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A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Jul 25, 2006 09:48 AM
from the does-turtle-count dept.
from the does-turtle-count dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As part of his 1680-page book Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach, Amit Singh of kernelthread.com wrote a very detailed technical history of Apple's operating systems. Since he had to cut down on the history chapter because of the book's already too-large size, most of this chapter didn't make it to the printed book. Singh has made available the history chapter as a free PDF. The file is 140 pages long, and is generously filled with figures and screenshots. It starts with the internals of the original Apple I and goes through a tour of all operating systems Apple dabbled with, including internals of A/UX, Lisa OS, and such. It even covers details of outside influences like the Xerox Alto, STAR System, Smalltalk, and Sketchpad, and closer to home things like Mach, NeXTStep, and OpenStep."
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A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems
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Apple ][ (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/ | Last Journal: Friday November 09, @08:01PM)
Despite how far we've come, there are time I really miss my old Apple ][.
Re:Apple ][ (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://craigbuchek.com/)
And the reason that they do this is that they (and you) don't have to pay the real cost of disposing of the old TV. Instead of recycling the TV and reclaiming all the materials, you'll probably just toss the old TV in the trash. And the hazardous chemicals will leak into the soil. Our descendents will have to clean that shit up eventually, which will cost tons of money. But we don't have to pay that, so we just go get a new TV cheap.</rant>
Re:Apple ][ (Score:4, Insightful)
In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.gnaa.us/)
Uh, wait.
Re:Apple ][ (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://whineymacfanboy.googlepages.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday April 12 2007, @09:28AM)
God, we have come a long way haven't we - now Apple will cease & desist you for linking to their Service Manual.
God, how I miss the old Apple
Re:Apple ][ (Score:5, Interesting)
And don't give me the old, tired, whiny excuse that people would simply build their own from the specs they got from a friend. It's not true. As you alluded to, most people aren't hobbyists and don't want to be bothered to build their own. And there isn't a problem from a commercial competitor, either, since patents and copyrights are there to protect against this exact form of abuse. There are adequate legal protections against ripoffs.
Companies should be required to include specs with every electronic and mechanical device they sell, whether it's as small as a wristwatch, or as large as a car.
Re:Apple ][ (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday June 29, @04:58PM)
I still have (and treasure) bits of cloth of complex, intricate design, created and produced with the aid of that Apple. She truly made it an extension of herself.
Not as good as the Beeb though (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday April 27 2007, @02:20PM)
The OS was fully vectored and modular, the BASIC language had procedures and functions, as well as a built-in assembler that could access BASIC variables, but the hardware design was what made it stand out. It had every i/o port under the sun - serial, parallel, "user i/o", other dedicated ones for a network (Econet), to support floppy disks and hard disks, and even plug in a second co-processor (there were 8086, Z80 and 32000 variants I think). You could get Pascal and C for it, and it supported 80-column text on a monitor.
And to bring it slightly back on-topic, the documentation was simply excellent - the "Advanced user guide" told you just about everything you needed to know about the machine, from the event i/o to interrupt-programming, documenting the OSxxx calls, and all the port i/o etc.
Nothing since has come close to the flexibility of that machine given the design limitations at the time, and it's a tribute to the designers.
Of course, such largesse can be abused [grin] See My first and only virus-writing incident [slashdot.org]
Simon
Those were the days... (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://religiousfreaks.com/)
I remember making "awesome" games in the 40x40 graphics mode. Not too easy to make a game in a couple hours anymore ;)
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]What I want to know is (Score:1, Funny)
(http://www.nsa.gov/kids/)
What were you smoking?
Where can I buy some?
Re:What I want to know is (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday March 26 2004, @02:46PM)
Of course, time went on, and things changed radically since then, but Mac UI development was, in its early days, miles beyond what Microsoft could muster.
Now - why MacOS decided to stick with the same setup in spite of Win95/98? Dunno.
Re:What I want to know is (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What I want to know is (Score:5, Informative)
I did (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.lkmc.ch/)
Daring Fireball wrote about this recently [daringfireball.net]. Here's the most important quote of the article:
Yeah, I did use and like Mac OS 9, Mac OS 8 and System 7. I did smoke lots of weed, but that had nothing to do with it. There are two things to consider: First, it went up against crap like Windows 3.11 and Windows 95. Second, it was the prettiest, most easy-to-use OS, even with cooperative multitasking and lack of memory protection.
Mac OS X added a lot to what makes a Mac great, but Mac OS 9 had a lot going for it, too.
Re:I did (Score:5, Funny)
Memory protection used to be explained in the following way:
For all practical purposes this was the state of things for many years.
Re:I did (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.haeleth.net/)
It's a rather misleading description, though. More accurately:
Re:I did (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a rather misleading description, though. More accurately: UNIX/Windows NT/OS X
Umm, the memory management issues changed long before OS X existed and this predates even Windows NT for the most part. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to describe, but you fail to describe either the state of the art now, or the situation as it existed in the past, but rather have presented a muddled, mix of both, while leaving out most of the concepts of modern memory management. "if there is no more memory to give, the program is terminated" is certainly not the case with any modern UNIX or with OS X, as it jumps to swap and then frees memory from other systems according to how they are "niced" among other things.
Repeat ad infinitum, all the while gritting your teeth and reciting the mantra "this is better than Windows, this is better than Windows" until you almost believe it.
The first computer I ever personally owned was dual motherboard, dual processor 66mhz ppc and 486/66 simultaneously running both Windows 3.11 and MacOS 7.x (with a cool key combo to swap the input and display and some nifty utilities to copy and paste between them). I'm about as close to an impartial observer at the time as you could have ever had. The fact was, Windows memory allocation was in theory, much better than MacOS, but in practice was so unstable that it caused an even bigger problem than it solved. If you don't remember this than you either never ran both side by side or you are looking at the past with rose tinted glasses.
Re:What I want to know is (Score:4, Interesting)
Mac OS 8 went head to head with win98. The only better choice at that time was BeOS . Yet another good OS killed by an illegal monopoly of a bad OS.
Hell BeFS featured a database File System of the likes MSFT still can't create. and they did it on hardware that even Linux would require recompile and lightweight window manager to run on.
MSFT to this day is still trying to copy cool features found in competitor's now old products.
Re:What I want to know is (Score:4, Informative)
(http://theravensnest.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 07, @07:05AM)
- Good multi-user support.
- Pre-emptive multitasking.
- Protected memory
If you wanted these three, you had two choices; UNIX or Windows NT[1]. Other consumer operating systems didn't have them. Windows gained Pre-emptive multitasking with Windows 95, but it didn't get the other two until MS abandoned 9x in favour of NT. BeOS didn't have the first, but did have the second and was quite popular with Mac users.What it did have was a heavily Raskin-influenced GUI, which left pretty much anything else in the dust when it came to usability. NeXTStep was in the same area, but much more expensive.
[1] Or VMS and a few others if you had a huge budget.
Amit's Book (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://theravensnest.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 07, @07:05AM)
First, the Earth cooled. (Score:4, Funny)
(http://ettlz.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 12 2006, @06:53PM)
Then Steve Jobs came, and he brought forth NeXTStep.
And then Apple bought up NeXTStep, added some more BSD, and gave it some pretty clothes and called it OS X. I couldn't believe it. They opened the closet, took out the best eye candy, and walked straight into town...
Archeological dig (Score:4, Funny)
(Last Journal: Friday August 24, @08:52PM)
Anybody feel like digging? :)
Re:Archeological dig (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.ps34free.com/default.aspx?r=927598)
quick obselescence (Score:1, Redundant)
I'm guessing that it is because the underlying hardware is changing rapidly- many hardware sectors increase in size and performance a magnitude every five years, making some resource algorithms less meaningful. Plus novelties like flash, MRAM, cores, cells, and GPUs, etc. all have to be integrated in.
1680-page book ? (Score:3, Funny)
(http://home.happyface.net/)
Lisa OS (Score:4, Interesting)
No wonder the book is 1680 pages (Score:2, Troll)
Why it didn't appeal to christians... (Score:2, Funny)
wished for more about A/UX (Score:2, Interesting)
As the new maintainer of the A/UX FAQ [dyndns.org], I keep hoping to learn more about it. Unfortunately the author didn't bring up anything I didn't already know. That said, the page or two he had is a good summary for those that have never used A/UX before.
I bought this book - it is very good. (Score:2)
Excellent form of promotion (Score:2)
(https://customer.lylix.net/aff.php?aff=006)
What was the book written in? (Score:2)
(http://www.reanimality.com/)
Being too greedy? (Score:1)
I was always a fan of BeOS. A presentation and demonstration of it was part of the interview process that got me my first consultant position. Always thought was a shame it didn't make it. Now, if that chapter is to be believed (p100 of the pdf), they could have were it not for the boss being too greedy. After managing to negotiate upwards from an initial valuation by Apple of $50m up to an offer of $200m, he still tried to get more and got no deal at all.
That's a little heart breaking, actually. I've been lucky enough to avoid the whole "my company's gone bust" thing, but what I've seen others go through isn't nice. It would really piss me off to find out that the boss, with $200m on the table and only $20m having been put into the company, still was too greedy / crap at negotiation to take it.
"Ten times return on our investment? Ha! I think we'll do better trying to compete with Microsoft in the OS market!"
Yeah, real smart...
Anyone know whether Jean-Louis Gassee really could have accepted the $200m offer and closed the deal, e.g. if even Apple didn't end up putting BeOS at the heart of their OS strategy?
Re:Being too greedy? (Score:4, Insightful)
From the time Copland died in the summer of 1996 until we got laid off in March of 1997, we waited for the Big Decision and learned a lot about UNIX-based operating systems because we knew that's where the company had to go. NeXt and Steve Jobs's return were complete surprises. Smartest move Gil Amelio made--just as was Steve's immediately getting Gil out of the way and resuming leadership. Apple's customers needed a reason to believe and Gil only provided silence. As one Rumor-Monger wag said, "he couldn't market pussy in a prison."
Is this history in the right book? (Score:1)
Suppose you bought a book about Ruby and it had a 140 page introductory chapter that started with the history of FORTRAN and Algol and worked all the way up through Perl and Python and Ruby. Suppose it went off on tangents about things that Niklaus Wirth and John Backus did. Suppose it talked about various programs of historical importance (like the first compiler and PLANNER and so on). Suppose it talked about programming paradigms which don't relate to Ruby, like the development of Prolog.
Now all of this is interesting, but it's out of place in a book about Ruby.
Surprised at so little mentioned about GSOS (Score:4, Interesting)
For me the AppleIIGS was really the "begining" of my current career in the computer industry. It was also a really slick operating system. But the most significant impact the AppleIIGS had on the market was it was the start of Apple's trend of abandoning old technologies. Almost as soon as the AppleIIGs was released, Apple had abandoned it and the Apple II platform for its new Macintosh systems. When Apple did this they abandoned the large majority of their customers. The early Macs were relatively expensive versus the bargin prices on Apple IIs, and a number of schools were deeply invested in the Apple II platform.
When Apple abandoned the II with the GS it was the start of the first major shift in the personal computer marketplace. A number of Apple customers felt gilted by Apple so they began to look for alternatives. Compared to the expensive Macintosh, the relatively cheap PC clone industry seemed like a huge bargin. It was at this moment that Microsoft really took control of the Operating System/platform market as a large portion of Apple's customer base abandoned the company and switched over to PC clones powered by Microsoft's Operating Systems. In truth, it has only been with Mac OS X and their Mactel platforms that Apple has truly succeeded in significantly expanding their marketshare since the AppleIIGS fiasco.
As I said, for an operating system and product that had such a profound impact on the future of Apple, I'm surprised to see so little mention of the AppleIIGS and GSOS.
Re:who cares? (Score:3, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Saturday February 05 2005, @03:50AM)
Too early for existential type questions. I think I need my coffee
Re:What a load of crap (Score:3, Funny)
(http://nekobox.org/)
NO YOU DON'T, YOU JUST WASTED YOUR TIME explaining, "This page is intentionally left blank" SO YOU HAVEN'T GIVEN UP!!!
Re:What a load of crap (Score:2)
Re:What a load of crap (Score:1, Offtopic)
(http://ettlz.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 12 2006, @06:53PM)
(damn Slash indentation destroyer) but I think they renormalised it.
Re:1680 page book? (Score:2)
(http://libtom.org/)
[hehehe yeah I am joking].
Chances are if your book is 1680 pages you should divide and conquer that sucker.
I mean I could write a book called "All there is to know about computers" and cover software, hardware, design, engineering, algorithms, etc, in one huge 32,618 page book. That doesn't make it a good idea.
Tom
Re:What a load of crap (Score:1)
(http://kadin.sdf-us.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 16, @01:46PM)
Re:Singh is an idiot - so many errors (Score:3, Informative)
Why is the parent poster getting modded up as informative? I'd trust Amit over what appears to be an obvious troll. I'd also trust the 6500 spec sheet and the original Apple manual that I managed to dig up.
For example, it says in the Spec sheet "Addressable memory range of up to 65K bytes", "On-the-chip clock options: Crystal time base input", etc:
6500 data sheet [6502.org]
"Microprocessor Clock Frequency: 1.023 MHz"
Apple I Manual [computerhistory.org]
etc.Re:Singh is an idiot - so many errors (Score:2, Informative)