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Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]

bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de

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

#31

Post by bombcar »

captainmuon wrote: post #29
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…

Why was leaking tech docs considered such a problem? I could imagine any competitor large enough to copy implementation from docs and unscrupulous enough to do so would be able to get their hands on all your docs anyway (say, a Microsoft exec hiring a PI, ...). But what's the harm if anybody else gets their hands on the docs? Is it some abstract legal "we must not accidentially make any forward-looking statements", o…

All computer companies at the time were deathly afraid of Osborning themselves, which may be part of it.

Also feature parity between systems didn’t exist so they were still trying to one up each other.

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

#32

Post by Maursault »

Taniwha wrote: post #14
KerrAvon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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")

Steve Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985 and returned in 1997. Steve Wozniak also left about around the same time, sold most of his Apple stock, and founded CL 9 in 1985. I'm not sure when Apple contracted Unisoft initially, but A/UX wasn't announced until early 1988, and there was at least a year of development underway already.

Apparently Jobs sold most of his interest in Apple immediately in 1985 in order to finance founding NeXT the same year. Jobs took a number of Apple employees with him to NeXT, but I'm not sure how long he was speculating who he wanted with him. Yada yada yada, Apple and NeXT were in negotiations by 1996. I have heard that A/UX was the first thing Jobs killed when he returned in 1997, but the final release of A/UX was version 3.1.1 in 1995, and Apple abandoned it a year later.

So if it was Steve Jobs they were hiding from, it would have either been very early in the development of A/UX (if that occurred by January 1985) or Jobs somehow started killing A/UX during early NeXT negotiations with Apple in 1996. Or Jobs had some reason to be at Apple during that period due to Pixar(?)

And if it wasn't Steve Jobs, then there was another Steve at Apple that was menacing employees between 1985 and 1996. Steve is a relatively common name, and it would be pretty interesting to learn who that was.

I am a fan of A/UX, though I didn't appreciate being forced to buy a license for it in 1989 by my university's CS department. Though the price dropped by about half by then, along with the MacII hardware, it was a very expensive purchase for a 17yo, about as much as a midrange car at the time.

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

#34

Post by Maursault »

pavlov wrote: post #21

Around this time there was also Apple project “Star Trek” which ported System 7 to x86: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project It worked, but all the apps needed to be recompiled for x86, and it didn’t tick any of the advanced feature boxes like Pink/Taligent did. (Which notably ticked all the boxes and never shipped.) Still I think MacOS on x86 could have been a contender against Windows 3.1. Had Microsoft…

> Still I think MacOS on x86 could have been a contender against Windows 3.1.

"MacOS" is slightly ambiguous because of the nomenclature changes, though Star Trek was System 7. The nomenclature (ignoring iDevice os names) evolves from System 1-7, Mac OS 7.6 - 9.2 (aka "Classic"), Mac OS X, OS X, and finally macOS, but all these names really only represents two distinct operating systems across 4 distinct hardware platforms.

The Star Trek project also initiated in 1992, after the PowerPC AIM alliance was formed. PowerPC was promising and apparently pretty exciting, with RISC able to do more with less processor cycles than x86 CISC. But by the late 1990's and early 2000's, Motorola had sold its PPC division to Freescale, and IBM had sold off its embedded chip applications and spread out into game console processors. Apple (Jobs) wasn't happy with IBM's delays in advancement or the roadmap, and by 2005 Apple announced the platform switch to x86.

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

#37

Post by pjmlp »

Love that the UNIX compatibility layer is called Don Quixote, and how the document reveals the way UNIX was always seen from Apple glasses.

> Don Quixote is not intended to be a replacement for a standard full-featured UNIX system -- rather, it is a reduced-complexity UNIX for "the rest of us" who want some or all of the capabilities of UNIX but don't want the difficulties associated with a standard UNIX.

> ...

> Both NeXT and A/UX are using this approach to attempt to turn a relatively traditional UNIX workstation into a personal computer. The "wrapper" approach does not address the fundamental problem -- the complexity of UNIX.

Taken from UNIX Adapter chapter

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

#38

Post by Maursault »

KerrAvon wrote: post #9
thewebcount wrote: post #5

Reading through the first few pages, I’m impressed with their bluntness about the shortcomings of the original MacOS. While Pink itself failed, they actually managed to achieve a lot of the stuff they discuss in that document, even before the switch to OS X. I remember when they started moving low-memory globals into system calls. And, obviously, they did eventually get it working with other processors. This makes me…

I mean, the problems were known in 1985-1986; a real indictment of Apple’s executive management during this era that once they finally had a solution underway, they threw it away only to start over again with Copland years later. I mean, it wasn’t until 2003 before Apple was able to shipp an OS remotely embodying anything here for most end users. (Pre-Jaguar Mac OS X was not ready to install on grandma’s iMac.)

> it wasn’t until 2003 before Apple was able to shipp an OS remotely embodying anything here for most end users

Perhaps I wasn't most end users, but I was able to leverage a Mac 8500 from 1997 with an upgraded dual G4 450MHz daughter card to run Connectix Virtual PC and Windows XP on 10.0 Cheetah in 2002 (daughter card would not support newer OS versions) in order to attend remote online A/V Blackboard courses for a semester at my alma mater. The virtualization was a lame dog, but somehow it worked well enough for me to complete the courses, and I can only assume the base Cheetah operating system performed far better on contemporary Mac hardware (which would have been the 2002 Quicksilver, G4 800MHz up to dual G4 1GHz).

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

#40

Post by eschaton »

astrange wrote: post #28
Reason077 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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" The use of C++ with inheritance based OOP was a huge technical limitation for BeOS at the time, because C++'s virtual method tables resulted in very brittle ABIs. Just about any changes to the virtual method definitions in a base class (even as simple as…

Objective-C still had the "fragile base class" problem because its classes' ivar offsets were known across library boundaries, so they couldn't be changed, but C++ had (and still has) this for code with vtables as well. It was finally fixed with the x86-64 ABI.

Taligent had their own compiler and used something similar to what the ObjC 2 ABI uses for ivars for all member variables and functions to eliminate the fragile base class problem. “Using C++” may have been part of their problem, but not for the same reasons as it was for BeOS.
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