191–200 of 223 posts
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Alpha and MIPS are the other two architectures. Sad trombone noises for Alpha
I had a job in 2006 where the sysadmin ran the entire shop on a single OpenVMS server with two 500Mhz Alpha CPUs. It was our file server, AD server (somehow), DB server, web server, everything. I just looked it up and that CPU came out in 1996, at the same time Intel released their 200Mhz Pentium. Alpha was way ahead of their time.
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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
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.
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Alpha and MIPS are the other two architectures. Sad trombone noises for Alpha
I had a job in 2006 where the sysadmin ran the entire shop on a single OpenVMS server with two 500Mhz Alpha CPUs. It was our file server, AD server (somehow), DB server, web server, everything. I just looked it up and that CPU came out in 1996, at the same time Intel released their 200Mhz Pentium. Alpha was way ahead of their time.
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Is it a derivative? I'd say it's the latest version of Windows NT.
That's still the same NT line tho they changed how versions are called after Windows 8.1 which was NT 6.3. Initial Windows 10 release was bumped to NT 10.0 but further versions use year-month and year-half year formats [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...
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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'd love to see what Apple would have done... but at the same time I fear very much it would have killed Apple.
BeOS was amazing, but its dev tools were nothing special while NeXT's were state of the art, industry-beating. That means no way to win Mac developers over to the new OS.
BeOS was as insecure as Classic MacOS, so no way to crack the server market (not that that worked) and no way to build nice locked-down little gadgets like iPhones.
And while Be had JLG, a very smart cookie, NeXT had Jobs, who had more vision in a day than JLG in a year.
Me, I wish a disappointed Be had done a deal with Acorn and ported to Arm.
Arms in the hundreds-of-MHz range were there and gigahertz-class was coming soon. Acorn had prototype multi-processor machines. Be had the best SMP support in the business in the late 1990s.
They could have reskinned BeOS to look more RISC OS like, run RO in a VM like OS X ran Classic in a VM, and offered both the thinnest lightest Web-capable laptops in the world, and compellingly-priced multiprocessor desktop workstations that didn't need a dozen cooling fans and could have gone to 4-way or even 8-way at an affordable price, which x86 and PowerPC chips could not touch.
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…
My memories are surely tainted by nostalgia because 1997-2001 I was a teen and avid Mac user but from what I remember between the mid-90s Performa on 7.5 and late 90s iMac on 9 it felt like a lot happened. While not the future, as an end user 8.6/9 felt relatively modern, especially compared to Windows 95/98. And even in the mid-90s even if from a business POV the future was bleak for Apple from an end user one 7.5 was not really worst than 95.
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I saw Copland at MacWorld Expo Boston at Apple’s booth. It kernel panicked. We didn’t get to use it. 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 sca…
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…
Sadly, that is a low bar to clear.
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…
Why was A/UX not in the running, it was already written? Just add some polish. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX
I asked this myself.
The thing that I didn't think about was that A/UX combined 680x0 UNIX™ code with 680x0 MacOS code in very clever ways. MacOS provided the windowing, terminal emulators, the filesystem browser, etc. Unix provided the underlying kernel, the filesystem, networking, etc.
(This is a hand-wavey simplification for illustrative purposes.)
The point being, intimately intertwined, closely integrated.
But classic MacOS only ran on 680x0 and to port it to PowerPC, Apple invented a clever hack built around partial emulation: a nanokernel containing a 680x0-to-PowerPC interpreter (with a way for 680x0 code to call PowerPC code), on top of which ran the MacOS Toolbox ROM image, on top of which ran most of MacOS in 680x0 code. Then they profiled that, and converted the most performance-critical parts -- and only those -- to PowerPC code.
When I ran a PowerMac with classic MacOS, I had a little indicator applet in the menu bar. It was red when executing 680x0 code and turned green for PowerPC code. (Not very helpful for colour blind folks, but hey, fine for me.)
It was red almost all the time. Only years later when substantial PowerPC-native apps started to appear did it sometimes stay green long enough to see.
It wouldn't have been so hard to port the Unix bits of A/UX to PowerPC-native, but that would have ruined the integration between the Unix code and the MacOS code. Getting MacOS all running natively would have been a massive task. Apple never did it; it replaced the entire OS with NeXTstep.
Getting 680x0 MacOS code integrating with PowerPC A/UX code would have been a major technical challenge.
It sounded easy and obvious but it was an even bigger project than Copland, and Apple wisely dediced against it.