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

Re:nothing special until OS X

1 -- Finally can have a multi-button mouse

Eh, what's that sonny? I used a 6-button turbo trackball on the mac from system 8 on. But you're right about the crashy business, some machines just kept chuggin' along, and some just wouldn't go for more than a few minutes. System 7 - 9, any flavour of windows and NT, they all worked like a charm or had gremlins ('winfax' --- shudder). But we still got the work done.

There's nothing I hate more than being slave to my mouse.

I agree that having to hack the system (see above re: stability) folder in order to get full keyboard navigation was boneheaded design. But it didn't really matter after I got Keyquencer, which as an OS X'er I miss, since most important operations got reduced to a key combination macro -- fast, rock solid, make the machine do backflips, really, anything nearly, one program saved me months. But this newfangled 'nixy goodness is like being young again, roaming through the university network, even if the interface isn't as productive to old farts like me (I still boot up the old toastermac for fun sometimes), running with no reboot for 5 months at a time makes up for it.

Re: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.

And I go completely in the opposite direction. I used to revile Macs and Apple. My first Mac experience was poking around on a Mac Plus I got at a thift store long after it was obsolete, and then awhile later running NetBSD on an SE/30.

Now I'm becoming sort of an after-the-fact semi-expert on old Apple hardware. Primarily because it's been showing up at local surplus equipment auctions and I'm figuring it out, shining it up and testing it, and selling it to people on eBay and locally. I seldom have more than one or two machines on hand that I can run anything newer than OS9 on. And I've come to have a lot of affection for one machine in particular, my PowerBook 165c, which I paid $5 for and which is a great little machine for OS 7 but since it's completely unsalable (people don't buy anything older than 7300s unless there's 'classic' interest, like SE/30s, Classics, maybe nicer Quadras) I am keeping it around. It's a really nice little system for getting away from the modern madness of today, to retreat to Claris Works and do some writing.

So I'm a new Mac convert, someone who didn't 'see the light' until after OSX came out, who doesn't run, and in fact has never touched the keyboard on a Mac running OSX.

Re:nothing special until OS X

People who say it "Just Works" probably haven't spent much time using it.

Well, I havn't spent much time using it. About a month since I got this powerbook. And for the most part I can say, yeah, "It just works!".

I got my powerbook, brought it home. Plugged it in. Hit the powerbutton. And after answering a couple of questions I downloaded the updates over my wireless broudband connection that I had never used before, and was learning about my new OS in minutes. I downloaded fink, installed some of my favorite UNIX like apps. I checked out my dotfiles from CVS via ssh. Changed my default shell to zsh. Dropped my dotfiles in place and had to add /sw/bin and /sw/sbin to my path, and that was it. Period. I set up my network to go to 3 different places, with 2 printers with no problems (well, there was a kernel panic problem with the airport driver when switching locations but that has been patched).

As far as I'm concerned, all other incarnations of MacOS sucked. "It just crashed". I could crash a mac in about 5 minutes doing stuff like web browsing, using the finder, or whatever. I had really bad luck with them.

This is coming from almost 10 years of Linux/UNIX usage that was pretty much exclusive. I did do Windows development for a couple of years, and yeah, that tought me I was barking up the wrong tree. We would do demos with a windows client and a Linux server for SSL and smartcard interaction, and have to tell the people giving the demos. "This is rover. Its a Linux based OS that does the backend stuff. All you have to do is turn it on this way and when your done turn it off this way. This is a windows box like your familiar with, when it fucks up, just hard shut it down and reboot it."

For a desktop OS, I couldn't be happier. "It just works!" I hated Macs a couple of years ago because of the little bomb icon, and having to see that happy face all the time rebooting them. Windows almost works (depending on the version, the time of last reinstall, the phase of the moon, the level of service pack you have, the proper drivers, and which applications you are runnint). Linux is a decent desktop os, but doing stuff like dual headed displays, installing software (I admin supercomputers, I know what to do OK), printing, dynamic devices like firewire and USB, whatever, is almost there, but not quite.

I'm still new to OS X, and am still learning about it. I have not developed anything for it besides perl and shell scripts yet. But I'm impressed. Its a little hard dealing with some of the "dumb downedness", like the lack of configuration options that comes with linux, but the defaults or what you can change are not bad.

I like how OS X integrated UNIX with a GUI. The role of root is unobtrusive and natural. It asks for my password for installing software, no viruses, no virus checker, no popups, no spyware, etc. Don't get me wrong. Its not perfect. But its the best end user os for me out there. Hands down.

Frameworks

So was the term "frameworks" coined at Taligent? I couldn't determine from the story. For those of you that don't know, a framework is like a library bundled with the headers, and so instead of installing multiple objects (the library file(s), the headers, etc.) you can just copy over one framework and have the same functionality. Pretty clever actually. Never knew where the name came from, though.

Re:Frameworks

Also known as a bundle.

Frameworks aren't quite the same thing as a bundle.

Framework bundles use a bundle structure different from "modern" bundle structure used by applications. The structure for frameworks is based on an older bundle format and allows for multiple versions of the framework code and header files to be stored inside the bundle. Supporting multiple versions allows older applications to continue running even as the framework binary continues to evolve.

The system identifies a framework by the .frameworks extension on its directory name and by the Resources directory at the top level of the framework bundle. Inside the Resources directory is an Info.plist file that contains the bundle's identifying information. Your actual Resources directory does not have to reside physically at the top-level of your bundle. In fact, the system frameworks that come with Mac OS X put a symbolic link in this location. The link points to the most current version of the Resources directory, buried somewhere deep inside the bundle.

Mac OS 2

I remember running Mac OS 2 through 4(!) on my Mac 512. Ah, back in the day when you could run your OS off of a floppy... and a 512k floppy no less ;)

Re:Mac OS 2

A 512k floppy would be a hell of an impressive thing, given that the Mac 512k used 400k floppies, and was followed by the 512ke, which used 800k floppies.

The 512k figure refered to the amount of RAM it had.

That was cool. But...

Wow. While I've always like the Macs, I've never tried to build much of my career on them. And yet, between hobby and career, I have used nearly every version that saw the light of day, and read voraciously about the others.

A couple of tidbits he left off.

Secure A/UX. I forget what it was called, but a DOD-compliant (I forget the Orange Book classification) version of A/UX was developed by an Atlanta company called SecureWare, later bought by HP. It was one of the first (if not the first) Unix variant to get that classification.

X11 for NEXTSTEP. An Austin company called Pencom Software (later PSW Technologies) developed a version of X11 for NEXTSTEP, called co-Xist. It was never blindingly fast, but then a lot of things were that way on NeXT platforms. As more of the server was ported to a lower level, performance got better. Steve Jobs hated X11. It didn't fit in with his vision of the "perfect OS". I suspect he felt it sullied his beloved DPS. So NeXT never was interested in bundling co-Xist with NS. (There were a couple of other NS X companies as well, but co-Xist was the better product in my admittedly biase view. 8^)

Alas, the only Mac I personally own is a dead one I keep in my cube for visitors to sit on. No idea what the OS is on it, but the rounded top is more comfy than the typical, flat PC. 8^)

OS X is a natural progression

Hey, I loved OS 9 too, and even the older Mac OS' got my heart beating fast.

But I mean, OS X just has to be the next step. There's only so much Apple could have improved OS 9. I do VERY much agree with some here about the way OS 9 looked, I like it as much as/more than I like the look of OS X. If Windows XP is the "Playschool" interface, then OS X is the "Mattel" interface.

I really, really wish Apple would provide ways to completely skin the OS from System Preferences, such as making it look like OS 9 while keeping the features set. That would be nice. Even though some programs now can do that, I'd love Apple to do it.

In the future I can only see good things for Apple. And who knows, maybe they will get closer and closer to integrating Linux, though BSD isn't a bad option as it stands.

Most evil..

It was introduced at a price of $666 that included 4K bytes of RAM and a tape of Apple BASIC.

And you all thought Microsoft was the evil company. ;)

NeXT

I really liked NEXTSTEP, and the NeXT cubes were pretty nice machines. They were the first I had worked with that supported dual monitors, and true color.

I miss

my mac IICX, we tweaked the thing up to 32 megs of ram, 1.1 gig hard drive (80 interneral, 1.1 external), and os 7.5 The thing worked like a beaute, would boot up in 30 seconds and did fine on word processing and the occasional sim city. Ah good old times.

Why doesn't it list GSOS (for the IIGS)

That was used (IIRC) on my home system The Apple IIGS - I went vic20, Apple //C, Apple IIGS - after when Apple screwed the GS users by going mac only is when I switched to the PC.

Ryan

What about a hist. of the visual interface design?

I enjoyed learning more than I ever thought possible about the evolution of the MacOS, but as a graphic designer, I felt myself wanting to know more about the evolution of the visual interface side, like: what other fonts were designed for the Mac besides Chicago, back in the day? And: why put the "Close" window button in the upper left corner?

Re:What about a hist. of the visual interface desi

See Susan Kare's site [kare.com] for some of that.

Long ago, I went to a talk by the author of MacWrite. He mentioned that at one point, text deletion was done by selecting the text and dragging it to the trash can. That was quickly rejected by test users.

The Lisa was a better machine than the Mac

The Lisa was a nice little machine. It was just too early. It had a hard drive and a protected mode OS, which wasn't bad for early 1983. You could actually get work done on a Lisa. It just cost far too much.

The original Macintosh (128K, one floppy, and no hard drive) wasn't very useful. You spent most of your time looking at the watch icon and changing floppies. Not until Macs with hard drives came out was it good for much. And that took years. Apple even fought a company that managed to put a third-party hard drive into original Macs.

Technically, the big problem with the Lisa was that Motorola was years late with the MMU chip for the M68000. The Lisa had an MMU that Apple put together out of register-level parts. This ran up the parts count and the cost. Worse, the M68000 didn't do instruction resumption after page faults correctly. So code for a M68000 with an MMU had to avoid all instructions that could cause page faults after they'd already changed the machine state. This meant avoiding the use of increment bits to increment index registers. If a load with increment page-faulted, the increment would be done twice. So the compiler had to generate code which incremented the index register in a separate operation. This produced code bloat and a slowdown.

A/UX

Does anyone know where I could pick up some A/UX install disks/CDs? 10 years ago I've always wanted to play with A/UX... After reading this I'd love to try it out on one of my old macs just for nostalgia...

Re:A/UX

Well, A/UX is floating around if you look carefully :-)

http://geektechnique.org/projects/aux-on-quadra. ht ml ...it's still under copyright of course, but where to buy it? Anyway, on a slow sunday-afternoon I like to fiddle with it, I run it just for fun :-)

Mac OS 9 still has one thing I miss...

Kaleidoscope.

I have not yet found a theming engine for Windows an Linux that even comes close to what was done with that little CDEV, especially in regard to irregular window shapes.

Nothing special except..

Well my Apple II Integer Basic was pretty special then with the language card pascal was pretty special. I still think Apple P.I.E. (programmer's editor) was awesome. My brother's woz-signed IIgs was neat. And the Apple /// was pure ecstasy to me, that was sheer amazingness. Of course Apple dropped it the jerks! The Apple III was sheer love and I never wanted anything else, until they dropped it (the bastards!) When they dropped it (damn! damn! damn!) I was scarred for life, the disillusionment distorted my personality.. hee hee.. bwahahahah!!!!

Oh and my fat mac was great, then when I got a hard drive to replace a floppy port that was awesome, my Quadra 950 shipped from the U.S. when it came out that was fantastic. My dual cpu 9600 was great especially with BeOS on it. And finally MacOSX which has some nice touches, too much candy, a fabulous non-apple OS under it which is not used enough, and could be great. I think however that Apple research used to be insanely great and now appears to have let a lot of air out of its sails. I remember the god who ran it quit at one time, Quicktime was used to appease M$, (though I found enough of the Mac toolbox in QT for windows that I was able to port a giant Quark XPress type program from MacOS in 6 months) and never since then have they focussed on insanely great research, if you judge from marketing. Of course they are great at marketing which is why they are taking over the music industry but I wouldn't mind if they took that money and put some serious brainpower onto some next generation OSs now. I mean now we have gotten to where the desktop always should have been and it works great with mostly Apple's GUI integration. Now it would be nice for something new again. BWAHAHA!

Damn I thought I was old school

until I read this.

My first "modern" computer was a Mac Plus. 1 MB or Ram and a 20 MB HDD that connected throught the external floppy port. I didn't even have HFS support until I cobbled together a system from the files on a few game disks that I had lying around. Falcon 2.0 provided me with a newer "System" file than I had before and I believe that I ripped off a new "Finder" from my HS. Oh, nostalgia, back in the days when I paid $80+ per month for Compuserve at home and had free internet access (FTP+Gopher+Usenet) access at college.

LK

Mac System 7 looks best to me

Huh, looking at the screenshots, I realize I think System 7 really look the best to me. I'm mostly a Windows on the desktop guy, but when I was first introduced it to it was on System 7, and that's probably what I used at the School of the MFA. It captured the elegance of the early Mac but wasn't so starkly monochromatic. OS 8 still looks about the same, but then 9 starts to get into that "ooh look shiny metal crap" that was the prelude to the Fisher Price look that is so dominant these days.

Similarly, I think I'll always dial down Windows XP and whatever comes next to as close to Windows 95/98 in appearance as possible. The boring parts of an OS should look as boring and grey and consistent as possible, that way you can more easily tell what's boring and what might be interesting and new.

(This from a guy who invented gamebuttons [kisrael.com], javascript games where the sole input and output is a single javascript button)

Apple I

I look at this screen and can't help think of early versions of the Matrix. That was probably the first iteration of Neo.

Imagination

The background leading up to the GUI OS was very interenting. Here's a little background on two of the characters:

• Vannevar Bush [theatlantic.com]
• Ted Nelson [virginia.edu]

Re:MkLinux

Put the crack pipe down. All Apple did was modify the kernel to run as a userspace process on top of a Mach microkernel. I'm presuming those changes were eventually merged into the official kernel.

Re:MkLinux

[b]Apple tried to control Linux? Good lord... be thankful they never pulled that off. I can see Apple up there in place of SCO already, and with loads more money and arrogance[/b]

where does it say exactly that they tried to 'control' linux? i couldn't find it anywhere in the article

Re:MkLinux

You just summoned an odd image of Jobs fighting McBride in my brain...

Re:MkLinux

Interestingly enough, correct me if i'm wrong here, Jobs tried to woo Linus to Apple around 1997, but obviously failed. Makes you wonder how it all would have turned out though, doesn't it?

Re:It's simple

Uh, I wrote this. And I own 4 G4's (and countless older systems). Truth hurts. NeXT did all of the hard work.

Re:It's simple

Write OS that is decent for the era (1984).
Add hierarchical file system (1986).

.
. (RTFA)
.

Buy NeXT (12/96).
Massage it into something Mom can use (2001).
Profit!

Re:MkLinux

For that reason, there still is no low-level bootloader if you want to run NetBSD or any other freenix on classic Mac hardware. The NetBSD on my SE/30 boots out of a little vestigal MacOS app, which auto-runs after MacOS loads.

There probably never will be such a bootloader, because the startup code is built into the ROM. The classic Macs MUST start Mac OS, the boot code is hard-wired. The only way around it is to pull the ROM off the logic board and replace it with something of your own.

For that reason, it's much easier to write a simple start-up app that boots into Linux/*BSD from Mac OS.