systems that Apple has created in the past, and many that it tried to create. Through this discussion, we will come across several technologies the confluence of which eventually led to Mac OS X'."

apple //e - DOS 3.3

all I know is at the time I could do everything with my Apple //e, word processing, visicalc, Apple BASIC. Hell, I even had the orig Castle Wolfenstein! Wow, those were the days.

CB

Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3

We were using them for multimedia presentations at the Museum of Science and Industry in L.A. They controlled full motion interactive video using Sony LDP1000s, and all networked together to the mighty Corvus 5 MB (enormous!) hard drive. Reliable as a brick. And all this in 1984.

Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3

I remember having a 5.25 disk with about 20 different dos-es on it. Diversi-Dos, Double Dos, and a pile of others that I can't remember offhand.

They all had different things that they excelled at. Diversi-Dos was fantastically fast and made a little buzzy noise when it was loading, which is why I installed it on most stuff.

There were also ones with 'built in' commands, and other such such hackery.

I wish I had it now, but I accidentally formatted it.

Anyone hear of such a thing?

Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3

I had something very much like that, if not the same thing. One disk full of DOSs, another full of Locksmith, etc., and there wasn't much you couldn't do.

I've still got an original DOS 3.1.1 System Master. I doubt it boots. I don't think floppies were supposed to last 25 years.

Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3

I don't think floppies were supposed to last 25 years.

You'd be surprised, the vast majority of my 20+ year old C64 disks work just fine. (That's not to say I haven't made backups though.)

Apple II Emu

Emulation links:
http://emulation.net/apple2/ [emulation.net]

Images:
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/ [asimov.net]

Whole bunch of other sites:
http://e.webring.com/hub?ring=apple2 [webring.com]

There used to be a really good one out there I used as a resource when I was trying to figure out how to move the images from my PC through the serial port to my Apple //e to write them to the Disk II. If anyone remembers what I'm talking about please link under this post (it showed a boot screen on the homepage then it redirected to their homepage).

Thanks! Hope these links help.

Oh and of course if you want to buy old stuff (as I have done) there is always eBay [ebay.com] (They suck by the way because they used to have an Apple II section but it's gone now.)

Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3

Prodos was the base for the MAC OS Filesystem and continued.

That's incorrect. ProDOS was the same as SOS, the Sophisticated Operating System, developed for the Apple ///. They expected boot code in different sectors, so you could have a disk that booted on an Apple II and an Apple III.

The first Macintosh used MFS, followed by HFS and then HFS+.

Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3

What are the filesystems on current MACs ?

Mac OS uses the Hierarchial File System (HFS), which has been extended to HFS+ for OS X and (I think) OS 9 and above (anyone care to confirm that?). Recent versions of Mac OS can also handle ISO9660 and FAT, and I think OS X can do BSD UFS.

Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3

I think HFS+ first appeared in either system 7.6 or 8...I'm leaning toward 8 more... Actually you could create UFS partitions with old versions of Drive Setup on older Mac OS versions long before OS X came around.

Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3

HFS+ first appeared in Mac OS 8.1 [apple.com].

Supported filesystems in Mac OS X [apple.com]. For some reason ISO9660 and NTFS aren't on the list but they're supported too. There's probably more.

Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3

The Apple IIe was godly. I was too young to own one, but my cousin got one when he was like 15 or something and the first thing he did was print off a huge banner: "THE APPLE IIe, THE ULTIMATE" in dot-matrix and hung it up across the family room.

Hideous, but awesome.

Powerstack

I'd like to remind everyone that the greatest computer [lostbrain.com] ever created runs Mac osX native. As if it woudn't.

tcd004

Re:Powerstack

Someone's foe list? Good God, no, anything but that. I'll be good, I promise.

Pity about the os9 GUI

The screenshot of rhapsody [kernelthread.com] makes me think something rather neat was lost to the world. While the inner workings of os9 hold no appeal for me I REALLY adored the look and feel of the UI. the simple raised grey windows and 'platinum' themed buttons/menus.

Personally, I'd prefer working in an environment with those windows/gui elements and the cartoonish crisp simple icon style, than that of OSX. I realise it's very much a subjective thing - pity we don't have the choice of looks in OSX to go back to that platinum look

(and no, shapeshifter themes are nothing like the real thing)

Re:Pity about the os9 GUI

I agree. I love OS X for its power and stability, but on the rare occasions I find myself looking at a Mac running OS 9 or previous, I remember how much better it looked. At those who discount aesthetics in OSs are idiots; when you're staring at a screen all day, you'd better hope it's easy on the eyes.

Any iteration of the Mac OS, of course, is better-looking than anything that's ever come out of Redmond. ;)

Re:Pity about the os9 GUI

Yeah, Bill Gates never promised that you'd want to "lick" anything. But Microsoft doesn't make hardware.

Apple had long been lauded for it's ease of use (read: intuitive and friendly UI), and for hardware that favored graphics processing, from what I could tell. Fair or not, Apple is regarded as the best platform for image/media/graphics processing and rendering (I'm not so familiar with the Apple hardware config, so verification, anybody?).

It seems that pulling away from the good old intuitive interface and heading for a sleeker interface, and one that is based off of FreeBSD nonetheless, seems to indicate that they want to capture the trendier, more tech-savvy crowd. They've got their rep as the media processor of choice, so now they're trying to grab the cool hackers and developers who are sick of Windows and are tired of the command line.

And I guess it's working. My roommate last year got a G4 running OSX and he loves it. This is after years of dealing with various versions of windows and trying over and over to get Mandrake on his system.

Me? I'm still running a PC with Redhat, though.

Funny, I feel the opposite

To each his own, I guess. On the rare occasions I see an OS 9 system, I think "I used to like that interface? It's ugly!" I'm an OS X convert, look and all.

Re:Pity about the os9 GUI

Alot of people don't understand the principle reasons for the GUI change. One was to make certain that people would see the distinction between the OS X and Classic modes. It was very important for Apple to get programmers to write native software that they make it very clear that the program they are using is not OS X native. Also, there was the necessity that older users be made constantly aware that this was a new OS and that it had very different capabilities. Apple wanted people to learn to use it differently. These are all really more important than the attractiveness of the UI. I really think they blew it on the way textures changed and a few other things. But, for the most part it is very good.

Re:Pity about the os9 GUI

This highlights one of the problems I have with KDE GNOME. Both projects had the misguided idea that a gui that looked like Windows would be easier for users switching from Windows. Ofcourse the opposite is true. If a gui looks like Windows users are going to expect it to act exactly like Windows. When the behaviour is a little different users get frustrated and confused. It would be far better to have a completely different UI that is userfriendly.

That said, I am not sure that Apple switched the UI for reasons of useability. There are so many UI mistakes in OSX compared to MacOS9 that I not sure if Apple was ever thinking about good UI when designing OSX. ;-)

Re:I'd believe it.

Sorry but alot of time has been wasted spent on taking Carbon and making it a first-class citizen with Cocoa instead of focusing on Cocoa.

That is changing with each revision as more Cocoa is implemented and the OS becomes more seemless.

Politics played the most important part of the direction OS X has taken.

Re:I'd believe it.

Oh COME ON! If you even read the article you are claiming to comment on, you'd know that Carbon and Cocoa are complementary APIs, created as peers around the same time. There are still some very basic features in carbon that cocoa does not have, and there are still a vast numbers of cocoa calls that are just wrappers for carbon calls. They are two different and perfectly valid APIs. People are just jaded about carbon because it's responsible fro the "bad carbon port." Essentially a Mac OS 9 application with all of the Macintosh Toolkit (the Classic API) bits worked out and holes barely filled with Carbon calls. It's unfair to denounce an API because a lot of developers were lazy. Look how good Carbon apps can be. iTunes anyone?

And before you complain about the Finder's being Carbon, remember that a lot of its troubles are due to the fact that it was a 1.0 release in 2000. While far from perfect, Panther's Finder is a perfect example of how good threading can pay off (except for Networking, my God, what were they thinking!).

Re:I'd believe it.

It may be Jobs's fault, but in any case, the issue is moot. The choice is not between Aqua and the Classic look-and-feel. The choice is between Jobs and OS X or a dead-in-the-water Apple still making incremental upgrades to OS 9 and getting less relevant by the second. Regardless of Jobs's faults, he did save the company, and I prefer a modern OS with a good GUI to an ancient OS made by a dead company with a great GUI.

Although, for me, I prefer OS X in every way except for the Finder, including appearance and interface. It might help that I studiously avoid Carbon apps (except for the Finder). And of course I like UNIX, which helps. But on the rare occasion that I boot back into OS 9, I feel very constrained and limited.

Mistakes in OS X v OS 9?

Most of the "mistakes" I've read about boil down to simply operating differently.

Remember, the OS 9 GUI was originally designed for a uni-tasking computer with a tiny screen. It was brilliant. But over the years, more and more features were welded on, Frankenstein-style and it ended up being inconsistent and unwieldy. Curmudgeons now bitterly complain that it was better, but it sucked in so many ways...

For example, the Apple menu which became the dumping grounds for anything that didn't fit elsewhere. It was originally meant to be a place where mini-applets resided to provide you with a tiny bit of multitasking. (The calculator, Chooser, etc.) And let's not even mention that the Apple menu could change on a per-program basis even though it was supposed to be independent of the currently-running program.

How about the File menu which is featured in every program and mostly contains functions that don't have anything to do with files, or even the program in which it is featured. Then we have the much-vaunted Finder which does things absolutely inconsistent with all other apps. (I.e. CMD-N creates a new folder, not a new window/document.)

How about another OS 9 Finder gem: go to one window and select some files, go to another ans select some more files. Guess, what, the files in the first window are no longer selected. Would you put up with this in any other app? NO. You'd complain about Apple's GUI guidelines, and rightly so.

But OS 9's GUI has achieved sacred status in the minds of the inflexible and so you can't argue with them.\

(The most prominent curmudgeon is the Applelinks guy, who has become a parody of himself with all of his protestations about being a MacOS X guru yet wanting his old kludgy and inconsistent OS 9 back. Sort of like the sports "expert" who complains about the end zone in baseball. He bitterly complained about performance for a long time, but it turns out he had all kinds of "haxies" to make OS X look like OS 9, then he ran in a tiny partition without enough RAM.)

Re:Pity about the os9 GUI

I had some of the early developer betas for Mac OS X, which used the Rhapsody UI.

Trust me, it would have elicited far more complaints than the OS X gui ever did. It was just a poorly thought out (with good reason, all the effort was going in to aqua) mismash of OpenStep and OS 9 concepts.

Re:Pity about the os9 GUI

Mac OS X Server was even sold like that. I still have version 1.0 here and it makes me wonder every time I see it. :)

Re:Pity about the os9 GUI

I was given a rhapsody developer's release for x86 some time in 1998.

I was astonished at how easy it was to install on a PC, and how flawlessly all of the (supported) hardware worked. It was just bizarre to install an OS on a PC and have it work right the first time. I had never seen windows/linux/freebsd install that easily, but Apple managed to get it working just fine on an OS that they never even shipped!

Re:Pity about the os9 GUI

I vote for the word "imprefections" to be added to the English language.

Apple operating systems

While using unstable Windows 95 at home, I admired apple for creating stable operating systems such as Macintosh OS, which I used in my university. Yes I believe Apple has always been better at making OSs than microsoft

Re:Apple operating systems

>I wonder if they ever thought seriously about selling a version for PC hardware.

It was called Project Star Trek (where no Mac OS has gone before), and got as far as working code and a pitch to the the Board of Directors.

The BoD turned it down.

It might not have worked reliably in the chaos of PC hardware, but we'd be better off today if Windows had been exposed to that kind of competition.

Re:Apple operating systems

Remind me again how hard it was to rebuild desktops as opposed to all you had to do with Win95/98?
Hello, Memmaker anyone?

Re:Apple operating systems

As crappy as Win95 is, OS7 and 8 were a lot worse in terms of stability. I've never met a OS7 user who hasn't had to "rebuild his desktop" at least every other week.

Well, let me introduce myself. I ran System 7 or 8 on my PowerMac 7100 for over 6 years and never rebuilt the desktop or had unexplained crashes. I kept my system folder very clean and avoided any exotic extensions (i.e. Now Utilities) that hacked the OS.

Re:Apple operating systems

There's a fileserver/database host pizzabox mac I set up in 1998 for a network-noob arts collective that ran sans reboot for two years, daily (even weekend) moderate use, until a power failure forced the issue. Some dude just changed the jaz disks every couple of days. I used to check up on them but it just worked, and finally I checked back a couple of years ago and it still chugged along, only a few reboots over the 4 years.

System 8.1, filemaker 4 solution with 45 related files and 600K+ records, and 20K+ word and excel and email files, a cheap old headless mac. Set that config up a few times over the years, for small organizations, a lifeline to them, hassle free and useful.

When I tried the same thing three years ago with an old win98 box (not enough cpu muscle for Win2k, and no budget, nada, zero), well, let's just say that after getting a few frantic phone calls ['it just shut down' - 'why do the fonts suddenly look all funny'] I went out and got another crusty old mac to do the job, problem solved. Not bad for a non-server OS, when scaled down properly.

Re:Apple operating systems

Rebuilding the desktop != Rebuilding an OS.

The desktop file only stored very minor information (file comments, file-icon associations, etc). When it became corrupted, the general symptom was an icon or two didn't show up correctly. Rebuilding this file took about a minute, and was completely non-destructive.

Back on Classic Mac OS I would generally do a clean build with each major system release, more to clean out old extensions, preferences, and other crud than deal with system stability issues. On the whole, Classic Mac OS might have crashed on occasion, but in didn't catastrophically fail and require a complete rebuild the way Windows tends to.

Funny story, true story

Back on Classic Mac OS I would generally do a clean build with each major system release, more to clean out old extensions, preferences, and other crud than deal with system stability issues. On the whole, Classic Mac OS might have crashed on occasion, but in didn't catastrophically fail and require a complete rebuild the way Windows tends to.

You just reminded me -- I had a friend who had a Quadra named Godzilla (one of the minifridge-sized ones the old Avids used to come in, with flames painted on it). He liked to name his System 7 harddisks 'New York' and 'Tokyo'... just so that when you held down option on boot it presented you with:

Are you sure you want to rebuild Tokyo?

It's the little things.

Re:Apple operating systems

Odd, I always had Windows 95 crashing even when only one app was running, and have little problems running multiple apps on classic MacOS as long as I don't run anything from Microsoft or Netscape.

The point about Win95 (and 98 isn't much better)is: is it the app crashing that corrupts the Protected Memory, or is it the OS killing itself.

Re:Apple operating systems

I'm sorry but I have to cry bullshit on this post. I work for the the IT department for a reasearch university in New Mexico (yea, laugh now but our U pulls in loads of reasearch money and we have one of the top Engineering schools in the country and we're in the top 50 in Computer Science) and we have widespread use of OS X, mainly in OS X Server but you would be surprised at the ammount our of sys admins running Macs with OS X (our entire NOC is running OS X as admin computers). It's a great combination of useablility (i.e. MS Office and UNIX Sys Admin tools nmap, ethereal, etc.) that just doesn't happen in the Windows environment. And yes, I realize you aren't talking about system administration, you are talking about end users.

I'm not sure what types of software that you were running but they must have been extremely poorly written. I mean OS X crashing more than ME?!? Come on, give me a break, I don't recall ever seeing a BSOD on a OS X (maybe the swirl that never ends) but if you know anything about *NIX in general, you can kill -KILL (PID) any process that is causing problems. Your comparison of Max OS X in general to ME is almost absurd as ME is based on partly on technology from the old DOS days, where OS X has compatability with classic, but the underpinnings are not the same. A much better comparison would be NT/2000/XP to OS X, but even there the reliability is not the same.

I personally have a Mac running panther, along with 2 PCs, one (sadly requied) running Windows XP and one running Linux. My current uptime (not max, which is 66 days) on my Mac is 34 days (the MAX uptime i've ever had on my XP machine is 22 days), and security reboots aside I've never had a crash, lockup or any other problem with OS X. I can't say the same for any Windows operating system I've ever run, although with XP my reboots are occuring with less frequency. And NO I'm not a Mac fanboy, I really prefer working on my Linux system, Mac comes in at a close second. And working in IT for 12 years, Mac's are, if not the easiest to deal with, they are close. No wonder you post as AC, but the fact that you're post was modded up shows that those with mod points are on crack.

Re:Apple operating systems

I think the operative word in his recollection is the word "was"... Indicating that we're talking Mac OS 7 or Mac OS 8, not OS X.

Regardless, a well administered mid-90's Mac was still arguably more stable than the average Windows 95 machine, 'pseudo protected memory' be damned...

Plagiarism

Why are a large number of slashdot stories directly copied off other sites? They give no credit to the original site at all.

This story could have easily said: "jpkunst noticed over at macslash.org [macslash.org] they are running a story about an article on kernelthread by Amit Singh etc etc...

In many cases these are copied word for word from the originating site, however thankfully our submitter took the time to rewrite a different summary for this particular story.

Isn't one of the main points of the GPL et al that you have to give credit to the original authors? How very hypocritical of the Slashdot editors to let things like this through.

Re:Plagiarism

As an avid reader of macslash, and knowing how slow the site can be on a normal day of the week, do you really want a link on the frontpage of slashdot? I mean I know it came from macslash earlier this week, and so do you, I think for me thats enough.

Re:Plagiarism

In other news, bloggers' plagiarism scientifically proven.

"Wired has up a story about HP, as part of a larger drive to figure out how ideas ideas 'infect' large groups of people, scientifically proving what most people already knew: bloggers steal their ideas from other bloggers."

Newton OS

I don't see it on the list.

sigh...

My first love... System 6. : \

Synopsis of history

Apple started with a decent OS for the Mac, given the hardware at the time. No innovation to the kernel happened afterward throughout the nineties, resulting in the worst modern OS on the planet by MacOS 9. Steve Jobs comes back, identifies how aweful the OS is, and rightly abandons the horrible piece of software. Apple creates MacOS X to replace it out of Mach, and BSD, resulting in a decent OS.

Steve, is that you?

Really, don't be surfing Slashdot when you have two companies to run!

In reality, Steve Jobs came back as part of the deal when Apple bought Next. So his return didn't start the move for a new OS, it was a side effect of the end result of it.

Mostly Wrong

Well Apple had been making serious attempts to get away from the classic codebase since System 7 came out. Everyone knew that the fundamentals were way behind where they should be. There was a team-up with IBM, Copland, Rhapsody, and who KNOWS what else was happening 'in the basement'. The on-campus attitude was quite snooty, from my understanding, and that makes innovation difficult.

The problem seemed to me to be that Apple really wanted to remain 'true' to their die-hards while reimplementing the entire OS around them. It just couldn't happen that way.

Overall I think Apple did well with OS X, I wish it were a little more lightweight and zippier, but it's poky because the fundamental technologies behind it are much more extensible than any other OS. The filesystem overhead in OS X (which seems to really slow things down) provides for single-icon cross-platform binaries. The OpenGL display system brings scaled displays much closer.

System 7 was a fun ride

I worked on System 7 at Apple (on TrueType), and besides my regular job, did two things that stuck around for a long time:

• At the very last minute I personally made the Geneva 9 Italic bitmap font and put it into the build, which was important because the (then) new feature of Aliases showed up in italics in the Finder. (I made a Chicago 12 Italic too, which got cut from the installer when it pushed the install onto one more floppy *sigh*.)
• There was this fat-plus-shaped cursor, used by spreadsheets, that had a mangled mask, which I had noticed years before but could never get Apple to fix. So I fixed it myself :-)

And I guess TrueType worked out pretty well, but I was a pretty small part of that. Still System 7 was quite a big deal back then and was fun to work on.

If only he could get some of his stories right...

Copland never went "beta". It never even went Dev Release. It was cancelled almost immediately before the Dev Release was scheduled. Gershwin was nothing more than the successor of Copland. When Copland died, Gershwin died. This isn't in any way a definitive collection of Apple systems, let alone an accurate one.

Pre-release Copland

I clearly recall a pre-release version of Copland running on my well-connected buddie's PB 3400. I remember him trying to boot it, but it pretty much crashed whenever you tried to DO anything (open two windows, copy files, rebuild desktop, etc.).

This was the same guy who showed me OpenFirmware, Linux (pre 1.0, may I add), and South Park. He's quite responsible for the geek I've become.

Apparently he's the author and number-one on the Kismet wireless project.

intel

notice how some of the earlier incarnations of what became OSX show the about box and has teh words "pentium" on them .. i wonder... also i wonder where the windows version is of some of the stuff is now. This guy is obviously using it on win xp.

screenshots

the screenshots in question are: rhapsody on intel [kernelthread.com]
Yellow box on XP [kernelthread.com]

nothing special until OS X

I think I'm part of a new subcategory of Mac owners--I didn't get one until OS X 10.1, and so have no desire to run OS 9 or Classic apps. There were three factors that made me get my Powerbook:

1 -- Finally can have a multi-button mouse (though it is a Logitech, and the trackpad still only has one button)

2 -- Protected memory. I was so freaking sick of ol' Crashy McGee, as I nicknamed my Windows 2000 box (and that was WAY better than 98). I took care of that machine, too, but every so often the kernel seemed to spontaneously get corrupted. That's a hell of a lot worse than the proverbial BSOD. I'd have to boot into Linux just to fix Windows! But before OS X, Macs didn't have such great stability, either.

3 -- Built-in command-line-interface. There's nothing I hate more than being slave to my mouse. If your Windows mouse doesn't work, you're screwed. Try navigating and performing normal tasks with only the keyboard. Unless you have the foresight to enable all that handicapped-access stuff, which most people don't. And I can ssh into my shell account, where I still check my mail with pine. Not that I'm some spectacular programmer (I tinker with stuff for fun, but no formal experience), but pine works just fine for email. Why does everything need to be in HTML? Why do I need stupid pictures or e-cards?

Anyway, not all Mac users are nostalgic for the old OSes; some of us just want a Unix box with a consistent and functional GUI. Not that the history wouldn't be of interest to any long-time Mac user, but it isn't interesting to me except as a curiosity.

Re:nothing special until OS X

"I'm part of a new subcategory of Mac owners--I didn't get one until OS X 10.1"

You latecomer. You poser. You'll never be part of the club. NEVER!

Resentfully yours,

The Mac Elite