They did end up releasing salvageable bits and pieces of Copland as Mac OS 8.
Both visionary, both only partial successes.
WinFS :-(
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).
You mean, COM?
Smalltalk was OS/2's .NET, so to speak.
Unfortunately it all died alongside OS/2, followed by IBM's pivot to Java.
I believe Tribes 2 did something similar just at a higher level
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it's expensive, but it's also astonishing how much prices have come down.
$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.
Sadly, that is a low bar to clear.
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.
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.