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Windows NT for Power Macintosh

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Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#161

Post by hypercube33 »

pjmlp wrote: post #122
hylaride wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#162

Post by banish-m4 »

temac wrote: post #140
pjmlp wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically they had multiple iterations of it, with POSIX subsystem in NT, MKS Toolkit, Interix, Windows Services for UNIX, for various levels of "POSIX support" , dropped everything on Windows Vista, only to create WSL out from Project Astoria ashes. And before they got golden goose with MS-DOS/IBM deal, they were into the UNIX business with Xenix. A few reasons why Linux would probably never taken off, had Microsof…

There was actually "SUA" after "SFU", only removed in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

It was mostly for running NFS to talk to other UNIX boxes, not to run UNIX software.

To make a Windows NT box UNIX-ish, there was MKS Toolkit. It predates Cygwin, msys, and djgpp.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#163

Post by hypercube33 »

pjmlp wrote: post #87
postmodest wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#164

Post by Dwedit »

nullindividual wrote: post #66
exe34 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

> 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

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#165

Post by nullindividual »

kbolino wrote: post #129
xattt wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#166

Post by nullindividual »

anyfoo wrote: post #113
PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#167

Post by mixmastamyk »

lizknope wrote: post #69
mixmastamyk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#168

Post by firecall »

faefox wrote: post #31
stahi wrote: post #22

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…

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

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 :-)

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#169

Post by lizknope »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #167
lizknope wrote: post #69

Earlier 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…

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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#170

Post by 1oooqooq »

snakeyjake wrote: post #124
faefox wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

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.

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