THat's absurd. That's it, that's the comment.
Hack of the Year award, stat!
Windows NT for Power Macintosh
141–150 of 223 posts
Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh
#143I love the boot loader file https://github.com/Wack0/maciNTosh/blob/main/boot_files/Syst...
Sidenote: The Open Firmware syntax is so unreadable. No wonder it was scorned. A lost opportunity.
Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Unix permissions will allow you do to that perfectly fine.
Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh
#146Man, I loved Windows NT back in the day. It was light enough that I could run it on fairly low end late-90s hardware, and it was substantially more stable than Windows 95.
Had Microsoft been serious with POSIX subsystem, and most likely I would never bothered with Linux for our UNIX assignments. Instead I dual booted between both of them.
Absolutely, I had a university instructor that taught us both Windows NT and (I believe) Red Hat Linux in 1998, for running web servers. Linux made much more sense when thinking about a multi-user system running various services. I ended up dual booting Windows and Slackware to learn Linux, while also being able to use the software I was already familiar with on Windows. If Microsoft had gone deeply into POSIX for their consumer systems, I don't believe I would have switched over to Linux except for quality of life improvements that may have come about (which may have never happened).
Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar story to Cairo with Microsoft [0]. Both visionary, both only partial successes. WinFS :-( [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)
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.
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.
Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar story to Cairo with Microsoft [0]. Both visionary, both only partial successes. WinFS :-( [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)
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.
Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh
#149Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude, shut up, the Amiga is totally better. Cooperative multitasking is lame. Have you seen HAM mode??
No, Amiga sucks, it can’t even run UNIX! Do you even know what it is? My dad uses it for work.
The Amiga 3000 and 2000 can run Amix, a port of Unix System V Release 4.