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Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs was very open about taking things from elsewhere and refining them for consumption.

Lisa and Mac were products of his seeing the Smalltalk GUI at his visit to PARC. There was nothing off-the-shelf, so they had to be built from scratch.

Of NeXT he said that he had been so bamboozled by the GUI at his PARC visit that he missed the other two, arguable more important concepts: OO and networking.

NeXT used as much off-the-shelf components as possible: Ethernet + TCP/IP for the network, Unix for the OS, Adobe's Display Postscript for graphics, Stepstone's Objective-C for the OO parts (which in turn mashed together C and Smalltalk). It bundled TeX, Sybase SQL Server, a bunch of scripting languages, Webster's dictionary, etc.

They only built themselves what they absolutely had to to get the machine and user experience they wanted.

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> Steve Jobs was very open about taking things from elsewhere and refining them for consumption.

See also, forking KHTML into WebKit to build Safari when MS cancelled Internet Explorer for macOS and the platform was left without a robust browser choice. For two reasons: That they were somewhat comfortable letting MSIE reign for so long rather than making an inhouse option, and for not starting over when they did.

And WebKit eventually birthed Chromium. Truly the circle of life.

It’s funny that Apple originally wanted Mozilla (proto-Firefox) but couldn’t figure out how to build it on Mac OS X in a reasonable amount of time.

> couldn’t figure out how to build it

Well, no. They evaluated the existing choices and decided that KDE's code was a better fit.

> Melton explained in an e-mail to KDE developers that KHTML and KJS allowed easier development than other available technologies by virtue of being small (fewer than 140,000 lines of code), cleanly designed and standards-compliant.

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

According to Ken Kocienda's book (he was one of the original developers of Safari), that email is a post-hoc rationalization. The "evaluation" was literally him and another guy trying to build Mozilla for weeks and failing, and then someone else joining the team and quickly building Konqueror instead.

If the people evaluating your code can't get it to build, I'd say that's a good sign that your code isn't ready to be taken up by others.

> According to Ken Kocienda's book (he was one of the original developers of Safari), that email is a post-hoc rationalization.

Kocienda's book doesn't say that Melton's email is a post-hoc rationalization. It doesn't say anything about that email on a meta level. It merely gives a straightforward account of the project's history from Kocienda's perspective. There is zero contradiction between this, the message from Melton on the KDE mailing list, or the other historical accounts (e.g. on Wikipedia) that cite Melton.

The official story from Melton has always been that they originally tried to start with Mozilla, found it too difficult to work with, so they abandoned it and adopted KDE folks' work as the basis for their Mac-native browser.

The most relevant passage from that email:

> When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects.

(GeekyBear's "Well, no" here is definitely wrong if the particulars from Kocienda's account are in fact accurate, but that's simply poor synthesis on some HNer's part and doesn't make Melton's version a retcon. The accounts we have from those involved are consistent.)

I’m pretty sure your history is off here. There was a 5 year agreement around 1998 to keep Office available for the Mac, and to make IE the default (but not only bundled) browser available.

Safari was shipped almost exactly at the end of that agreement, and the announcement as to IE for Mac being discontinued was 6 months later.

A fun bit of trivia: that IE was a different rendering engine (Tasman, not Trident which was used on Windows).

Indeed - it was also a lot more standards-compliant than Trident, though not without it's own share of fuckery as befitted the age.

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