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Comment by stahi | Hacker News Reader

Nostalgia reminds me of this: https://lowendmac.com/2014/next-openstep-and-the-triumphant-...

Amelio and the rest of his senior staff began searching for a way out. They needed a new operating system to buoy their attempts to compete with the Wintel juggernaut. The same search had taken place several times before, but now the company was desperate.

Limited Options Ultimately the list of possible targets was narrowed down to five options:

License Windows NT from Microsoft and bolt a Mac-like interface onto it. License Solaris from Sun and bolt a Mac-like interface onto it. Narrow the focus of the flagging Copland project and release it in a year and a half. Acquire Be and use BeOS. Acquire NeXT and use OpenStep.

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Next's APIs were also ported to run on top of Windows NT and Sun's Solaris.

In addition, the entire NextStep OS ran bare metal on several CPU architectures.

> originally ran only on NeXT's Motorola 68k-based workstations and that was then ported to run on 32-bit Intel x86-based "IBM-compatible" personal computers, PA-RISC-based workstations from Hewlett-Packard, and SPARC-based workstations from Sun Microsystems.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep

Yep, I used to run Apple's (maybe it was still NeXT at the time?) Mail app on Windows NT, I can't recall where I got it, maybe it was part of some goodies included with WebObjects?

Yes. WebObjects development was possible on NT due to “YellowBox”. It shipped with ProjectBuilder, EOModler, Mail, and other NeXT apps.

You could even do Objective-C monkeypatching shennigans on YellowBox, which I remember being needed at the time to get the scroll wheels on certain mice to work on YellowBox apps.

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F7...

The YellowBox would have been such a great target. They kept it around for iTunes on Windows and I suspect they still use some version of it.

It were those ports to Sun's Solaris, that influenced Java's design and later on Java EE as well.

What I'd give for a glimpse of the timeline where Apple bought Be instead of NeXT.

Apple would have died.

I love BeOS.

I love BeOS more than you.

I love BeOS more than Jean-Louis Gassée.

BeOS wasn't ready. I was there I used BeOS as my daily driver on a maxxed-out Power Macintosh 6400. I have, today, that machine still running BeOS. I also have a second dual-PII running BeOS.

BeOS wasn't ready.

Apple was making a decision in 1996 for a deal that had to be struck and struck fast (1997). I started using BeOS in 1997 with one of the first Power Macintosh releases.

Those days (my days) it wasn't ready-- you had to pile patch on top of patch on top of community fix on top of some set of drivers some dude in Boise made in order to get things functional. I spent more time browsing BeOS listservs and download sites fixing things (at 56k) than using it.

Everyone is remembering fondly the R4.5/R5 days in late 1999. Three years after the December 1996 announcement of the NeXT acquisition. By then BeOS was... better. It was running on PCs and had a much larger user community. In 1996/7? Just a handful of BeBox owners and Mac users dumb enough (me) to try it.

Management would have been professionally negligent to choose it over NeXTStep.

In 1996, when Apple was up against the wall, NeXTStep was almost ten years old. All they had to do was buy the company, port it to PPC, and change some copyright messages and icons around. Took about two years.

BeOS would have required way more time, money, and expertise.

BeOS had no multi-user, no security (at all), an "aspirational" level of posix compliance, drivers that were a disaster, a network stack specifically designed to frustrate you, and no "companies that actually matter and no Gobe doesn't count" application support.

I get it. It was pretty. It was fast. French electro DJs loved it because it was low latency, and some audio tools were ported to it.

A userbase of French electro DJs doesn't pay the bills.

The C++ API bound forever to the gcc 2.95 ABI IIRC was also an "interesting" choice. Sure with success they would certainly have engineered a way forward, out of necessity, but if I would have had to give my opinion about that for Apple at the time...

The Haiku project folks worked out ABI compatibility for newer GCC releases. Current builds of Haiku support binary backwards compatibility with the 2.95 ABI while also supporting newer GCC ABIs at the same time. So at least we know it is (and would have been) possible.

I have a spare machine to do some offline work on running Haiku OS, the open source successor to BeOS. Even today it simultaneously feels 20 years ahead and 20 years behind.

Good example, the interface is incredibly snappy but no Wifi. I love the vision of BeOS but it probably would have been the death of Apple if they had gone with it.

Haiku does support WLAN adapters (even USB ones), through the support isn't as extensive as Linux or the BSDs. You might want to use the current nightly builds instead of the latest beta version, though, which was released in December 2022.

https://hardware.besly.de/index.php?hardware=Wireless_Networ... https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/support-for-realtek-usb-wifi-...

I agree both with @snakeyjake and with @faefox.

I'd love to see what Apple would have done... but at the same time I fear very much it would have killed Apple.

BeOS was amazing, but its dev tools were nothing special while NeXT's were state of the art, industry-beating. That means no way to win Mac developers over to the new OS.

BeOS was as insecure as Classic MacOS, so no way to crack the server market (not that that worked) and no way to build nice locked-down little gadgets like iPhones.

And while Be had JLG, a very smart cookie, NeXT had Jobs, who had more vision in a day than JLG in a year.

Me, I wish a disappointed Be had done a deal with Acorn and ported to Arm.

Arms in the hundreds-of-MHz range were there and gigahertz-class was coming soon. Acorn had prototype multi-processor machines. Be had the best SMP support in the business in the late 1990s.

They could have reskinned BeOS to look more RISC OS like, run RO in a VM like OS X ran Classic in a VM, and offered both the thinnest lightest Web-capable laptops in the world, and compellingly-priced multiprocessor desktop workstations that didn't need a dozen cooling fans and could have gone to 4-way or even 8-way at an affordable price, which x86 and PowerPC chips could not touch.

i think you missed the greater point. apple with beos would not have turned Enterprise dead end that it is today.

that market was what jobs had to pivot to (there's a great video where he pushes the rationalization of going to academia and Enterprise workstations) so that next could survive. and it infected apple from the inside.

the timeline everyone missed with beos is exactly apple not becoming the mix of ibm and Microsoft it is today.

Everyone also forgets that JLG was a horrible manager and his decision to keep Macs obscenely high priced was what ultimately almost killed Mac.

And Steve Jobs as the founder of Apple had a political capital than JLG would have ever had.

While I know that the measly $250 million that Microsoft invested in Apple didn’t “save it”, only SJ could make peace with MS (only Nixon could go to China) and make the tough choices.

Founders are given a lot more leeway to make huge changes than any other manager.

While I LOVE LOVE LOVED BeOS. It resonated with me and it was a great experience...it wasn't multiuser and didn't have some stuff that I forget, but seemed necessary for a system to have long-term success. But mam did it cut out the cruft and wring out ALL of the HP of the hardware of the time.

Why was multiuser so important? Apple’s most successful operating system in the Jobs 2.0 era isn’t multiuser either.

BeOS would have been a fine foundation for smartphones and tablets. But of course it’s an open question whether Apple could have got that far in the 2000s without the return of Jobs. I suspect the company would have been acquired or merged with some unsuitable suitor like Sun.

It allows applications to run in different priviledge contexts and allows you inherit privilidges on a network, off the top of my head.

Unless you _want_ your solitare game have the ability to enumerate your contacts and send mail.

macOS and iOS use a completely different mechanism to ensure a game doesn’t read my contacts or make network requests. It has nothing to do with Unix-style users.

They could have built that on top of BeOS just as well as on NextStep.

Unix permissions will allow you do to that perfectly fine.

> Why was multiuser so important?

Because computing devices, and access to them, was not so ubiquitous back then. Families all had to share a single computer. Business users had to share access to large servers. There were no smartphones. Some had to travel to an educational setting just to see or use a computer.

Multi-user would have likely been bolted on one way or another at some point, as had happened when other OSes gained fundamental new features.

Was any operating system actually able to go from single-user to multi-user so easily? Windows NT and OS X were totally rewritten from the ground up relative to their single-user predecessors Windows 9x and classic Mac OS.

yea, a big one. Once there was an intentionally multi-user-from-ground-up OS called "Multics". Dude named ken thompson or dennis ritchie or something worked on it but was like "bro, so bloated". So dude writes a DISK BENCHMARKING system, single user, called it "Unix" as if to castrate multics. The original unix was disk benchmarking, barebones. So we know how that moved into multi-user

source: kernighans readingbook, "unix a memoir" or something like that, great read

I'm not sure how much that really counts. According to [1], the time that Unix spent as a single-user operating system was intentionally very short-lived. Even the earliest version of the operating system that can be reconstructed today had multiple logins and processes, though only one could be active at a time. It seems that, by the time Unix was written in C, ported to multiple architectures, and spreading outside of Bell Labs, it was already multi-user.

[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/10908

NT had no predecessor (at least from Microsoft; architecturally it's predecessor would be VMS). It was ground-up multi-user. Mac OS [Classic] was not OS X's predecessor, either -- it was NeXTStep.

You are right on the technical lineage, but I was referring to how these products were (ultimately) presented commercially. The facts that they are both older than one might think and they were developed with specific goals from the start I think more clearly illustrate that you can't just "bolt on" such fundamental differences.

NT is closer to a mainframe OS than 9x and it came out in the win3 era

Yeah, I actually used NT 3.51 for some time. However it was the NT line that replaced the 9x line, at least from the consumer perspective.

I agree that iOS isn’t multi-user in any real, like, multiple user accounts intended to be used by real people sense.

I wonder, though, it is based on MacOS somehow, right? Which is based on BSD. Could there be some left over multi-user plumbing sticking around in a technical sense?

Yes, iOS still uses users in the technical "Unix" sense, they're just not mapped to actual physical users, but instead to various services.

Android is in a similar boat. They're still an important way to manage filesystem access of programs.

Android isn't in a similar boat, AOSP has full isolated Multi-User support that is realized through Unix users. You can create new users through Settings and they have their own home screen, apps and files.

Most vendors have this enabled now and things like work accounts/MDM use the same system.

https://source.android.com/docs/devices/admin/multi-user

iOS barely uses that. Processes commonly run as “mobile” or “root”, but it does not matter very much. POSIX users and access permissions are archaic, and, in my opinion, don’t match with how almost any device is being used nowadays. iOS implements its own concepts through entitlements, containers, vaults, sandboxes etc. (Look up the “Apple Platform Security Guide” for details.)

> Shared iPad security in iPadOS

> [...] User data is partitioned into separate directories, each in their own data protection domains and protected by both UNIX permissions and sandboxing.

POSIX users are quite important.

Yeah, it basically doesn't use UNIX permissions at all.

In the very early public slides announcing the iPhone, I believe Jobs referred to iOS as "Mac OS X".

Heh, funny you mention that, considering Be's pivot to BeIA. Some Be engineers also worked on the (unreleased) Palm OS Cobalt, and eventually, Android. (And then Fuschia, but I don't think that OS will ever hit smartphones.)

Many moons ago I read that Apple came super close to buying Be, but Jean-Louis Gassée wanted to much money and negotiations fell apart.

I reckon it was the star power of Jobs more than the OS as such that saved Apple in the late 90s.

Jobs' ability to do the deal with MS to get MS Office on the Mac and a cash injection of $150m saved Apple at the time.

We were well into the 2000s before OSX really began to make a difference to Apple's fortunes, and no one could have predicted that OSX would be the foundation for the iPhone OS.

It wasnt even a given that OSX would be the OS for the iPhone during development.

But absolutly, NeXT was the best choice, even if the OSX Beta and 10.0 were almost unusably slow and buggy!

I was at the Paris Mac Expo when Jobs launched the beta, and the excitement was amazing!

Same year as the Key Lime iBooks IIRC. They rose up our of the floor on a pedastal if I'm remembering it right LOL.

I worked at Apple in the 90s, and saw all the demos of early releases of OSX and the confusing stack of platforms and tools. Jobs did the right thing ditching that!

Finally, I remember being at the Mac Expo in London and BE was there. We were standing around admiring the cool light bars on the front of the Be Box and its multitasking abilities.

If I'm remenbering right the lights on the front went up and down to indicate CPU usage. I could be imagining that?

Someone correct me if I'm misremembering :-)

The $150 million had nothing to do with saving Apple. They had already secured a billion dollar line of credit and besides, the same quarter Apple spent $100 million to buy out PowerComputings Mac assets and license.

It was years before Apple became profitable and the $50 million was a drop in the bucket

I suspect that without Jobs, Apple is dead by 2002. Turned into an arm of, like, RIM. Then Google comes out with the Android phone and it's all over for everyone including Microsoft.

I suspect if Apple and NeXT never "merged", the phone market would be RIM vs (a very different) Android, but we'd be worse off.

Blackberries were OK at the time, but my god RIM was so culturally conservative and Google at the time had no design sense that we'd probably be 10 years behind where we are now - and if we even had software keyboards they'd be terrible.

Outside US, it would keep being all about J2ME, Symbian, Windows CE/Pocket PC, Bada OS.

Which keep being forgotten, in these kind of discussions.

RIP PalmOS you died before your time. Best mobile gaming OS I've used and ran for a week on some AA batteries

Nokia would still be around

They probably would still be the #1 phone manufacturer, still making terrible Symbian phones with terrible developer support. I was working for Nokia (and a shareholder) on their future phones c. 2004-2005 and it was horrible all the way down. Apple deserved to eat everyone's lunch.

Hard to argue with that. Still remember a co-intern telling me "Steve Jobs returned to Apple!" and just shrugging.

HTC G1 the original Android phone, was basically another sidekick. We’d have this shitty Android and WinMo for a decade longer and eventually things would get good.

The slate form factor was already being explored by other manufacturers before the iPhone came out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Microsoft had been doing it since 2000 but never made it cool. Here's one from 2004:

https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/03/review_hp_ipaq_6340/

I had one since 2000 as a daily driver and I loved the thing, but the app library was horrible.

The funny thing is, iPhone launched with no support for 3rd party apps. It took damned near a year for the first apps to arrive.

Sure, but unlike the iPhone, that thing was an unbelievable piece of shit.

It's not hard to extrapolate that something would have entered the market. I assume it would only have been a couple of years later.

Assuming Apple would still be successful, and not close shop.

It would have settled C++ as the main systems language on desktop OSes, between Windows, and Mac Be OS.

Objective-C would have died, and Swift would never come to be.

Clang and LLVM probably would never had gotten Apple's sponsorship.

POSIX would have died on the desktop, as Be OS like other non UNIX OSes wasn't that keen in being UNIX like.

There wouldn't be a flock of Linux and BSD developers rushing out to buy Apple hardware, instead of sponsoring OEMs shipping PCs with those distributons.

As someone who loved BeOS at the time, past discussion here on HN leads to believe that Apple's adoption of it would have had some real challenges.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062

I can’t think of a better acqui-hire than NeXT + Steve Jobs

You mean when NeXT bought Apple and forced Apple to finance the deal.

A.K.A. that time when Steve Jobs acqui-hired Apple.

Apple looked at it as an acquisition, while NeXT looked at it as a merger.

NeXT didn’t buy Apple obviously, but Steve Jobs and his lieutenants took over the most important positions within Apple.

Which made sense given the situation Apple found itself in.

For sure, it was pretty clearly the right call at the time and objectively so with the benefit of hindsight. But BeOS was just too good to be allowed (forced, really) to die on the vine the way that it did.

No need for hindsight. BeOS is still alive. A Haiku for you.

We kind of live in an alternate to that alternative reality.

A lot (most?) of Be engineers ended up at a company called Danger, which was bought by Google a few years later, and they all went on to be the original core team of Android. Some BeOS technologies even ended up in Android such as its Binder, which from memory the Be engineer working on it open sourced it just before Palm bought Be, and then he used the same code in Android.

Some other company would release the iPhone then!

Right innit? It's not just Apple using BeOS but wondering how everything else would be different. You actually need to... think different at this point, aye?

I have read these kind of stories many times but I'm starting to realize how much the relative engineering success of MacOS 8 and 9 is overlooked with the now "classic" storytelling centered around Jobs and his comeback. Mac OS 10 was not really usable until 10.1 in 2001, yet the iMac, iBook and PowerBook G3 were successes, so the OS obviously played a role, but reading these stories it's kind of absent.

My memories are surely tainted by nostalgia because 1997-2001 I was a teen and avid Mac user but from what I remember between the mid-90s Performa on 7.5 and late 90s iMac on 9 it felt like a lot happened. While not the future, as an end user 8.6/9 felt relatively modern, especially compared to Windows 95/98. And even in the mid-90s even if from a business POV the future was bleak for Apple from an end user one 7.5 was not really worst than 95.

I'd argue that OS X (to use the nomenclature of the time) 10.0 was alpha quality software, and even 10.1 was at best what we now would consider beta software. OS X was not usable until 10.2 (and that's when many major software such as Photoshop and even Apple's own Final Cut Pro received their first native OS X port), but even 10.2 didn't reach feature partiy with classic MacOS. It wasn't until 10.3 Tiger that you could safely recommend to friends and family to upgrade to OS X.

Tiger was 10.4

They did end up releasing salvageable bits and pieces of Copland as Mac OS 8.

Similar story to Cairo with Microsoft [0].

Both visionary, both only partial successes.

WinFS :-(

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)

I think of it as a time when people became so entranced with the idea of the emerging object-oriented zeitgeist that they imagined that making things OO and component driven would just hand-wave towards success. People rushed to make infrastructure to support this model, and, well, it was no magic bullet. Complexity, fragility, and a lot of hard work remained.

the thing I'd like to see is for software to expose functional/"rest"-like interfaces. similar with websites and the content/user data.

if you look at what accessibility software achieves by simply looking at the screen/hooking into the OS, now imagine any and all software could be connected like that.

some of this functionality is now provided in individual silos, e.g. an email with an appointment in gmail can go into your Google calendar. a ticket from your train company can be added to Google wallet.

but if you look at a flight booking system and want to compare the total price of a given set of dates for travel, including hotel and other things at different times - you're back to doing it on paper (or use somebody's website where 20% of the flights or hotels you want aren't included).

> the thing I'd like to see is for software to expose functional/"rest"-like interfaces. similar with websites and the content/user data.

You mean, COM?

ActiveX is raising its arm through the soil

Office is probably the largest consumer-facing application to use COM today. It's honestly a great technology -- which came from the Cairo project.

> if you look at what accessibility software achieves by simply looking at the screen/hooking into the OS

Unfortunately that's kind of a pipe dream... in the real world, the first organization to flagrantly violate the OS vendor's human interface guidelines is the OS vendor itself, who ships some application with custom-schmustom, owner-drawn widgets that cannot be queried according to the standard OS APIs for querying them for content. So the accessibility software literally has to OCR the screen to determine what's written in the text fields and buttons.

Source: Knew a guy who worked on Dragon NaturallySpeaking, he had some war stories.

> now imagine any and all software could be connected like that.

As other commenters mentioned, there's COM, but that's a hairball to code for and a hairball to configure. The nicest systems that worked that way historically were the Lisp machine and Smalltalk environments, but the closest day-to-day software is probably Emacs. Everything in Emacs really can be connected together through the power of text buffers and Lisp. Objective-C is Smalltalk semantics retrofitted onto C, and originally NEXTSTEP, later macOS, really was a promising environment for this sort of integration... but in recent years Apple has been so focused on "apps" that it's doubtful they can keep supporting that vision.

You would have enjoyed AREXX IPC on the Amiga.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx

Isn't that the SmallTalk model, but everyone decided to use C++ instead?

Not everyone, IBM OS/2 SOM had support for Smalltalk, C and C++.

Smalltalk was OS/2's .NET, so to speak.

Unfortunately it all died alongside OS/2, followed by IBM's pivot to Java.

Java on the AS/400 is the weirdest thing. The whole platform was designed to be compile once to near assembly and then run cached byte code or whatever. Java is just too late compilation is clunky in comparison imo.

I believe Tribes 2 did something similar just at a higher level

TIMI is compiled at installation time usually, the bytecode format is used only as portable executable format.

While initially Java on AS/400 did take advantage of TIMI, IBM eventually moved away from it, into regular JVM design on now IBM i.

Most likely because IBM z doesn't use TIMI, rather language environments, and they want a more straight design, or due to Java dynamic capabilities using TIMI wasn't the best approach.

On AS/400 (IBM i), only Metal C, and the underlying kernel/firmware, written in a mix of PL.8, Modula-2 and C++, are pure native code.

It's funny how cancelled projects are somehow making people almost more "nostalgic" than projects that actually shipped. One of the reason may be that cancelled projects don't need to be completed, to ship with a reasonably good quality, to have an easy to use interface, to be sustainable for a long enough period of time, etc.

I rather see a reason that many such cancelled projects had very elegant architectures/structures, which is something that hackers love.

If you want to ship a product so that it becomes commercially successful, you often have to "deeply taint" this clear vision to make the product compatible with the multitude of very inelegant (industry) standards that customers expect/require.

Thus the nostalgia is not about shipping vs not shipping, but about keeping an elegant vision or be willing to taint it to be compatible with a "depraved" world.

Right. Most cancelled projects are beautifully architected and discount tons of installed products with all their decades of cruft.

Then you start trying to bring the New Thing(r) into the Real World(tm) and there are 5000 edge cases the original project dealt with in a 42-page if/else block for 270 different OEM patches that were sold by some JV team in another building who have never written a line of code in their lives.

"Brother, it's edge cases all the way down" - Alan Tuna Turing

There's a concept in political theory about why people become nostalgic for lost causes, failed movements, etc - kind of a backwards looking utopianism?

If only we had done X, if only this group had succeeded instead of failed in the past... I do agree that it's a way to avoid looking at the actual implementations and details of a real thing, and just go to what might have been directly.

I saw Copland at MacWorld Expo Boston at Apple’s booth. It kernel panicked. We didn’t get to use it.

But wow do I remember how exciting it was the first time I read about it in MacUser magazine. Basically some GUI mockups and promises of cool under-the-hood improvements, possibly the first time I was excited about future computing. Thank goodness they bought NeXT instead. They had no ability to manage projects at scale at the time.

Too bad TimApple has no sense of how to do anything other than chase growth; we need another product person at the helm. Oh well.

I'm tired of hearing "Tim Apple's Apple Can't Engineer".

VisionOS has some of the most incredible, coolest engineering I've seen in a long time, from top to bottom. Even if you're not interested in AR/VR, the writeups and sessions about the dual processor OS layout they've used, the scene and room graphing technology they've built, and the challenges of building ultra low latency pass through scene reconstruction and mapping are incredible.

Vision Pro might honestly be one of the technically coolest things built in the last 10 years, and I really hope they get the price down and fix some of the UX (weight, battery, etc), because it is something I use every day (and in fact, am writing this post on right now). It's for sure a Beta/DevKit/etc, and I wouldn't recommend the casual person to buy one, but again, on engineering chops alone, it is a masterpiece.

> and I really hope they get the price down

Very much agreed. I get why it’s expensive and I’m no stranger to the apple tax (and usually don’t mind it all that much), but I got the email today that it’s now available in Canada and $5k for a headset is… steep.

For what it's worth, the entry level PowerBook 100 in 1991, when adjusted for inflation, cost about $5500 USD. An entry level iBook in 2003 would cost about $2700 USD.

Yeah, it's expensive, but it's also astonishing how much prices have come down.

We don’t even have to adjust for inflation. I (well my parents) paid $4000 dollars for a Mac LCII with a //e card, a crappy 12 inch monitor, a LaserWriter LS printer, a 5-1/4 drive for the //e card and SoftPC. It had 10MB RAM

It's so easy for people to look at the dollar figure for something they bought in the 80s or 90s and not account for inflation and make a pithy comment, but when you back-calculate the actual price my parents paid for some things, it blows my mind how cheap technology is now.

$5500 for an entry level laptop! You can get an M2 MacBook for $800 today, and I couldn't even begin to describe how much more tech is inside that thing for 20% of the price.

Hey you could have got the PowerBook G3 Lombard mentioned in the OP instead for $5k. pretty lucky you can get a magic headset instead eh

> one of the technically coolest things built in the last 10 years

Sadly, that is a low bar to clear.

I honestly don’t believe that’s true, tbh.

Apart from the LLM bot "AI" toys, what significant new technological advances can you point to in the decade from 2014-2024?

Offhand I can't think of a single thing.

Between 1994 and 2004 we went from Windows 3.x and Classic MacOS, to OS X and WinXP.

Linux went from being a toy to a serious viable OS.

Before: 16-bit OSes with some 32-bit parts, all resolutely single-CPU, many primarily based around cooperative multitasking with no real memory protection, and mainly proprietary networking.

After: pure 32-bit OSes, with proper preemptive multitasking and hardware memory protection, capable of SMP on multiprocessor systems, with TCP/IP based networking.

From 2004-2014 the industry moved from mainly single-CPU 32-bit machines to multi-core 64-bit machines everywhere, with UIs rendered through hardware 3D, and a heavy reliance on Web protocols for almost all network functionality. A much smoother transition but that was because of the big changes in the previous decade.

Linux went from being a nerd tool to a usable mainstream OS that was rapidly taking over the server market. Smartphones went from toys to maintstream. Chromebooks arrived in 2011, and Linux started to become a consumer OS.

Since 2014... er... containers everywhere on servers? Electron apps proliferating? That's about all that springs to mind.

"Too bad TimApple has no sense of how to do anything other than chase growth …" I feel like this is more emblematic of the wider industry trend than Apple's own strategy that they chose to impose on us.

The focus shifted very hard over the past 15-20 years from selling people new and novel gadgets and software to turning us ordinary folks into "monthly active users." Personal computing got a lot less personal, and Apple leaned into it to stay relevant.

> License Windows NT from Microsoft and bolt a Mac-like interface onto it.

Gosh, am I glad that that didn't happen. I wonder how serious of an option that really was, it seems wildly out of place compared to the other propositions, which are all reasonable.

Apple bolted Carbon APIs onto NeXTSTEP/Mach, and Microsoft bolted the OS/2 Presentation Manager onto NT (https://virtuallyfun.com/2021/05/19/presentation-manager-for...), so I'm not sure why bolting Carbon onto NT would be unreasonable.

IIRC from reading Showstopper, NT was intended to afford that sort of different frontend swapping. It just happened that Windows became the primary focus in the end.

It might have been necessary to stick with the NT 3.51 codebase. I think they broke the clean separation of the GUI from the rest of the OS in 4.0, which was launched that year, for performance reasons.

Google for Mac OS X Server 1.0 screenshots... the UI was a bizarre mashup of classic Mac OS and NeXTSTEP, you can see they were part way through bolting a Mac-like interface on.

When Mac OS X was eventually released it looked utterly different.

Why was A/UX not in the running, it was already written? Just add some polish.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX

A/UX was still a licensed version of Unix. This post says the licensing fee was $1,000 per seat.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Apple_AUX/comments/11wks6i/what_was...

I remember the AT&T / BSD lawsuit in 1992. Maybe Apple looked at NeXTSTEP and since it is based on the Mach microkernel and BSD that they would be able to fix the 10 or so files to avoid the AT&T / Unix System Labs licensing fees like Free/NetBSD did.

In the 1980's Microsoft had their own port of Unix named Xenix. Why didn't they push this instead of the very limited MS-DOS?

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-xenix

> In March of 1982, Western Electric reduced the royalty fees that it charged for UNIX with the introduction of UNIX System III (a combination of UNIX V7 and PWD). This was done by raising the source license cost, but lowering the royalty per user license to $100 (about $318 in 2023) from $250. This meant that Microsoft’s prepayment of $200000 in 1980 (around $700k in 2023) for a discount in volume was voided if they wished to use the newer system. That same month, on the 10th, Paul Allen held a seminar in NYC where he outlined plans for MS-DOS 2.0.

> Why didn't they push this instead of the very limited MS-DOS?

Hardware requirements.

For a (quite long) while the plan was to keep DOS for microcomputers and Xenix for the serious stuff. DOS gained some extensions that made it very Xenix/UNIX-like (like subdirectories, pipes, "-" as command line switch char, device files in "\dev" instead of a global namespace, etc.).

I think for the time period, hobbyists can't be written off either. My dad got into Commodore and Atari in the late 70's/early 80's, and sparked my interest in software. Computing already wasn't cheap, but if the home consumer needed to pay for extra licensing fees, I could easily see adoption being far more limited to business. I think a lot of developers, myself included, got their start as hobbyists and never would have caught the "itch" to develop if for not this early exposure at home.

While MSDOS had subdirectories, pipes were not supported at the kernel level. It was simply a convenience of COMMAND.COM that simulated pipes by running each command sequentially. The command switch character was the slash (/) until the end, with the exception of a few non-standard third-party softwares insisting on the dash. Device names were always global namespace and \dev never existed in any form.

Did you copy-paste an hallucinating LLM?

The features were never turned on by default, so they are not popular knowledge (I used DOS since 2.x and never knew).

https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/comment/171783/#Comm... (devices in \dev, "-" as switch char, etc.).

> While MSDOS had subdirectories, pipes were not supported at the kernel level. It was simply a convenience of COMMAND.COM that simulated pipes by running each command sequentially.

You are confusing the lack of concurrency with lack of pipes -- the mere fact that COMMAND can do what you describe requires UNIX-like pipes and channels (e.g. stdin/out/err), and programs avoiding direct console I/O (way common for DOS programs...). Comm software such as Kermit did the same thing to simulate remote login (I used this one in the day, at least).

No, it looks fair.

MS-DOS 1.x did not have subdirectories.

That came in with MS-DOS 2.x which is when the very rudimentary level of Xenix compatibility came in: device names such as `LPT1:` or `COM2:` could be prefixed as `/dev/lpt1` or `/dev/com2`. Pipes simulated in COMMAND.COM.

I don't recall DOS ever accepting command switches prefixed with `-` instead of `\` as standard, though.

Hmm I remember switches always had to begin with “/“ in DOS

Yep, that must have been it. Porting it to BSD might have been more work and opened them up for a lawsuit.

How was Solaris an option then?

Good question but I don't know.

Apple did not create A/UX. It was created by UniSoft

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniSoft

https://virtuallyfun.com/2021/09/19/so-what-is-the-deal-with...

I'm guessing that Apple would have to pay a fee to both UniSoft and AT&T and maybe Sun was much larger and a partner with AT&T / Unix System Labs on SysV so maybe they could resell Solaris for cheaper.

Sun open sourced Solaris in 2008 for 2 years. Maybe AT&T / USL didn't care by then or maybe Sun's licensing agreement allowed them to do it. I don't know.

A/UX was also ridiculously insecure in its default configuration. It had a "guest" user, no password. I remember labs of Mac II or IIx systems at a local university, with public IP addresses, guest accounts, no passwords. A local BBS guy posted a message on how to get "free" internet access through the university's dialups. I think it was at least a month before things got locked down.

It was the time, only trustworthy people on the net so far. Told the story here about my mid-ninties job where I ran Quake servers on the lan before we had a firewall.

Yes, though contemporary OSes like SunOS were more secure than A/UX. Once you were on the network though, it was like swiss cheese (NIS / YP... unshadowed password files... etc.)

Interesting what-ifs. Perhaps offering the money they spent on Copeland to ATT could have bulk licensed it.

A/UX runs on 68k NuBus machines, not PowerPC PCI ones.

Unix itself does—seems like a short porting effort compared to the other choices. They had emulation available as well.

A/UX 4.0 I believe was going to be based on OSF/1. The MkLinux port was also useful in the Mach 3.0 migration (as were the open source BSDs which refreshed the 4.4BSD code Rhapsody was based on, from NEXTSTEP 4.0 which only ever shipped as an alpha).

> Why was A/UX not in the running?

I asked this myself.

The thing that I didn't think about was that A/UX combined 680x0 UNIX™ code with 680x0 MacOS code in very clever ways. MacOS provided the windowing, terminal emulators, the filesystem browser, etc. Unix provided the underlying kernel, the filesystem, networking, etc.

(This is a hand-wavey simplification for illustrative purposes.)

The point being, intimately intertwined, closely integrated.

But classic MacOS only ran on 680x0 and to port it to PowerPC, Apple invented a clever hack built around partial emulation: a nanokernel containing a 680x0-to-PowerPC interpreter (with a way for 680x0 code to call PowerPC code), on top of which ran the MacOS Toolbox ROM image, on top of which ran most of MacOS in 680x0 code. Then they profiled that, and converted the most performance-critical parts -- and only those -- to PowerPC code.

When I ran a PowerMac with classic MacOS, I had a little indicator applet in the menu bar. It was red when executing 680x0 code and turned green for PowerPC code. (Not very helpful for colour blind folks, but hey, fine for me.)

It was red almost all the time. Only years later when substantial PowerPC-native apps started to appear did it sometimes stay green long enough to see.

It wouldn't have been so hard to port the Unix bits of A/UX to PowerPC-native, but that would have ruined the integration between the Unix code and the MacOS code. Getting MacOS all running natively would have been a massive task. Apple never did it; it replaced the entire OS with NeXTstep.

Getting 680x0 MacOS code integrating with PowerPC A/UX code would have been a major technical challenge.

It sounded easy and obvious but it was an even bigger project than Copland, and Apple wisely dediced against it.

Interesting, and sounds quite plausible. Perhaps they could have replaced the GUI with a X window lookalike instead of trying to brute force the old OS.

That is what the Apple/NeXT combined company did, of course. Rhapsody showed it well.

http://toastytech.com/guis/rhap.html

And there's some description of the emulation nanokernel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_nanokernel

But in its way OS X was much more of a clean break: a whole new OS, ported to the old hardware, tweaked to understand filesystems and file formats and given a shallow cosmetic resemblance.

A/UX was a much tighter integrated system. Some of the OS functionality was provided by actual classic MacOS.

What was left, if that was removed, was a fairly unremarkable Unix for its time. You could even boot it in a sort of vanilla-Unix form.

You can compare and contrast here:

https://www.aux-penelope.com/screenshots.htm

E.g. for v3, top 2 rows (pics 1-6) are in Mac mode, bottom row (7-9) are in Unix mode. A bit like the ANS with AIX, there's little to appeal to Apple users here:

https://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ans/aix.html

I still think Solaris/Mac stood a chance; the hardware would have been miles better than anything else.

The best 68k Mac I ever had was MAE in Solaris 9 on my SunBlade 2500. Fully patched up Solaris 9 had all the filesystem and disk i/o improvements, and none of the libc changes that happened in 10 which broke all backwards compatibility.

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