It still is "kind of mac"
-Andrew Litt
On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 14:41:00 -0700, Bruce Johnson
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> 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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--
-Andrew Litt
http://skinXP.com
--
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