On Oct 13, 2004, at 1:35 PM, Are Hansen wrote:
).
Take the file system, where every file can have a recource-part ("fork"). The System and the progs store their user interface elements, fonts, sounds, whatever in there. So tidy and elegant, no hidden files or directories - it's all in one file. And can be extended to datafiles too; a Word-document could have the fonts it used stored in its resource fork - an early PDF! OSX still prefer to run on classic' HFS system, but the resource forks are no longer used.
Actually, they are, they're just in the form of 'bundles'. The difference between bundles and resource forks is mere semantics, and you can more easily examine bundle contents than you could resource forks.
Also, data files were never supposed to have resource forks; that Word did (and *still* does, even in OS X!) is one of the most annoying problems with Word. This is one major why people getting word files in attachments sent by OS X mail have problems opening them.
The Extension-system was brilliant, so easy to extend/remove single functions from the System.
That was far from brilliant, it was a monstrous kludge that cause endless problems for the entire life of the classic OS. We had Extensions Manager because we all desperately NEEDED it, not because it was such a wonderful tool.
Windows-people still "Oohh!" when you show them the Extensions Manager. And every file with a comprehensible name and a proper icon; take a look inside Windows' or OSX' forest of sub-directories and their files to see the the difference. "NO USER SERVICABLE PARTS INSIDE"
But the thing is, much of what you see in OS X's 'forest of directories' are the unix stuff that's rarely used, and system stuff that doesn't need to be mucked with.
There ARE, in fact mechanisms built into OS X to allow the functional equivalent of the old extensions. they just can't break the system like they used to.
And contrary to other PC OSs, lots of information was stored with the file (long file names, type, creator, last modified etc), which had to be emulated in easily-lost hidden desktops files on other machines.
No. Unix had all of this since the *70's*.
As they were in fact doing when Steve Jobs marched on to the scene again. Still with a broken pride from being ousted years earlier, intent on showing everyone that he was still the best, still the most visionary. As was his intentions when creating the Next company and its computer (that never made it in the market). If I remember right he made Apple buy Next, killed development on the new Classic concept, and then based the Mac OS on it's NextStep system. Tata! OSX was born.
As Rimmer would say "Wrong, wrongo, completely brimming over with wrongfulness!"
Gil Amelio killed the grotesquely complex and overdue 'Copland' OS project (which was an attempt to modify the existing OS to modernity), and started looking at alternatives, dropping the old and bringing the new.
It came down to two alternatives, both, interestingly, from ex-Apple executives: Jean-Louis Gassee's Be OS, which was a completely new, largely object-oriented OS, and later NeXT, the company helmed by Jobs.
At the time, one of Apple's manifold research projects was mkLinux, which was a port of Linux to Apple PowerPC hardware using a microkernel architecture. (describing the differences and advantages/disadvantages of using a microkernel versus a monolithic kernel such as in regular Linux is far beyond the scope of this discussion)
This caught the eye of people at NeXT, like Avie Tevanian, then CTO of NeXT (now CTO of Apple) who had graduated out of the CS program at Carnegie-Mellon where he had helped to invent the microkernel concept and architecture; he'd gone on to apply that experience at NeXT, which was a microkernel Unix-based OS.
(and for a company "that never made it" NeXT lasted for years. They did eventually sell a ton of systems, both the original NeXT boxes and later NeXT on X86 systems to a lot of industries. Wall Street techies loved 'em. The Objective-C programming environment (the ancestor of Cocoa) was a powerful 'secret weapon' in the hands of a lot of developers. The groundbreaking game Doom was developed on NeXT boxes.)
Jobs shopped NeXT to Apple, and soon Apple bought NeXT, with Jobs on the board as a result.
Soon the coup that replaced Amelio with Jobs occurred (and there are a number of accounts of *that* floating around) and Steve Jobs was back at the helm of Apple.
But Apple had long before decided to use NeXT as the genesis of their next generation OS.
-- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Phar macy Information Technology Group
Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs
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