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A History of Apple's Operating Systems
Posted by
michael
on Fri Mar 05, 2004 08:07 PM
from the where-they-went-wrong dept.
from the where-they-went-wrong dept.
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'."
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apple //e - DOS 3.3 (Score:5, Informative)
CB
Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Parent
Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 (Score:4, Funny)
Hideous, but awesome.
Parent
Apple II Emu (Score:5, Informative)
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
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.)
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Re:apple //e - DOS 3.3 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Powerstack (Score:5, Funny)
tcd004
Pity about the os9 GUI (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Any iteration of the Mac OS, of course, is better-looking than anything that's ever come out of Redmond.
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Re:Pity about the os9 GUI (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Funny, I feel the opposite (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Pity about the os9 GUI (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Pity about the os9 GUI (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Mistakes in OS X v OS 9? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
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Re:Pity about the os9 GUI (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Pity about the os9 GUI (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
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Apple operating systems (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Apple operating systems (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Apple operating systems (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Apple operating systems (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Apple operating systems (Score:4, Insightful)
Hello, Memmaker anyone?
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Re:Apple operating systems (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Apple operating systems (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Funny story, true story (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Plagiarism (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Plagiarism (Score:5, Funny)
"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."
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Newton OS (Score:4, Insightful)
Synopsis of history (Score:4, Insightful)
Steve, is that you? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Mostly Wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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System 7 was a fun ride (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
nothing special until OS X (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
You latecomer. You poser. You'll never be part of the club. NEVER!
Resentfully yours,
The Mac Elite
Parent
Re:nothing special until OS X (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:nothing special until OS X (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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.
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Mac OS 2 (Score:5, Interesting)
That was cool. But... (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.. (Score:5, Funny)
And you all thought Microsoft was the evil company.
NeXT (Score:4, Informative)
I miss (Score:4, Interesting)
The Lisa was a better machine than the Mac (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Damn I thought I was old school (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:MkLinux (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:MkLinux (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:MkLinux (Score:5, Interesting)
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screenshots (Score:5, Interesting)
Yellow box on XP [kernelthread.com]
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Re:What about a hist. of the visual interface desi (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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