liam_on_linux | Entries tagged with next

The story of why A/UX existed is simple but also strangely sad, IMHO.

Apple wanted to sell to the US military, who are a huge purchaser. At that time, the US military had a policy that they would not purchase any computers which were not POSIX compliant – i.e. they had to run some form of UNIX.

So, Apple did a UNIX for Macs. But Apple being what they are, they did it right – meaning they integrated MacOS into their Unix: it had a Mac GUI, making it the most visually-appealing UNIX of its time by far, and it could network with MacOSs and run (some) MacOS apps.

It was a superb piece of work, technically, but it was a box-ticking exercise: it allowed the military to buy Macs, but in fact, most of them ran MacOS and Mac apps.

For a while, the US Army hosted its web presence on classic MacOS. It wasn't super stable, but it was virtually unhackable: there is no shell to access remotely, however good your 'sploit. There's nothing there.

The irony and the sad thing is that A/UX never got ported to PowerPC. This is at least partly because of the way PowerPC MacOS was done: MacOS was still mostly 68K code and the whole OS ran under an emulator in a nanokernel running underneath it. This would have made A/UX-style interoperability, between a PowerPC-native A/UX and 68K-native MacOS, basically impossible without entirely rewriting MacOS in PowerPC code.

But around the same time that the last release of A/UX came out (3.1.1 in 1995), Apple was frantically scrabbling around for a new, next-gen OS to compete with Win95. If AU/X had run on then-modern – i.e. PowerPC- and PCI-based – Macs by that time, it would have been an obvious candidate. But it didn't and it couldn't.

So Apple spent a lot of time flailing around with Copland and Gershwin and Taligent and OpenDoc, wasted a lot of money, and in the end merged with NeXT.

The irony is that in today's world, spoiled with excellent development tools, everyone has forgotten that late-1980s and early-to-mid 1990s dev tools were awful: 1970s text-mode tools for writing graphical apps.

Apple acquired NeXT because it needed an OS, but what clinched the deal was the development tools (and the return of Jobs, of course.) NeXT had industry-leading dev tools. Doom was written on NeXTs. The WWW was written on NeXTs.

Apple had OS choices – modernise A/UX, or buy BeOS, or buy NeXT, or get bought and move to Solaris or something – but nobody else had Objective-C and Interface Builder, or the NeXT/Sun foundation classes, or anything like them.

The meta-irony being that if Apple had adapted A/UX, or failing that, had acquired Be for BeOS, it would be long dead by now, just a fading memory for middle-aged graphical designers. Without the dev tools, they'd never have got all the existing Mac developers on board, and never got all the cool new apps – no matter how snazzy the OS.

And we'd all be using Vista point 3 by now, and discussing how bad it was on Blackberries and clones...

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: DI.FM

(Adapted from a Quora answer.)

OS/2 1.x was a clean-sweep, largely legacy-free OS with only limited backwards compatibility with DOS.

OS/2 2.x and later used VMs to do the hard stuff of DOS emulation, because they ran on a chip with hardware-assisted DOS VMs: the 80386’s Virtual86 mode.

NeXTstep was a Unix. It predated FreeBSD, but it was based off the same codebase: BSD 4 Unix. It “only” contained a new display layer, and that itself was based off existing code — Adobe PostScript — and the then-relatively-new technique of object-oriented development. Still substantial achievements, but again, built on existing code, and with no requirement for backwards compatibility.

BeOS was a ground-up new OS which wasn’t backwards or sideways compatible with anything else at all.

NT is based on OS/2 3.x, the planned CPU-independent portable version, with a lot of design concepts from DEC VMS incorporated, because it had the same lead architect, Dave Cutler. Again, the core NT OS isn’t compatible with anything else. This is rarely understood. NT is not a Win32-compatible kernel. NT isn’t compatible with anything else, including VMS. It’s something new. But NT supports personalities, which are like emulation layers running on top of the kernel. When NT shipped, it included 3: OS/2, POSIX and Win32. OS/2 is deprecated now, POSIX has developed into the Linux subsystem, and Win32 is still there, now in 64-bit form.

The point is, none of these OSes were enhanced versions of anything else, and none were constrained by compatibility with existing drivers, extensions, applications, or anything else.

Apple tried to do something much, much harder. It tried to create a successor OS to a single-user, single-tasking (later cooperatively-multitasking, and not very well), OS for the 68000 (not something with hardware memory protection, like the 68030 or 68040), which would introduce those new features: pre-emptive multitasking, virtual memory, memory protection, integrated standards-based networking, etc.

All while retaining the existing base of applications, which weren’t written or designed or planned for any of this. No apps == no market == no use.

Apple took on a far harder project than anyone else, and arguably, with less experience. And the base hardware wasn’t ready for the notion of virtual machines yet.

It’s a great shame it failed, and the company came relatively close — it did have a working prototype.

It’s often said that Apple didn’t take over NeXT, nor did it merge with NeXT — in many important ways, NeXT took over Apple. Most Apple OS developers and project managers left, and were replaced by the NeXT team.

The NeXT management discarded Copland, most Apple technologies — OpenDoc, OpenTransport, GameSprockets, basically everything except QuickTime. It took some very brave, sweeping moves. It took the existing MacOS classic APIs, which weren’t really planned or designed, they just evolved over nearly 1½ decades — and cut out everything that wouldn’t work on a clean, modern, memory-managed, multitasking OS. The resulting cut-down, cleaned-up API was called “Carbon”. This was presented to developers as what they had to target if they wanted their apps to run on the new OS.

Alternatively, they could target the existing, far cleaner and richer NeXT API, now called “Cocoa”.

The NeXT team made no real attempt to be compatible with classic MacOS. Instead, it just ran all of classic MacOS inside a VM — by the timeframe that the new OS was targeting, machines would be high-enough spec to support a complete classic MacOS environment in a window on top of the Unix-based NeXTstep, now rebadged as “Mac OS X”. If you wanted your app to run outside the VM, you had to rebuild for “Carbon”. Carbon apps could run on both late versions of classic MacOS and on OS X.

This is comparable to what NT did: it offered a safe subset of the Win32 APIs inside a “personality” on top of NT, and DOS VMs with most of Win16.

It was a brave move. It’s impressive that it worked so well. It was a fairly desperate, last-ditch attempt to save the company and the platform, and it’s easier to make big, brave decisions when your back is against the wall and there are no alternatives... especially if the mistakes that got you into that corner were made by somebody else.

A lot of old Apple developers left in disgust. People who had put years of work into entire subsystems and APIs that had been thrown in the trash. Some 3rd party developers weren’t very happy, either — but at least there was a good path forwards now.

In hindsight, it’s clear that Apple did have an alternative. It had a rich, relatively modern OS, upon the basis of which it could have moved forwards: A/UX. This was Apple’s Unix for 680x0, basically done as a side project to satisfy a tick-box for US military procurement, which required Unix compatibility. A/UX was very impressive for its time — 1988, before Windows 3.0. It could run both Unix apps and classic MacOS ones, and put a friendly face on Unix, which was pretty ugly in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

But A/UX was never ported to the newer PowerPC Macs.

On the other hand, the NeXT deal got back Steve Jobs. NeXTstep also had world-beating developer tools, which A/UX did not. Nor did BeOS, the other external alternative that Gil Amelio-era Apple considered.

No Jobs, no NeXT dev tools, and no Apple today.

Current Location: 6music

I recently read that a friend of mine claimed that "Both the iPhone and iPod were copied from other manufacturers, to a large extent."

This is a risible claim, AFAICS.

There were pocket MP3 jukeboxes before the iPod. I still own one. They were fairly tragic efforts.

There were smartphones before the iPhone. I still have at least one of them, too. Again, really tragic from a human-computer interaction point of view.

AIUI, the iPhone originated internally as a shrunk-down tablet. The tablet originated from a personal comment from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs that although tablets were a great idea, people simply didn’t want tablets because Microsoft had made them and they didn’t sell.
( Read more... )

Jobs’ response was that the Microsoft ones didn’t sell because they were no good, not because people didn’t want tablets. In particular, Jobs stated that using a stylus was a bad idea. (This is also a pointer was to why he cancelled the Newton. And guess what? I've got one of them, too.)

Gates, naturally, contested this, and Jobs started an internal project to prove him wrong: a stylus-free finger-operated slim light tablet. However, when it was getting to prototype form, he allegedly realised, with remarkable prescience, that the market wasn’t ready yet, and that people needed a first step — a smaller, lighter, simpler, pocketable device, based on the finger-operated tablet.

Looking for a role or function for such a device, the company came up with the idea of a smartphone.

Smartphones certainly existed, but they were a geek toy, nothing more.

Apple was bold enough to make a move that would kill its most profitable line — the iPod — with a new product. Few would be so bold.

I can’t think of any other company that would have been bold enough to invent the iPhone. We might have got to devices as capable as modern smartphones and tablets, but I suspect they’d have still been festooned in buttons and a lot clumsier to use.

It’s the GUI story again. Xerox sponsored the invention and original development but didn’t know WTF to do with it. Contrary to the popular history, it did productise it, but as a vastly expensive specialist tool. It took Apple to make it the standard method of HCI, and it took Apple two goes and many years. The Lisa was still too fancy and expensive, and the original Mac too cut-down and too small and compromised.

The many rivals’ efforts were, in hindsight, almost embarrassingly bad. IBM’s TopView was a pioneering GUI and it was rubbish. Windows 1 and 2 were rubbish. OS/2 1.x was rubbish, and to be honest, OS/2 2.x was the pre-iPhone smartphone of GUI OSes: very capable, but horribly complex and fiddly.

Actually, arguably — and demonstrably, from the Atari ST market — DR GEM was a far better GUI than Windows 1 or 2. GEM was a rip-off of the Mac; the PC version got sued and crippled as a result, so blatant was it. It took MS over a decade to learn from the Mac (and GEM) and produce the first version of Windows with a GUI good enough to rival the Mac’s, while being different enough not to get sued: Windows 95.

Now, 2 decades later, everyone’s GUI borrows from Win95. Linux is still struggling to move on from Win95-like desktops, and even Mac OS X, based on a product which inspired Win95, borrows some elements from the Win95 GUI.

Everyone copies MS, and MS copies Apple. Apple takes bleeding-edge tech and turns geek toys into products that the masses actually want to buy.

Microsoft’s success is founded on the IBM PC, and that was IBM’s response to the Apple ][.

Apple has been doing this consistently for about 40 years. It often takes it 2 or 3 goes, but it does.

First time: 8-bit home micros (the Apple ][, an improved version of a DIY kit.)

Second time: GUIs (first the Lisa, then the Mac).

Third time: USB (on the iMac, arguably the first general-purpose PC designed and sold for Internet access as its primary function).

Fourth time: digital music players (the iPod wasn’t even the first with a hard disk).

Fifth time: desktop Unix (OS X, based on NeXTstep).

Sixth time: smartphones (based on what became the iPad, remember).

Seventh time: tablets (the iPad, actually progenitor of the iPhone rather than the other way round).

Yes, there are too many Mac fans, and they’re often under-informed. But there are also far to many Microsoft apologists, and too many Linux ones, too.

I use an Apple desktop, partly because with a desktop, I can choose my own keyboard and pointing device. I hate modern Apple ones.

I don’t use Apple laptops or phones. I’ve owned multiple examples of both. I prefer the rivals.

My whole career has been largely propelled by Microsoft products. I still use some, although my laptops run Linux, which I much prefer.

I am not a fanboy of any of them, but sadly, anyone who expresses fondness or admiration for anything Apple will be inevitably branded as one by the Anti-Apple fanboys, whose ardent advocacy is just as strong and just as irrational.

As will this.