Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]
bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]
1–10 of 40 posts
Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]
#2Interesting historical document describing Pink which later evolved into Taligent. They even planned a toolkit for collaboration (page 345ff) :O
Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]
#3Oh, this is incredible! I've always wished I could have been a fly on the wall during this boondoggle.
"Jaguar", mentioned early in this document, was a RISC platform based on the Motorola 88000, which was abandoned in favor of and/or rolled in to the PowerPC project that shipped in 1994, four years after the date on this document.
Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]
#4You gotta love the mentality that calls the collabourative framework the "Donner Party." Yikes.
Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]
#5Reading 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 think 2 things: 1) You can achieve something if you have a plan, and 2) What you plan won’t be what happens, but you may still achieve the same goals a different way.
Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]
#6Page 1.2-2:
>Some day, the company might even want to run Pink on something really obscure, like an Intel processor ("bite your tongue!").
Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]
#7Interesting historical document describing Pink which later evolved into Taligent. They even planned a toolkit for collaboration (page 345ff) :O
Yup. This is an interesting time for the project. It's after the '88 meeting where they separated features onto blue (easier), pink (harder) and red (hardest) cards and before '91 when they were actively talking to IBM about what would eventually become Talingent in '92.
They've had enough time to think about things and get some early coding experiments under their collective belts, but not so long that the impact of infighting (and mild panic) is so apparent.
I contributed a small bit to a serial port manager in this time frame. In retrospect, it's clear they wanted something that could work on different hardware (like the 16550 popular in PCs and Z8530s already used by the macs) - but I'm a little sad to see it isn't mentioned here.
Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]
#8Pink 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 an FPU (sorry!). So OO looked like the way out from that tangle.
Leaking tech docs were a big problem as Apple sought buy-in from partners. The "56" watermark might have overtly supported traceability back to the recipient. In ~1993 at Taligent we would also covertly vary variable names and such in sample code we delivered to different partners, after we found the code being shared anonymously.
Due to the OO scaffolding, the simplest application required implementing ~35 classes (yuck!), but the promise of modular intermixed code/edit/data (opendoc) was largely realized (yay!) before HTML and MIME types made complex data/display trivial (oh well).
As the length of the document shows, both Taligent and Copland were ... bedeviled with a million mid-level tyrants producing huge volumes of technical blabbage. Tremendous waste of brains, while a few sharp people were poking around Mach and finessing hardware abstraction layers.
Hoops (dev-env) and i18n seemed to be the only things that came out of that, and IBM pushed i18n into Java.
Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]
#9Reading 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.)
Re: Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]
#10Pink 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.