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Windows NT for Power Macintosh

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Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#201

Post by lproven »

hjdiiokjs wrote: post #188
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.).

While MSDOS had subdirectories, pipes were not supported at the kernel level. It was simply a convenience of COMMAND.COM that simulated pipes by running each command sequentially. The command switch character was the slash (/) until the end, with the exception of a few non-standard third-party softwares insisting on the dash. Device names were always global namespace and \dev never existed in any form. Did you copy-p…

No, it looks fair.

MS-DOS 1.x did not have subdirectories.

That came in with MS-DOS 2.x which is when the very rudimentary level of Xenix compatibility came in: device names such as `LPT1:` or `COM2:` could be prefixed as `/dev/lpt1` or `/dev/com2`. Pipes simulated in COMMAND.COM.

I don't recall DOS ever accepting command switches prefixed with `-` instead of `\` as standard, though.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#202

Post by lproven »

lizknope wrote: post #74
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AIX isn't exactly a desktop OS. If so, only artificially; AIX was born on a workstation and seems to still support running a graphical desktop environment.

AIX was the first Unix I ever used in 1991 on an IBM RT with the ROMP CPU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RT_PC I wanted one on my desktop so bad. DOS/Win3.1 PCs were just so bad to me. Then I saw SunOS and really just wanted any Unix system on my desk. I bought a PC in 1994 just to install Linux.

> AIX was the first Unix I ever used in 1991 on an IBM RT with the ROMP CPU

Nice. Me too. But it was about 1989. The first machine I ever compiled a C program and it took me ages to find `a.out` and work out that that was my binary. I was more used to DOS compilers that turned $SOURCENAME.$ext into $sourcename.EXE.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#203

Post by aryonoco »

tarsinge wrote: post #198
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…

I have read these kind of stories many times but I'm starting to realize how much the relative engineering success of MacOS 8 and 9 is overlooked with the now "classic" storytelling centered around Jobs and his comeback. Mac OS 10 was not really usable until 10.1 in 2001, yet the iMac, iBook and PowerBook G3 were successes, so the OS obviously played a role, but reading these stories it's kind of absent. My memories…

I'd argue that OS X (to use the nomenclature of the time) 10.0 was alpha quality software, and even 10.1 was at best what we now would consider beta software. OS X was not usable until 10.2 (and that's when many major software such as Photoshop and even Apple's own Final Cut Pro received their first native OS X port), but even 10.2 didn't reach feature partiy with classic MacOS. It wasn't until 10.3 Tiger that you could safely recommend to friends and family to upgrade to OS X.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#204

Post by aryonoco »

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.

We kind of live in an alternate to that alternative reality.

A lot (most?) of Be engineers ended up at a company called Danger, which was bought by Google a few years later, and they all went on to be the original core team of Android. Some BeOS technologies even ended up in Android such as its Binder, which from memory the Be engineer working on it open sourced it just before Palm bought Be, and then he used the same code in Android.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#205

Post by nullindividual »

Dwedit wrote: post #164
nullindividual wrote: post #66

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. You mean, COM?

ActiveX is raising its arm through the soil

Office is probably the largest consumer-facing application to use COM today. It's honestly a great technology -- which came from the Cairo project.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#206

Post by bitwize »

exe34 wrote: post #63
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of it as a time when people became so entranced with the idea of the emerging object-oriented zeitgeist that they imagined that making things OO and component driven would just hand-wave towards success. People rushed to make infrastructure to support this model, and, well, it was no magic bullet. Complexity, fragility, and a lot of hard work remained.

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…

> if you look at what accessibility software achieves by simply looking at the screen/hooking into the OS

Unfortunately that's kind of a pipe dream... in the real world, the first organization to flagrantly violate the OS vendor's human interface guidelines is the OS vendor itself, who ships some application with custom-schmustom, owner-drawn widgets that cannot be queried according to the standard OS APIs for querying them for content. So the accessibility software literally has to OCR the screen to determine what's written in the text fields and buttons.

Source: Knew a guy who worked on Dragon NaturallySpeaking, he had some war stories.

> now imagine any and all software could be connected like that.

As other commenters mentioned, there's COM, but that's a hairball to code for and a hairball to configure. The nicest systems that worked that way historically were the Lisp machine and Smalltalk environments, but the closest day-to-day software is probably Emacs. Everything in Emacs really can be connected together through the power of text buffers and Lisp. Objective-C is Smalltalk semantics retrofitted onto C, and originally NEXTSTEP, later macOS, really was a promising environment for this sort of integration... but in recent years Apple has been so focused on "apps" that it's doubtful they can keep supporting that vision.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#207

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

aryonoco wrote: post #203
tarsinge wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have read these kind of stories many times but I'm starting to realize how much the relative engineering success of MacOS 8 and 9 is overlooked with the now "classic" storytelling centered around Jobs and his comeback. Mac OS 10 was not really usable until 10.1 in 2001, yet the iMac, iBook and PowerBook G3 were successes, so the OS obviously played a role, but reading these stories it's kind of absent. My memories…

I'd argue that OS X (to use the nomenclature of the time) 10.0 was alpha quality software, and even 10.1 was at best what we now would consider beta software. OS X was not usable until 10.2 (and that's when many major software such as Photoshop and even Apple's own Final Cut Pro received their first native OS X port), but even 10.2 didn't reach feature partiy with classic MacOS. It wasn't until 10.3 Tiger that you co…

Tiger was 10.4

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#208

Post by Dwedit »

lizknope wrote: post #72
badgersnake wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the same codebase that was my point. Whether it’s still called Windows NT or whether that name died in the 90s can probably be argued either way.

I think XP is when the DOS based Win95/98/ME was merged with NT

It was never merged. The DOS-based Windows series was just replaced.

Windows 2000 could have just as easily been the OS that replaced the DOS-based Windows series, it was user-friendly and functional enough.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#210

Post by AshamedCaptain »

hjdiiokjs wrote: post #188
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.).

While MSDOS had subdirectories, pipes were not supported at the kernel level. It was simply a convenience of COMMAND.COM that simulated pipes by running each command sequentially. The command switch character was the slash (/) until the end, with the exception of a few non-standard third-party softwares insisting on the dash. Device names were always global namespace and \dev never existed in any form. Did you copy-p…

The features were never turned on by default, so they are not popular knowledge (I used DOS since 2.x and never knew).

https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/comment/171783/#Comm... (devices in \dev, "-" as switch char, etc.).

> While MSDOS had subdirectories, pipes were not supported at the kernel level. It was simply a convenience of COMMAND.COM that simulated pipes by running each command sequentially.

You are confusing the lack of concurrency with lack of pipes -- the mere fact that COMMAND can do what you describe requires UNIX-like pipes and channels (e.g. stdin/out/err), and programs avoiding direct console I/O (way common for DOS programs...). Comm software such as Kermit did the same thing to simulate remote login (I used this one in the day, at least).

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