Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]

bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 40 posts

Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]

#11

Post by Taniwha »

w10-1 wrote: post #8

Pink did get rolled into Taligent, the Apple/IBM JV to overcome Windows NT. Remember that mac 68K system calls were via ("A-line") opcodes, and their only extension/fix mechanism was head- and tail-patching those entry points. 1990 was only about 2 years after quickdraw was re-written in C instead of assembler. Also, application developers made assumptions, e.g. sending F-line opcodes thinking any 68020 machine has a…

Yeah my impression of Apple at the time was that they leaked like a sieve - yet at the same time Steve was a petty tyrant who would jump on anyone who was caught.

I worked on A/UX at UniSoft, we got half of the first dev run of MacII boards (I got to find hardware bugs), I stopped attending BMUG and we chose our own internal code name (Pigs in Space), when the project finally leaked it was as "Eagle" Apple's code name (whew!)

Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]

#12

Post by KerrAvon »

w10-1 wrote: post #8

Pink did get rolled into Taligent, the Apple/IBM JV to overcome Windows NT. Remember that mac 68K system calls were via ("A-line") opcodes, and their only extension/fix mechanism was head- and tail-patching those entry points. 1990 was only about 2 years after quickdraw was re-written in C instead of assembler. Also, application developers made assumptions, e.g. sending F-line opcodes thinking any 68020 machine has a…

I don’t think the length of the document indicates anything in itself. This is an entire operating system written from scratch. There should a lot of design documentation.

Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]

#13

Post by KerrAvon »

Taniwha wrote: post #11
w10-1 wrote: post #8

Pink did get rolled into Taligent, the Apple/IBM JV to overcome Windows NT. Remember that mac 68K system calls were via ("A-line") opcodes, and their only extension/fix mechanism was head- and tail-patching those entry points. 1990 was only about 2 years after quickdraw was re-written in C instead of assembler. Also, application developers made assumptions, e.g. sending F-line opcodes thinking any 68020 machine has a…

Yeah my impression of Apple at the time was that they leaked like a sieve - yet at the same time Steve was a petty tyrant who would jump on anyone who was caught. I worked on A/UX at UniSoft, we got half of the first dev run of MacII boards (I got to find hardware bugs), I stopped attending BMUG and we chose our own internal code name (Pigs in Space), when the project finally leaked it was as "Eagle" Apple's code nam…

Steve was long gone by the time Pink existed. Apple leaked (mostly from the top!) until Steve became CEO in 1997, and he clamped down on leaks pretty hard.

Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]

#14

Post by Taniwha »

KerrAvon wrote: post #13
Taniwha wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah my impression of Apple at the time was that they leaked like a sieve - yet at the same time Steve was a petty tyrant who would jump on anyone who was caught. I worked on A/UX at UniSoft, we got half of the first dev run of MacII boards (I got to find hardware bugs), I stopped attending BMUG and we chose our own internal code name (Pigs in Space), when the project finally leaked it was as "Eagle" Apple's code nam…

Steve was long gone by the time Pink existed. Apple leaked (mostly from the top!) until Steve became CEO in 1997, and he clamped down on leaks pretty hard.

Yeah but he was around while we were working on A/UX, I remember visiting Apple and people hiding from him (or rather keeping their heads and voices down in a cube farm when he passed by "shhh Steve's coming")

Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]

#15

Post by randomifcpfan »

astrange wrote: post #10

Pink eventually collapsed under the weight of bad choices like "using C++" and "inheritance-based OOP". You can more or less tell it was going to fail from this design document; it is just way too long and seems to have like 5 years of work pre-planned. The Unicode stuff did live on as ICU ( https://icu.unicode.org ) after being rewritten into Java and then back into C again.

I don’t think C++ and inheritance based OOP inherently doomed Pink. BeOS was also C++/OOP, and NextStep/macOS’s use of ObjectiveC/OOP is very similar to C++/OOP, since pre-ARC Objective C is similar to C++ with a slightly more dynamic way of making late-bound function calls.

Pink was doomed by inexperienced and optimistic technical leadership, partly caused by the original Pink/Blue split combined with the NeXT brain drain.

Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]

#16

Post by pjmlp »

astrange wrote: post #10

Pink eventually collapsed under the weight of bad choices like "using C++" and "inheritance-based OOP". You can more or less tell it was going to fail from this design document; it is just way too long and seems to have like 5 years of work pre-planned. The Unicode stuff did live on as ICU ( https://icu.unicode.org ) after being rewritten into Java and then back into C again.

In addition to siblings comment COM and OLE are pretty much alive to this day on Windows, being the main way of accessing the platform since Longhorn ideas were ported from .NET into COM in Vista.

WinRT for all its flaws, is basically COM with an additional base interface (IInspectable), .NET type system metadata instead of TLB, and application identify.

Then Android has similar ideas via Android IPC (and Binder).

Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]

#20

Post by duskwuff »

Taniwha wrote: post #11
w10-1 wrote: post #8

Pink did get rolled into Taligent, the Apple/IBM JV to overcome Windows NT. Remember that mac 68K system calls were via ("A-line") opcodes, and their only extension/fix mechanism was head- and tail-patching those entry points. 1990 was only about 2 years after quickdraw was re-written in C instead of assembler. Also, application developers made assumptions, e.g. sending F-line opcodes thinking any 68020 machine has a…

Yeah my impression of Apple at the time was that they leaked like a sieve - yet at the same time Steve was a petty tyrant who would jump on anyone who was caught. I worked on A/UX at UniSoft, we got half of the first dev run of MacII boards (I got to find hardware bugs), I stopped attending BMUG and we chose our own internal code name (Pigs in Space), when the project finally leaked it was as "Eagle" Apple's code nam…

> Yeah my impression of Apple at the time was that they leaked like a sieve

And yet there's still only one partial source code leak (for System 7.1) publicly available. Microsoft still has them beat on this. ;)

Post reply on HN