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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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Apple ][ (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite how far we've come, there are time I really miss my old Apple ][.
Re:Apple ][ (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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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.
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Re:Apple ][ (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Apple ][ (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Apple ][ (Score:3, Interesting)
She is unfortunately now experiencing dementia, and the loom with its interface was donated to an artists' school in North Carolina about three years ago. The company that manufactured it is still thriving--it is called AVL, and the loom is called the CompuDobby. I believe they got their start making large looms for manufacturing processes. Hers was, I suppose, a medium-sized loom, though it occupied almost an entire room in her house. It wasn't an artsy-craftsy thing but a serious piece of work. The Apple
Not as good as the Beeb though (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re:Apple ][ (Score:2)
Re:Apple ][ (Score:2)
At least some Amigas came with them as well, I think at least all the OCS Amigas, but I only had a manual for my A500. I'm pretty sure A1000 and A2000 also came with schematics.
Re:Apple ][ (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Apple ][ (Score:5, Insightful)
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>
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Re:Apple ][ (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Apple ][ (Score:2)
In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Funny)
Uh, wait.
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Those were the days... (Score:2, Interesting)
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]Re:Those were the days... (Score:2)
One wonders just what the ratio of CommentsBitchingAboutTheSig(bytes) to Sig(bytes) is like.
The test in parentheses would be subscript, but slashdot doesn't allow it. I can have sup, but not sub?
Re:Those were the days... (Score:3, Informative)
Sigs get the rel="nofollow" attribute added to them, as do all posts. (Check it out: view the source for this link, and see the rel="nofollow" added. [google.com]) There's one exception: posts posted with the +1 Karma Bonus. Posts made with the Karma Bonus do NOT include rel="nofollow". Go ahead, check out the source of gasmonso's comment [slashdot.org]: no rel="nofollow" because
Amit's Book (Score:5, Interesting)
First, the Earth cooled. (Score:4, Funny)
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)
Anybody feel like digging? :)
Re:Archeological dig (Score:5, Insightful)
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1680-page book ? (Score:3, Funny)
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)
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:What I want to know is (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:What I want to know is (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What I want to know is (Score:5, Informative)
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I did (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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That's not Memory Protection (Score:3, Informative)
Technically, that's not memory protection, but memory consumption. Memory protection protects the address space of each application from other applications, so applications can't overwrite other application's memory data.
Prior to Mac OS X, all Mac applications shared one common memory space, which had the advantage that hacking was simple, but had the disadvantage that one rogue application could crash everything, or even worse, change other applications' data without anyone noticing.
Re:I did (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a rather misleading description, though. More accurately:
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Re:I did (Score:3, Insightful)
So your personal mantra would be "crashing is better than telling me if there's a memory problem"?
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.
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Re:I did (Score:3, Insightful)
Or reboot, because even though you might have had enough available free memory to run an application, it might not have been enough contiguous free memory.
Re:I did (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I did (Score:2)
Exactly. Graphical file managers _never_ got better than the one in Mac OS 9. In fact, they've gone downhill from there (OSX's is a piece of shit). I use the command-line instead of a graphical file manager now (and have since I quit using Mac OS 9 in 1999ish), just because it's easier, faster and better than any graphical file manager.
Re:I did (Score:2)
I tend to agree. The spatial Finder was a great idea. I like the addition of the NeXT-style browser in Mac OS X, but unfortunately, the new Finder really feels like Frankenstein's Monster, taking parts from everywhere without properly integrating them.
I use Mac OS X's Finder, and it's better than Windows or Nautilus, but there's still a huge amount of work to be done.
Re:I did (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Re:What I want to know is (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:What I want to know is (Score:3, Interesting)
I did I. I wis I could of used it more often(the lack of apps was the thing i missed)
IM members appear in tracker as files. Contacts got stored in such a way that you could search through them with the same program that you used to locate files, or documents. BeOS could display multiple movies at the same time back when running one with quicktime or real could slow down a box.
It's taken literally a decade for OS X and Windows to catch up and they still lag behind
Re:What I want to know is (Score:4, Informative)
- 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.
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Hating Macs (Score:2)
You hated a specific brand of personal computers, yet you think Mac users were the ones smoking something?
What did those poor Macs do to you? Steal your lolly when you were in kindergarden?
Re:who cares? (Score:3, Funny)
Too early for existential type questions. I think I need my coffee
Learn concepts, not imlementations (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why you should always learn concepts instead of implementations. Concepts remain useful and can be used to judge new implementations, while implementations always go away eventually.
Re:What a load of crap (Score:3, Funny)
NO YOU DON'T, YOU JUST WASTED YOUR TIME explaining, "This page is intentionally left blank" SO YOU HAVEN'T GIVEN UP!!!
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: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."
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