[aclug-L] Re: BeOS? What is it?

[Tom Hull <thull@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Reinke wrote:
> 
> Steve founded NeXt after beeing kicked out of Apple, and later founded
> Pixar (Toy Story 1 & 2, Bug's Life).

Jobs bought Pixar from Lucasfilm in 1986. Most (possibly all) of the key
technology had been developed earlier at Lucasfilm. Anyone who attended
SIGGRAPH in 1983-86 would have seen short films from Pixar that anticipate
the more recent full-length films. (I see that "Red's Dream" was 1987, but
that was 3rd or 4th in the series.) You would also have noticed that almost
50% of the main presentations were made by Pixar engineers. The basic fact
is that Pixar pretty much cornered the market for top-notch genius graphics
engineers. Pixar also made hardware at that time, which pretty quickly
was supplanted by SGI systems (and now, increasingly, by Linux-based
Beowulf clusters).

> MacOS X (ten) will be released later this year and is based on NeXT. MacOS
> X Server has already been out for a while, but those are the first versions
> of MacOS that are built on NeXT.
> 
> >I don't know if NeXT is based on BSD or not.
> 
> I believe it was at BSD 4.3 at the time Apple bought NeXT.

NeXT kernel was initially Mach. Did they switch at some time? To do so
seems unlikely, for strictly architectural reasons.

> >       Doesn't MacOS run on the Mach kernel?or did it used to
> >but not any more?and what happened to that "blue box, yellow box"
> >stuff (if anyone but me followed that business). Did it all go by
> >the wayside when OS X took over from Rhapsody?(Same time Jobs took
> >over from Amelio, more or less?)
> 
> MacOS itself doesn't run on the Mach kernel, but OS X and MkLinux do.
> Rhapsody was basically the codename during development, I'm pretty sure
> that the blue/yellow box stuff is still in there, but they aren't really
> mentioned anymore. I think they kinda decided to symplify things so the
> general public wouldn't be intimidated by it.

One problem here is that Apple has a whole graveyard of dead operating
system projects. Sometimes it's hard to identify the corpses, and because
it is all top-secret closed source stuff, proper autopsies are impossible.
BSD and Mach both have licenses which allow companies like Apple to use
them any way they see fit, so the software gets sucked in and loses its
identity.

Another problem is that Apple has a ridiculous reputation as some sort
of great innovator. Almost everything they've ever done was pioneered
somewhere else. Even plastic cases (although I can't recall anyone else
making them purple.) What Apple has always done is to take other folks'
technology, make it as cheap as possible, hype it, then overcharge you
for it. Even when they did adopt a technology early, they screwed it up:
e.g., they used SCSI for cheap networking instead of fast disks; they
adopted the Motorola 68000, but were too cheap to use the MMU, so they
turned it into an unprotected 16-bit CPU.

-- 
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 *  Tom Hull * thull@xxxxxxxxxxx * http://www.ocston.org/~thull/
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