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Windows NT for Power Macintosh

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Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#211

Post by mixmastamyk »

lproven wrote: post #200
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

> Why was A/UX not in the running? 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 int…

Interesting, and sounds quite plausible. Perhaps they could have replaced the GUI with a X window lookalike instead of trying to brute force the old OS.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#212

Post by icedchai »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #176
icedchai wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, though contemporary OSes like SunOS were more secure than A/UX. Once you were on the network though, it was like swiss cheese (NIS / YP... unshadowed password files... etc.)

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#213

Post by karlgkk »

lproven wrote: post #199
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…

> one of the technically coolest things built in the last 10 years Sadly, that is a low bar to clear.

I honestly don’t believe that’s true, tbh.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#214

Post by fasa99 »

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.

yea, a big one. Once there was an intentionally multi-user-from-ground-up OS called "Multics". Dude named ken thompson or dennis ritchie or something worked on it but was like "bro, so bloated". So dude writes a DISK BENCHMARKING system, single user, called it "Unix" as if to castrate multics. The original unix was disk benchmarking, barebones. So we know how that moved into multi-user

source: kernighans readingbook, "unix a memoir" or something like that, great read

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#215

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#216

Post by saagarjha »

nullindividual wrote: post #166
anyfoo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, it basically doesn't use UNIX permissions at all.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#217

Post by lproven »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #211
lproven wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why was A/UX not in the running? 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 int…

Interesting, and sounds quite plausible. Perhaps they could have replaced the GUI with a X window lookalike instead of trying to brute force the old OS.

That is what the Apple/NeXT combined company did, of course. Rhapsody showed it well.

http://toastytech.com/guis/rhap.html

And there's some description of the emulation nanokernel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_nanokernel

But in its way OS X was much more of a clean break: a whole new OS, ported to the old hardware, tweaked to understand filesystems and file formats and given a shallow cosmetic resemblance.

A/UX was a much tighter integrated system. Some of the OS functionality was provided by actual classic MacOS.

What was left, if that was removed, was a fairly unremarkable Unix for its time. You could even boot it in a sort of vanilla-Unix form.

You can compare and contrast here:

https://www.aux-penelope.com/screenshots.htm

E.g. for v3, top 2 rows (pics 1-6) are in Mac mode, bottom row (7-9) are in Unix mode. A bit like the ANS with AIX, there's little to appeal to Apple users here:

https://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ans/aix.html

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#218

Post by lproven »

karlgkk wrote: post #213
lproven wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of the technically coolest things built in the last 10 years Sadly, that is a low bar to clear.

I honestly don’t believe that’s true, tbh.

Apart from the LLM bot "AI" toys, what significant new technological advances can you point to in the decade from 2014-2024?

Offhand I can't think of a single thing.

Between 1994 and 2004 we went from Windows 3.x and Classic MacOS, to OS X and WinXP.

Linux went from being a toy to a serious viable OS.

Before: 16-bit OSes with some 32-bit parts, all resolutely single-CPU, many primarily based around cooperative multitasking with no real memory protection, and mainly proprietary networking.

After: pure 32-bit OSes, with proper preemptive multitasking and hardware memory protection, capable of SMP on multiprocessor systems, with TCP/IP based networking.

From 2004-2014 the industry moved from mainly single-CPU 32-bit machines to multi-core 64-bit machines everywhere, with UIs rendered through hardware 3D, and a heavy reliance on Web protocols for almost all network functionality. A much smoother transition but that was because of the big changes in the previous decade.

Linux went from being a nerd tool to a usable mainstream OS that was rapidly taking over the server market. Smartphones went from toys to maintstream. Chromebooks arrived in 2011, and Linux started to become a consumer OS.

Since 2014... er... containers everywhere on servers? Electron apps proliferating? That's about all that springs to mind.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#219

Post by hylaride »

pjmlp wrote: post #120
hylaride wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame. NT did support POSIX, but it was in practice designed to make it easier to port UNIX apps. At co-op job I had back in the day (~2000), I had to fight with Veritas' backup software on NT that wrote to tapes. I don't recall what it was (a device mapping to the drive maybe?), but you could see the UNIX foundations of the software.

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…

I think Linux took off due to cost. If you're a startup or a web company with razor thin margins, you're not going to go Microsoft (or Sun).

Same story with MySQL.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#220

Post by kbolino »

fasa99 wrote: post #214
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.

yea, a big one. Once there was an intentionally multi-user-from-ground-up OS called "Multics". Dude named ken thompson or dennis ritchie or something worked on it but was like "bro, so bloated". So dude writes a DISK BENCHMARKING system, single user, called it "Unix" as if to castrate multics. The original unix was disk benchmarking, barebones. So we know how that moved into multi-user source: kernighans readingbook,…

I'm not sure how much that really counts. According to [1], the time that Unix spent as a single-user operating system was intentionally very short-lived. Even the earliest version of the operating system that can be reconstructed today had multiple logins and processes, though only one could be active at a time. It seems that, by the time Unix was written in C, ported to multiple architectures, and spreading outside of Bell Labs, it was already multi-user.

[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/10908

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