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Comment by nxobject | Hacker News Reader

The history section is depressing: a whole conga line of promised collaborations and technologies that Apple seems to have promised, and then completely dropped the ball on. (Even apart from the famous crash-and-burns of Copland and OpenDoc, don't forget A/UX 4.0! A/UX and AIX on PowerOpen! Mac OS 7 on DR-DOS! Netware on PPC Macs! Mac OS on the ANS! Okay, wait, MAE on AIX on the ANS! Whoops, no SMP on the ANS! Okay, now we're shipping Mac OS, A/UX, and NT on ANS!)

It puts contemporary Apple's NIH complex in context.

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The huge list of projects from that era of Apple really shows how aimless they were.

I remember at the time how more and more irrelevant they seemed compared to the Wintel behemoth, and that really didn’t start to turn around until the G3 iMac, and later the iPod.

>The huge list of projects from that era of Apple really shows how aimless they were.

Most of those projects involved active collaboration with other companies who were similarly aimless, so Apple was by no means alone in their aimlessness.

It's truly wild just how much time, effort, and money the various companies spent smelling each others' farts back in the 90s.

The era was one of fits & starts, mainly because the basic things which could be done were done already, & pretty well — word processors, spreadsheets, databases, page design, software which fit needs, was powerful enough, & wasn't too buggy to use. The long hardware stall of the 80s (think about how the 6502 lasted, basically the same, for well over a decade, & how IBM was still selling an 8086 machine in '87) forced software makers to focus on quality products. What wasn't there yet, even with the improvements through the 90s, was enough grunt in the hardware to do the things that were significantly past those basics, & so there was a lot of "let's try this, let's try that" throwing things at the wall. There were great ideas, & shots at getting them right — contemporary interfaces still look sad beside NeXTSTEP, & the Newton wasn't approaching what it was supposed to be until near when it was axed. Companies don't just want to do bug fixes & incremental improvements; they want their customers to be excited about something, & the 90s churn had a lot to do with keeping people interested & invested.

> It's truly wild just how much time, effort, and money the various companies spent smelling each others' farts back in the 90s.

I wouldn't say they stopped doing it in the 90s, personally.

I guess you can also draw similarities to the MS/IBM joint venture that was OS/2, but that actually released products - even if MS dumped it for NT.

Oh, OS/2 Warp was fine. I even had it as my default OS for a while back then.

Team OS/2 Baby! I still wish I had the salmon polo from the Warp comdex push.

MS/IBM joint venture failed through Windows 3.0, which in turn apparently was kickstarted by one person in the company.

Yes, if I am not mistaken, this is one of the books that tells which person was it.

"Undocumented Windows: A Programmers Guide to Reserved Microsoft Windows Api Functions (The Andrew Schulman Programming Series/Book and Disk"

https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/0201608340

Pity as SOM was much better alternative than COM, and OS/2 in general.

However that wasn't the only issue that nailed OS/2's destiny, higher hardware resources and lack of proper management direction from IBM side also played a big role.

> The huge list of projects from that era of Apple really shows how aimless they were.

so there is still hope for google?

but if we take Apple as a guide, this means one of the original founders either gets back in "the game" or they won't be able to use Apple as a guide

It takes a long time and a lot of wrong doing to bankrupt humongous companies.

Especially when the humongous company has a major profitable division.

Google probably can't goof off forever on the back of Search and adwords; but it can for quite a while.

And clearly a leadership/partnering-driven madness. They had the answer all along: A/UX, a MacOS UX on a Unix base, gave them what they wanted to get to (modern memory management, stability, multi-user security with a MacOS AI), and what they'd end up buying with NeXT.

Instead at the time I was working at an Apple reseller and we were treated to hugely over-optimisic promises for MacOS 8 that included a Microkernel that could run Windows apps alongside MacOS applications.

> Mac OS 7 on DR-DOS!

Seriously?

I believe it is a reference to the infamous Star Trek project. I did not know of the Digital Research connection, but it sounds like it was another one of those collaborations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

The funny thing is, the industry knew that collaboration would be necessary back then, but it took open source models for it to become effective. (I guess direct business to business agreements made competitors to dependent upon each other.)

(author) Yes, exactly. Star Trek got a lot of heat at the time for being a bad idea and at the time it probably would have been a real strategic blunder (Spindler was right to kill it IMHO), but it really worked, and Marklar ended up being analogously the same thing.

The biggest problem with Star Trek was that it didn't run existing Mac software, and you couldn't emulate the 68k ISA reasonably on x86 at the time. The key piece of Mac OS X on Intel a decade later was translation software for PowerPC binaries, so that your existing software still worked.

I've always hoped that, since it was actually demoed, a copy still exists somewhere in the wild – even if it'll only boot the Finder...

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