The final 'Garage' sale...

From: Brian Chase <vaxzilla_at_jarai.org>
Date: Thu May 29 10:03:00 2003

On Thu, 29 May 2003, TeoZ wrote:

> [...] I find very few people collect mac/pc software of the time
> period even though I think it shows a big evolution in software
> development just like computers of the 80' - 90's went from expensive
> business only equipment to mass produced basic tools they are today. I
> don't think I have seen a real copy of A/UX 2 or 3 around in years
> which is basically what OSX is for the mac today but a decade older
> (macos on top of Unix).

Nah. OS X's lineage comes /directly/ from NeXT's NEXTSTEP, which is
about 14 years old at this point. After NeXT got out of the hardware
business, NEXTSTEP begat OPENSTEP. Then Apple bought NeXT and used
their OS to create OS X. The underpinnings of OS X are blantantly
taken from NeXT's work (and I'm the happiest guy in the computing
world for it.)

One trivial example...

  nextstep% file /bin/ls
  /bin/ls: Mach-O executable (for architecture m68k)

  os-x% file /bin/ls
  /bin/ls: Mach-O executable ppc

They even share some of the same gags, like this one hidden in the magic
number they chose for Mach-O binaries:

  nextstep% od -h /bin/ls | head -1
  0000000 feed face 0000 0006 0000 0001 0000 0002

  os-x% od -h /bin/ls | head -1
  0000000 feed face 0000 0012 0000 0000 0000 0002

Even silly things under OS X like the spinning cursor wheel (which they
revamped in 10.2) and the system beep sounds are leftover from NEXTSTEP.
Then there's Cocoa, all the interface and project development tools,
netinfo, and Mach, and...

The MacOS environment provided by OS X is, for all practical purposes, a
throw-away solution meant to wean people off MacOS. Obviously Apple had
to provide this; had they not, they'd have panicked a lot of their
customers. But it's something that looks and feels like it's awkwardly
bolted onto the otherwise smooth and well integrated OS X.

NeXT really were more than a decade ahead of everyone else with their
systems. It's a shame it took so long for their vision to become both
accessible and acceptable to the masses.

-brian.
Received on Thu May 29 2003 - 10:03:00 BST