Looking Back At OS X's Origins 312
DJRumpy writes "Macworld Weekly has an interesting look at the history of OS X from its early origins in 1985 under NeXT and the Mach Kernel to Rhapsody, to its current iteration as OS X. An interesting, quick read if anyone is curious about the timeline from Apple's shaky '90s to their current position in the market. There's also an interesting link at the bottom talking about the difference between the original beta and the release product that we see today."
ars technica on os x (Score:4, Informative)
Check out Ars' run down too: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2010/09/macos-x-beta.ars [arstechnica.com]
Re:ars technica on os x (Score:4, Interesting)
Other links might be of interest to the /. crowd too, like info on the hack that allowed Darwin or OS X (up to 10.4.x IIRC) to run on some older (PPC) hardware that didn't support it. It was an open-source utility called XPostFacto [macsales.com] With an Ultra-160 SCSI or ATA interface card for acceptable disk performance, an old 9600 worked surprisingly well. Having 12 RAM slots, a 9600 could hold up to 1.5 gig of RAM, which is pretty decent for something made in the 90s.
our motto... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:our motto... (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple in the early 90s was a terrible company with shitty, slow, bug-ridden products (maybe I'm biased - I owned a Performa 5200) and terrible customer service. It certainly didn't help that their share price was less than a loaf bread.
To understand how they got from 1996 to where they are today you need to remember that, flow of funds aside, it was actually NeXT that acquired Apple. Apple didn't pick up an operating system - NeXT acquired a hardware distribution channel.
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Ah this again.
Apple had over a billion in the bank when Microsoft paid them off.
Paid them off because Microsoft and Intel were caught stealing Quicktime code. Shortly afterwards Apple was able to spend billions they didn't have while not touching their balance, somehow. Then Microsoft publicly paid them the $150 million. Apple was not that close to dead, at that point. It's made for some great stories though.
The (annotated) story [roughlydrafted.com], if you're actually interested.
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Uh, he didn't. The company was close to bankruptcy when he took the reigns, and much of this happened after the announcement that Microsoft would put in $150 million. They also paid a farther, undisclosed sum which had quite a bit to do with legal battles, both patent infringement and stolen code.
Despite losing $850 million the year before, over a billion dollars in 1997--of which around 600 million was related to buying NeXT, and suffering a billion dollar drop in revenues between 1997-1998, Apple mysteriously managed to maintain its investments and actually accumulated cash.
It wasn't until 1998 that Apple began selling off its shares in ARM, and those sales took place over several years. Prior to that, how did Apple manage to spend nearly two billion dollars more than it earned across two years, lose 14% of its income, and still manage to sit on the same $1.2 billion in cash without pawning anything?
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NeXT. Thanks. (Score:3, Informative)
Thank you, editors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextstep [wikipedia.org]
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NeXTstep used a variety of cap options, NextSTEP......ah, the late 1980s-early 1990s!
What the article doesn't mention (Score:5, Interesting)
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What the article doesn't mention is Steves war on color in the Operating System
Maybe that's why he is always wearing those damn black turtlenecks.
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Would you rather have your OS X or iTunes look like this? While these colors make the Amiga desktop stand out from the black-and-white Mac or C64 GEOS of the day, it's also extremely garish:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/Amiga_Workbench_1_0.png [wikimedia.org]
(zoom 300% to recreate the old 14 inch look of Amiga)
Ick. Well at least it could do preemptive tasking.
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Actually for the day it was great.
It did have color and real multitasking. Back then UIs where very new. IT actually got better over time and you could customize it a lot.
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Once plain look of Workbench got good enough - from the setups I've seen it was almost "you could customize it too much" (yes, "in the eye of the beholder/owner/user, et al." - but I wonder how many people were put off by such creations during random demonstration)
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I don't customize anything. I just use the default of whatever's given to me (except Windows, when I switch to the classic style because it's faster).
On my Amiga 500 it still has that garish blue-orange look, overlaid with a File Manager that has all the CLI commands down the center and you just click them to issue the command (example copy df0:resume ram:resume). I often don't load Commodore's Workbench at all.
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On the other hand Workbench 2's color scheme is a lot like the current OSX: grey with blue highlights. Maybe that's why I like OSX so much, feel's like home.
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Maybe it's just a rationalization 20 years later for why Apple didn't adopt color graphics earlier.
Every Apple I've had, starting with the II+ has had color graphics.
Oops. (Score:5, Informative)
Wish I could delete my previsou. post
Re:Oops. (Score:4, Insightful)
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>>>Kinda sad the Apple IIgs had a Mac style GUI in color before the Mac did.
Kinda sad the lowly 8 bit Commodore had a color GUI before the 32-bit Mac did. The GEOS was black-and-white by default, but could be customized to any 16 color combo.
1985 - Atari ST / Commodore Amiga released with 32 and 4000 colors
1986 - C64 got GUI
1986 - Apple IIgs had 16 color GUI and an improved 6502 with 16 bits (65816)
I didn't see my first color Mac until my school installed a 68040 Quadra. 1994. Prior to that all
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Part of the reason for no color was Apple was still targeting business and wanted to be seen as a business machine, not a toy like the Apple ][ line. IMO, Apple made a HUGE mistake of going after the business market exclusively for a while (trying to go head-to-head with IBM) and pretty much pissing on their consumer market. I know several people that (claim) they will never buy another Apple product because of how Apple handled the GS.
Re:What the article doesn't mention (Score:5, Interesting)
Steve Jobs was fanatical about WYSIWYG on the Mac. Since there were few color printers available in the 80's, it was common knowledge that Jobs felt that color display violated his WYSIWYG philosophy.
The good old days when Desktop Publishing was the new technology...
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>>>Since there were few color printers available in the 80's, it was common knowledge that Jobs felt that color display violated his WYSIWYG philosophy.
Bad philosophy considering many of us were printing color documents using computers like Atari or Amiga or Commodore. The inability to do color on 80s Macs made them look inferior.
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While I agree that the Mac's inability to do color was a sorely missed feature. I don't think I would go so far as call the Mac inferior. I would say that the Mac was targeted toward the "serious" desktop publishing crowd. Especially since there was better publishing software on the Mac. While the Atari ST and the Amiga were targ
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>>>I don't think I would go so far as call the Mac inferior.
I would. And did. The only reason I switched to a Mac was because the better machines (Atari and Amiga) disappeared off the market. The Commodore Amiga could do all the desktop publishing a Mac could do PLUS produce movies (Aladdin) and TV shows (B5, seaquest, space A&B, etc) besides.
.
>>>I think Apple took IBM more seriously than the assorted home computers and as long as the average office had B/W printing, Jobs felt justi
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Maybe it's just a rationalization 20 years later for why Apple didn't adopt color graphics earlier.
Maybe it's just the realization that most software developers do a crappy enough job in black and white that giving them even more freedom to screw up in even more garish ways isn't that great of an idea. Really. You may hate Steve for this, but if it avoids a system looking like Microsoft Windows' Default - Blue Luna [wikipedia.org], it's worth it.
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What about the re-orientation of the close,min, max buttons? WTF do they think this is, Gnome?
Seriously, It's been close, min, max left to right since the beginning. Why the hell the change now?
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What about the re-orientation of the close,min, max buttons? WTF do they think this is, Gnome?
Seriously, It's been close, min, max left to right since the beginning. Why the hell the change now?
When you press the green +button, iTunes minimizes to the mini player [macgenie.co.uk], with that same vertical orientation.
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I actually would like to see "make everything greyscale" button and keyboard shortcut in taskbar/etc.; too often colors screams at the eyes for no good reason.
Maybe that's just because of how I usually used C64 - on a small B&W Soviet TV. It actually made things better IMHO; 16 levels of grey looks quite a bit more refined than 16 colors. Hundreds levels of grey does tend to look that way too, when compared with poor choice of colors (there's one moment when Blue Luna looks fine - when it displays OS sh
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You may hate Steve for this, but if it avoids a system looking like Microsoft Windows' Default
What? I hate the OS X look because it reminds me of that. But it is worse, with its scrollbars and progress bars that look like toothpaste, and window buttons so small they make me feel like I'm 82, half blind, and have arthritis trying to click them.
The user interface achieved perfection with the OS/2, Windows 95 look and feel.
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Steve is just making you realize how important color is by taking it away.
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You're just holding it wrong!
That's what she said!
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I think a good bit of it was to keep the cost down.
Remember that the Mac shipped with only 128k at first.
No expansion was offered.
And no that was not a lot of memory in 1984. The Apple III that shipped in 1980 had 128k expandable to 512k
The Commodore B machine "yes I know it was slightly less successful than the AppleIII" Shipped with 128K
The Apple IIc which shipped in 1984 also had 128 k.
So you had 8 bit machines shipping with 128k of ram years before the Mac did.
The Mac was supposed to be a "cheap" comput
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>>>Remember that the Mac shipped with only 128k at first.
That doesn't sound so bad. The first Amiga only had 256k and multitasked programs just fine. Mac only had to run one program at a time, so only needed half the space (IMHO). Also I think you're misremembering how much RAM computers came with. RAM was not exactly cheap back then - I spent $90 for a 512k upgrade in 1989. That was considered a bargain.
1979 - Atari had 48k
1980 - AppleII+ had 48k
1982 - C=64 has 64k
1983 - Apple IIe had 64k
198
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Aesthetically, a choice to de-emphasize the "ZOMG LOOKIT I GOTS SCROLLBARS AND TITLE BAR AND ICONZZZZ" in favor of letting the content in your apps themselves take center stage is not *necessarily* a bad thing.
If the "plumbing" of the OS & the window manager is overshadowing the content in the apps to the point of distracting users, I'd say that toning down the window manager is probably a reasonable decision from a design standpoint. I don't know if there's anything to indicate how the move towards mo
Re:What the article doesn't mention (Score:5, Insightful)
Colors in OS X are often muted because of people doing visual work. Many (if not all) of Apple's Pro apps use grayscale window controls and highlights regardless of what the rest of the system is configured to use.
Re:What the article doesn't mention (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple adopted color graphics way early. They weren't on the early Macs.
One problem was that color monitors of the time were typically bad. I tried using IBM EGA graphics once, and couldn't stand to use the screen longer than about five minutes. I have friends who used their Apple IIs with monochrome monitors.
Jobs wanted high quality in the Mac displays, and was perfectly willing to sacrifice color to do so.
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Ever since then each version removed more color from the themes and from their applications. Personally I think they went overboard with iTunes, but it may also be that they want everyone to adopt the gray icons in a list for other applications as well. Don'
flying cars (Score:2, Funny)
I don't want to be a whiner, but I don't understand what OS X fans are so lyrical about. OS X still has no option to make my car fly, nor does it allow me to play tennis outside in my iTennisCourt, and swim in my iSwimmingPool. Do OS X fans also go crazy over other office equipment, such as staplers or paperclips?
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You just have to know where to hold down the option key when clicking.
Find an old Mac SE at a thrift store, hit the debug switch on the side, and type in G 41D89A
Even if the hard drive is bad, it opens a portal to a parallel universe.
Blasphemy! (Score:5, Funny)
The REAL history of OS X...
And on the sixth day, Steve Jobs said, "Let there be OS X" and OS X was created, and it was good.
That's how it goes, right?
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And on the sixth day, Steve Jobs said, "Let there be White," and the porcelin white was created, and it was good.
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Actually it was the Xth day...
90's OS (Score:4, Insightful)
It is interesting to note that at that time MS also released their first real GUI OS, Windows NT. By 1996 MS has a credible OS, which remain useful until 2000, when XP became a reasonable successor. Like Mac OS 9, however, NT was not that consumer friendly.
In a world where the web has reached a point where social media consumption and creation is what most people do, neither Mac OS X or Windows 7 will be the solution. As much as pundits want to say that people spend their days typing reports, creating powerpoints, that is not what people to. They post to video blogs and watch videos and text. We will see machines that run Windows 7 for business, and Mac OS X for software development and creative content creation, but the that is going to be an increasing niche market. People will be buying iOS and Android devices, because these are going to let them do stuff for $300. An external keyboard and google docs will let them do anything they need for school. Windows Mobile is not going to do it. We have seen the succor to Mac OS X, and it is iOS.
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MacOS actually really, really sucked. NT had memory protection, MacOS didn't.
While NT wasn't exactly a "home" OS, it was used enough to make it pretty common if you knew to get it.
In the 90s, Mac was way and I mean way behind the curve.
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MacOS actually really, really sucked. NT had memory protection, MacOS didn't.
Even Windows 95 had memory protection. Wasn't quite as good as NT in other ways, but it was definitely a home OS.
Re:90's OS (Score:4, Informative)
Then what would you say about an OS which:
- was \textsc{unix}
- supported the initial versions of http
- was used to develop a graphical web browser and editor named worldwideweb.app[1]
NeXTstep, available in 1989
William
1 - _Weaving the Web_ by Sir Tim Berners-Lee --- http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/Overview.html [w3.org]
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You said:
> Well, the WWW didn't exist in 1989
I didn't say it did, but that NeXTstep was available in 1989, and hence in the 90s. From:
http://info.cern.ch/ [info.cern.ch]
``CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is where it all began in March 1989....When they settled on a name in May 1990, it was the WorldWideWeb.''
William
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Bill Gates thought the internet was going to be run by MSN and AOL.
In everything but name, Gates was right.
Mostly AOL, though.
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NT before 2000 was hardly a 'useful' OS. It was Windows, but with an extremely limited set of available software since most things that worked in 95 or 3.x that weren't extremely simple wouldn't work right in NT, if at all. It was buggy
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Actually, PowerPC is based on IBM's POWER platform, and the AIM (Apple IBM Motorola) Alliance was formed to basically try to create a RISC alternative to Intel CISC processors.
Motorola (now Freescale) has not dumped PowerPC; it is still alive and well in the embedded market where Intel has no credible entries (PPC's main competition in that space are various flavors of ARM). The main issue was Freescale's (and IBM's, to an extent) inability to show a roadmap for a much lower power/higher-performance follow-
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Wasn't it only the G5, at the end of Apple's PPC run, that was based on the POWER platform? My understanding is that the G3/G4 weren't POWER-based.
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Re:90's OS (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm firmly in Apple's lap today, and have been using Macs at work and elsewhere for many years, but I couldn't stand the original Mac OS.
On a technological level, I also think it was far behind the competition in terms of memory protection, cooperative multitasking, etc.
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Er, not sure why my last message was posted anonymous but the "STRONGLY disagree" post below was me.
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With the exception of some of the brain-dead System 7.5 patches, the classic Mac OS was indistinguishable from OS/2 or WinNT as far as multitasking and stability went.
No it wasn't, not even close. You could bring a Mac to a dead halt simply by holding open a menu, and you'd be lucky to get a few days out of it without a bomb screen.
NT - and even OS/2 - would happily do things like burn CDs (at a blistering 4x) and play games simultaneously, with other stuff like a browser and email client ticking away i
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I don't think I would agree with your assertion.
Absolutely agree that in the very early 90s Mac OS was superior to the DOS/win31 combo. Moving past them, don't forget that even Win95 had preemptive multitasking. Multitasking is--and was--a big deal. Remember hearing the disk grind and not being able to switch applications? Remember copying a file to the network or a disk and not being able to do anything but wait for it to finish?
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That depends on what you mean the competition. It was quite comparable to the Windows 95/98 OSes technically, but was technically far inferior to NT.
Windows 3.1 would be a much more accurate comparison. Co-operative multitasking, no memory protection, static disk cache, etc. Windows 9x was essentially a generation ahead of MacOS, NT another generation again.
Re:90's OS (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd disagree. The two best UIs from the early '90s were from NeXTStep and IRIX [1]. NeXTStep was very usable, although a bit funky to get used to with the command bar and such. However, it was one of the few workstation OSes that was also a very well thought out OS for daily desktop use. Hardware wise, the NeXT was expensive, but the cube was well made, and the printer did a decent 400 DPI, which was great for its time.
Come the mid 90s, Windows 95 was actually a decent improvement, but the NeXT dock is still one of the UI concepts that is still common even now.
[1]: Technically, the IRIX 4Dwm window manager. For eye candy, it couldn't be beaten at the time (and this was before CDE came out, and waaay before the KDE/GNOME initatives.)
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>>>In the 90's, all OS sucked. Networking and the internet made them look old. Mac OS still sucked less...
Man do I disagree with that statement. The best operating system was Amiga OS, since it was the only one that could do preemptive tasking, enabling people to run multiple programs at the same time (but without bringing down the whole system if one crashed). Mac OS was a close second. GEOS on C=64 a close third.
And then came Windows which sucked worse than DOS or CLI.
As for processors, well
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Sorry, but you're wrong!
There was a kernel, it was called nuKernel. The boot ROM was used to launch the machine and provide the hardware information. You could replace the Finder with any other app and make the computer boot and work, but the System file was necessary for anything to function.
For the WaitNextEvent thing, what you describe is cooperative multitasking in an OS without memory protection.
Oh.. and DOS was an OS too...
There was no NeXTstep 4.2 (Score:5, Informative)
It was OPENSTEP 4.2 --- which Apple actually sold for a time, along w/ providing free Y2K patches and free upgrades to NeXTstep 3.3 or OPENSTEP 4.2 to license holders of earlier versions.
Amusing rumour is that ``Yellow Box'' was so named because Bill Gates, when asked if he'd develop for NeXT stated, ``Develop for it? I'll piss on it.''
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/14/gates_says_jobs_saved_apple/ [theregister.co.uk]
As nice as Mac OS X is though, I'd still rather have NeXTstep:
- Display PostScript
- built-in PANTONE colour library
- vertical, movable menu bar w/ tear off menus and pop-up menus
- top-level Print, Hide, Quit and Services menu
- TeX provided by default and supported by the nifty TeXview.app
- inspector-provided sort options for Miller-column filebrowser view
- re-sizeable Shelf which can store multiple file selections as a single icon
- nifty apps which made use of Services and Display PostScript like beYAP.app, Altsys Virtuoso, poste.app &c.
William
Re:Best. Gates Quote. Ever. (Score:5, Informative)
You're buying into Bill Gates' bullshit. Apple didn't "steal" anything; they had an agreement with Xerox. Many of the guys who worked on the Mac were hired from Xerox.
Several conventions originated at Apple, such as the "File Edit View Window Help" menu or the phrase "cut and paste." Lisa was already in development when Apple visited Xerox to see what they were working on, so while they were influenced by what they saw, it wasn't an inspiration to go in some whole new direction.
Much of this is detailed at Herztfeld's site [folklore.org], including sketches and screenshots of their GUI work.
Re:Best. Gates Quote. Ever. (Score:4, Informative)
Apple did not steal the GUI from Xerox [obamapacman.com]. They got to tour PARC with permission from Xerox's upper management and compensated Xerox with pre-IPO shares. What the Mac did with the ideas from PARC [folklore.org] was very different from what Xerox did with the ideas out of PARC. This is also very different from Microsoft sending an employee to copy [mackido.com] implementation details from Apple. Do go waving some out of context quote around without knowing the actual history of the situation.
Re:Best. Gates Quote. Ever. (Score:4, Informative)
An article about the history of the OS (Score:4, Interesting)
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otoh screenshots are relatively easy to come by (hitting Wiki is often enough); then there's also one thing which gives pretty good idea [debian.net], for the curious.
NeXT computer emulator? (Score:3, Interesting)
The last time I checked, there still was no way to kick around the really old original 68k versions of NeXTSTEP other than buying a NeXT machine and its optical media off of eBay. I wish somebody would write NeXT emulator that emulated the original 68k machines. The x86 version is interesting and all, but the 68k version is where it all started.
I guess people only bother emulating platforms that have lots of games.
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I guess people only bother emulating platforms that have lots of games.
Is there something about IBM mainframes [wikipedia.org] the greybeards aren't telling us? ;)
Jobs reality distortion field (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, Apple used NeXT because they had to buy the worthless company for $400 million, bailing out Jobs' personal net worth, to get Jobs back.
Apple's in-house OS, MacOS 8, made it to first developer release before Jobs killed it. This is not what Apple eventually released as "MacOS 8"; that was a warmed-over System 7. The real MacOS 8 was a completely new kernel, with protected memory and a CPU dispatcher, both of which the original MacOS lacked. (Deep down, the original MacOS was like DOS - no mem
Re:Jobs reality distortion field (Score:4, Informative)
Copland wasn't going anywhere so Apple decided to cut their losses.
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Well, Hank, I was the guy who wrote the report at Apple that recommended we buy NeXT. It was a simple choice, really, between Be and NeXTStep. [slashdot.org]
He says NeXTStep was their best option. Is he full of shit or are you?
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Apple's in-house OS, MacOS 8, made it to first developer release before Jobs killed it. This is not what Apple eventually released as "MacOS 8"; that was a warmed-over System 7. The real MacOS 8 was a completely new kernel, with protected memory and a CPU dispatcher, both of which the original MacOS lacked.
As others have pointed out, Jobs didn't kill Copland (the OS you're referring to). Apple's pre-Jobs executive team of Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock did. As of about the time when that developer release was "released" (only to device driver developers because it was too dysfunctional for anybody working at a higher level, and actually too dysfunctional even to do device driver development on, but they had missed so many deadlines there was a lot of pressure to release something), Amelio and Hancock were con
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early origins (Score:2)
I imagine it started out something like this:
#include nextstep.h
int main(argc, char *argv[]) //TODO: Insert OS here
{
}
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try.c:1:10: error: #include expects "FILENAME" or <FILENAME>
try.c:3: error: expected ')' before 'char'
From TFA... (Score:2)
Huh. I wonder what happened to it? Because "worked quite well" is not a phrase I would use to describe Mail.app in any version of OSX that I've used (that is, Tiger and above).
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I particularly like its creative take on counting unread messages...
No mention of BSD (Score:2)
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That would be more of a history of NextSTEP, which is where the BSD stuff was originally pulled in. There's this misconception that modern OS X is more or less a clone of one or more BSDs, but that is not the case.
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I'm not suggesting it's a clone, but that BSD is a link in the chain. Even if farther back than NextSTEP, is it not a part of "the origins"?
On a subjective level, I've never been extremely comfortable doing technical support in a purely graphical environment. Having little hands-on experience with OS X, I sometimes struggle to locate a feature or setting that I know must be there. If I drop into a Terminal session, however, things appear somewhat familiar. At this level, the Unix heritage of OS X seems appa
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Well, OS X is a Unix, so it's no surprise it feels familiar. Agreed about NextSTEP, although didn't the article mention it derived from "Unix"? I can't recall if it did or not. For most readers, the distinction between just saying "Unix" and "BSD" is probably irrelevant.
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The article mentioned NextSTEP's "Unix underpinnings" several times, actually. The typical reader of that article doesn't care about the distinction between BSD and System V - just saying Unix is informative enough.
BeOS (Score:4, Interesting)
Left out of that history is the branch that almost happened: for quite a while the smart money was that Apple would buy Be, Inc. and use BeOS [wikipedia.org] as the basis for their future OSes. More than a few developers (myself included [wikipedia.org]) based their business models on this happening.
BeOS was fairly amazing (Score:3, Insightful)
I am an unabashed Jean-Louis Gassee fan, having used Macs back in the 1980s and at the time wondered why they didn't allow me to use expansion cards like an Apple //, or even expand the memory (early 128K/512K Macs made that rather difficult!).
When BeOS came out, I was fairly thrilled at the idea, but had no idea how to get my hands on a Be box. A few years later, I got to see BeOS on an Intel box.
I was at first somewhat nonplussed, because this was a 160mhz 486dx2 style nightmare machine... but the BeOS ma
Mac Plus to iMac (Score:3, Interesting)
The first Mac I ever played with was a Mac Plus, circa 1986. When I found myself in the market for a computer of my own shortly afterwards I looked at a Mac, but didn't end up buying one. Silly me. My girlfriend at the time needed to buy a computer for her company, and when she saw how blown away I was by an Amiga, she figured if I was impressed by it it had to be good, and that's what she bought. I played with a NeXT cube and was impressed by it, but couldn't begin to even think about buying one. I sent my resume to NeXT and got a nice letter back, but no interview.
Fast-forward to 1995 and I'm doing Mac development, System 7, in the transition from 68k to Power PC. My development box was a Quadra 650 with a PowerPC daughter board, so I could boot and run it either way. Our first PowerPC compiler didn't support fat binaries, but I had no difficulty figuring out how to use ResEdit to paste in CODE resources from 68k executables to make my own fat binaries. I had fun tracking down some memory management issues, the usual crash when switching back to your app in MultiFinder. Am I showing my age or what?
A couple of years ago I saw a Mac Mini in a store, thought it was cute (always a good reason to buy a computer!), played with it a bit, was impressed, and bought one. After a couple of years I bought an iMac, which is my current home computer. At work I have all the Linux and Solaris boxes I want, plus an XP box to read email on, but the computer I spend my own money on at home is a Mac.
...laura, long time Mac enthusiast and fangirl
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Double click the resize knob at the bottom of the column, it will size itself to fit all file names in.
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The only thing I really miss from Windows is the File Explorer. Finder works, but its horizontal scrolling mode, where the view is never as wide as the filenames, is really annoying.
You can do a "New Finder Window" in OS X. There might be something similar in Windows, but I haven't found it. Of course I'm still on XP, so ...
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Re:Finder (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the worst part of Finder is not being able to navigate it with just the keyboard. Why in the world is the "return" key mapped to "rename file/folder"?
Because it's not Windows. Ever since the original Macintosh (before Windows came along) the return key renamed a file. It was Windows that changed the meaning of the return key. To open a file under Mac OS you use command-o. That's "o" as in "open".
Why would anyone assume that return means open? If anything return would mean close, after all it ends a line when you are typing. You learned that return equals open because that's how Windows defined the action, not because it's an intrinsic meaning. Under the Mac OS Finder return means "toggle editing the name", another defined action which at least makes a little sense since return ends the editing just like return on a typewriter ends the current line.
It makes more sense to have to use a key combo rather than a single key to perform an action which will likely bring you from the Finder to another program. That way it's harder to accidentally hit a key and have 50 windows open up because you had the contents of an entire folder selected. If you hit return with a bunch of selected items in the Mac Finder then nothing happens. It's a ton better than having to deal with the mess of open windows you'll get in Windows.
You're used to hitting return to open something because you are used to Windows, take some time with Mac OS and you'll find that opening a file with command-o is just as natural as using return. It's all what you are used to.
Also, you can completely operate the Finder using only the keyboard. In fact, you can operate nearly every aspect of a Mac using only the keyboard. Much of it can be done using keyboard shortcuts built-in to the Finder, however if you want to use some menus, controls, and such using only the keyboard you may have to use the "Universal Access" System Preference Panel to enable some additional keyboard and mouse navigation. If you want to see the keyboard navigation shortcuts then just go to the "Keyboard" System Preference Panel, there's tons of useful shortcuts in there.
Re:Finder (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would anyone assume that return means open?
Because it had meant "take whatever I wrote, execute it and show me the results" for decades before Macs, and "take whatever I selected, and try to show it to me" is the closest analogue in the graphical world.
Under the Mac OS Finder return means "toggle editing the name", another defined action which at least makes a little sense since return ends the editing just like return on a typewriter ends the current line.
Oh no, it really doesn't. The logical jump from "end current line" to "edit selected item's name" is far too large to call it "[making] a little sense", larger still than the aforementioned "execute" -> "open" one which also has the benefit of being an analogy to another kind of computer rather than a whole different (and very much dead and forgotten) class of machines.
Sorry, but as much as it may pain some of the Apple crowd around here, Microsoft *did* actually go with the saner choice here.
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The logical jump from "end current line" to "edit selected item's name" is far too large to call it "[making] a little sense", larger still than the aforementioned "execute" -> "open" one which also has the benefit of being an analogy to another kind of computer rather than a whole different (and very much dead and forgotten) class of machines.
At the time of the Macintosh introduction the typewriter was hardly dead and forgotten, in fact it was still the primary document creation tool for the majority of people and one on which they had been trained their entire lives. Keyboard entry on computers was still a newfangled thing that few people had experience with. For these people the return key meant "end/begin a line to type on", not "execute a sequence of commands". Remember that the intention of the Macintosh and its GUI was to introduce these p
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The one thing that can't be done with keyboard and that drives me insane is switching to the non-default option in Yes/No boxes. Neither arrow keys, nor Tab works.
System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts, at the bottom you'll see Full Keyboard Access, select All Controls
You can also hit control-F7 to toggle it without going into System Preferences.
Now tab to the button you want to activate (click) and hit the space bar to activate the button. You can also shift-tab to move backwards in the tab order, which helps because usually the rightmost button is the default active one.
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When did Ubuntu announce a new release?