Emulate Mac OS 9 with QEMU

It took a long time for Mac developers to really buy into Cocoa, many of them saw it as a less-capable version of existing APIs rather than the future of Mac development. That viewpoint wasn’t entirely without reason, at first, but the longer you spent with Cocoa, the more clear it became that Carbon was a second-class citizen.

My other thought is that Apple didn’t just want tech, but the experience to develop it. That’s why acquisitions were at the top of the list. Apple has certainly bought a few other companies just to access their engineering talent.

They probably looked at projects like FreeBSD at the time (1997-2000 era) and decided that too much time would be required to re-implement what they wanted to do, vs buying NeXT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0

Unix licensing costs almost definitely.

A/UX was forked from UNIX System V Release 2.2, with "additional features from System V Releases 3 and 4 and BSD versions 4.2 and 4.3". It also had a TCP/IP stack, since before MacTCP (if I recall correctly).

I don't have any direct knowledge of Apple's licensing issues with AT&T, but I worked for SCO in the early 90s, back when it was a UNIX OEM, not a litigation zombie.

AT&T licensing fees for UNIX back in the late 80s/early 90s were fiendish; that's the whole reason for the ascendancy of Linux today. (Linus couldn't afford his own Intel UNIX shrinkwrap, so he began rolling his own kernel.) I heard a ballpark figure that SCO paid out $200 in royalties every time they sold a copy of Open Desktop 3.0, which included royalties on SVR3.2, a third-party TCP/IP stack, X11 (which was free), and OSF Motif (which wasn't) and IXI's X Desktop (the desktop and utility apps build with Motif/X11). This drove the price of a copy of ODT 3 up to the $1000-2000 mark depending on trim. SCO also paid royalties to Microsoft every time we sold the developer tools, because SCO had inherited the MS C compiler by way of their Xenix license in the late 80s, and SCO SVR3.2 was built using MS C.

The AU/X "additional" features from SVR 3 and SVR 4 was probably the result of a similar process to SCO's cloning of SVR4 features in the early 90s. SCO's UNIX license only covered SVR3.2. AT&T jacked their license prices for SVR 4 so much that going to true SRV 4 would have drastically raised the price of Open Desktop. It worked out cheaper to assign a couple of hundred developers to work for 3-4 years at cloning SVR 4.3 (needed to hit the standards compliance checkboxes required by customers), while keeping the AT&T SVR3.2 copyright declarations in the header files (and on the box).

My guess would be that Apple hit the same wall that SCO hit after 1995; AT&T licenses were too expensive and cloning features and bolting them on top of an ancient code base was also becoming expensive. (As I remember it, SCO bought a license for SVR 4.3 in the end and switched to that, some time in the mid-to-late 90s, too late to dodge the bullet of Linux gobbling up the Intel/Posix world.)

Feature wise Word 2.0 is miles ahead of gdocs. In fact I'd rather use office 95 than the bloatware that came after it.

My general expectation is that dragging and dropping is a great way to discover an easier way to do something on a Mac, at least if you have a mouse and not a trackpad. I can drag a file into a terminal and get its full path, with escapes as appropriate. I can drag a folder into a “save” dialogue box and the dialogue box will move to that folder. I can drag an application off the Dock and remove it.

My general experience on Windows is that if you try dragging and dropping something, it may perform some kind of action, and it may be consistent about how it performs that action, but it is rarely the action I want to perform. Drag a file into a save dialogue? Obviously, I wanted to move that file into the folder that the save box was browsing!

My general experience on Linux is that drag and drop is utterly broken and will never work so I might as well give up. Even copy and paste is hell on Linux.