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MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

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Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#181

Post by OnlyMortal »

mike_hearn wrote: post #171
OnlyMortal wrote: post #49

Having developed for OSX in that era, IBM ViaVoice, it wasn’t a completely functional OS. The audio input was broken every alternate build, for instance. I’d come from a NeXT background and was surprised how slow OSX (OpenStep in essence) was on PPC.

I'm curious what you make of the standard narrative that OS X was a fuse of NeXTStep with UNIX and MacOS Classic. As far as I can tell that's not really accurate and OS X was basically just NeXTStep reskinned to look like MacOS, with an emulator for Classic apps bolted onto the side, and some C libraries to ease the porting process from the old Mac APIs to the new NeXTStep APIs without needing to transition to Object…

Apple decided to create a NeXT Workspace clone with PowerPlant (Carbonized). My understanding that this was due to politics with both Microsoft and Adobe.

It wasn’t done very well and was clunky. The later re-write to Obj-C was an improvement.

As for the rest of OSX, most of the inbuilt apps were just direct from NeXT. Even today, Mail and TextEdit are still similar.

ProjectBuilder was much the same as on NeXT as was InterfaceBuilder. Their merging into the blob that is now XCode was a mistake IMO.

With ViaVoice, the training app was a PowerPlant port from the older Classic version. It wasn’t hard to munge PP to get it to work.

I did the UI for the VoiceCenter (a HAL-like UI intentionally) and the Preferences given my AppKit skills. One advantage we made use of is we used a UNIX voice engine that ran as a process on its own.

The OS really was just a NeXT with skinning for Apple and a few apps using PowerPlant. I think the old Sun based network management was still present (NIS??).

Obviously, a lack of Display Postscript made a difference as Apple had to develop their own renderer using the same graphics primitives. That may be why it was so slow back then.

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#182

Post by Chanderton »

I remember how insanely quick the GUI on the first MacOS X Server (1.0) version was. It was mostly (simple explanation) a classic MacOS theme slapped on NeXTStep with some additional things added (and stripped). Then when the consumer version was released, it looked like a ”Hollywood OS” or a fancy Kaleidoscope scheme (3r party themes for classic MacOS). But it was slow as…

So the transition for me took a while at the start. Think it was Jaguar, or maybe Panther when i moved 100% to MacOS X.

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#183

Post by sanderjd »

scarface_74 wrote: post #131
sanderjd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to remember to remind myself of this more often! The one I remember so clearly is back when I was using Pidgin (or Adium I think was another thing I used?) with a few different messaging apps, and my company was trying to figure out how to make chat work, maintaining an irc server that we of course couldn't get the non-nerds to use, looking at HipChat and a couple others that seemed really expensive for their…

Isn’t that the ultimate survivorship bias?

My point wasn't about the specific companies that "survived" chat, but that any new chat products got huge after 2008 at all. From my perspective back then, I thought the whole category looked run out. But it had actually barely even gotten started, if you compare the number of users of chat apps back then to the number now.

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#184

Post by CoryAlexMartin »

davidy123 wrote: post #44
CoryAlexMartin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean for everything on screen to have a relationship to everything else? Could you elaborate?

Yes, based on the NeXTSTEP roots, everything should be object oriented. Think of it like visual copy/paste. Pretty much every on screen item should have a meaning and relationship to everything else. For example, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA at 35:00 you can see how an application is loaded from the network and a live chart dragged from one app to another. That isn't a one-off gimmick, it's how the…

I've always been fascinated with NeXTSTEP. It's kind of unfortunate that even the basic interoperability features that made it over to Mac OS, like Services, seem underutilized. I often forget they even exist, because they don't seem core to the default workflow.

I installed OpenStep in a virtual machine after reading this comment. I poked around a bit, but I'm not sure I encountered any of the sort of stuff you're talking about in the OS. Do you have any examples of things I could try to experience some of the magic?

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#185

Post by tambourine_man »

andrekandre wrote: post #173
tambourine_man wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS X was a bet on the future, that double buffering everything was OK because graphic cards would get there eventually. They certainly did, but we suffered through menus taking a good fraction of a second to drop down for a few years. I can still feel the pain. I would never have taken that bet. I want computers to be fast now . It was the right bet.

> double buffering everything was OK because graphic cards would get there eventually. and they showed it in the very next version 10.2 jaguar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OaRF9W1bJk&t=3m33s

I remember being very relieved that my card qualified for quartz extreme. Nice demo.
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