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Windows NT for Power Macintosh

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Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#171

Post by karlgkk »

jmb99 wrote: post #94
karlgkk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#172

Post by kbolino »

hypercube33 wrote: post #160
kbolino wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#173

Post by kbolino »

nullindividual wrote: post #165
kbolino wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#174

Post by icedchai »

lizknope wrote: post #169
mixmastamyk wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 200…

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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#175

Post by mixmastamyk »

lizknope wrote: post #169
mixmastamyk wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 200…

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

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#176

Post by mixmastamyk »

icedchai wrote: post #174
lizknope wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 200…

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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#177

Post by asveikau »

bee_rider wrote: post #103
pavlov wrote: post #81

Earlier 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.

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?

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

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#178

Post by scarface_74 »

1oooqooq wrote: post #170
snakeyjake wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#179

Post by scarface_74 »

firecall wrote: post #168
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.

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 diff…

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

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#180

Post by DaoVeles »

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 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.

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