The Commodore Amiga was about 10 years ahead of both Apple and Microsoft in terms of OS, since it had preemptive multitasking since day one back in 1986. It also beat the Mac in many other areas, such as sound capability, graphics performance and expansion support, but Commodore's marketing team was absolutely terrible. "Switcher" is not multitasking.
Yep. Those guys - Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali - couldn't give two shits about the actual computer and had no clue about what they actually had. They kept the price far too high for too long, even when the competition was catching up fast, and worst of all, spent almost nothing on advertising (especially in mainstream avenues) until near the end of the Amiga's life.
The Amiga GUI sucked, and the OS was unstable. "GURU Meditations", anyone? Also, the OS lacked graphical primitives like Quickdraw had. In MacOS, when an app wanted a circle drawn, the app told Quickdraw to draw a circle, and Quickdraw translated that to the bitmap of the display. With AmigaOS, if an app wanted a circle, it drew a bitmap resembling a circle directly. This made adapting apps to higher resolutions impossible. BTW, anyone remember me from comp.sys.amiga.advocacy?
1.0 through 1.2 was unstable, but once 1.3 came on board stability was greatly improved. I had an Amiga 1000, 500 and 1200 and very rarely experienced crashes after 1.3. All the other points I made are still valid, however: Amiga beat those guys in preemptive multitasking (by about a decade), available colors, sound options and expansion (the Achilles heal of Apple products to this day) Come to think of it, Apple STILL wants you to upgrade your iPhone or Mac to a new one rather than upgrade what you have, which is why, even to this day, no iPhone has had a memory card slot (though fans have requested one since the iPhone 1). Was Workbench the best? No.
Commodore's management was completely inept at marketing this machine. @Markus Bruch, I can't find your comment, but you said: "The problem for the Amiga - as I see it - was, that Commodore didn’t manage to come out with that 'fabulous' AAA chipset." This'll make you cry. Have you ever seen the specs for the AAA (Hombre) chipset? Check this out: (from wikipedia) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ *Design* Hombre is based around two chips: a System Controller chip and a Display Controller chip. The System Controller chip was designed by Dr. Ed Hepler, well known as the designer of the AAA Andrea chip. The chip is similar in principle to the chip bus controller found in Agnus, Alice, and Andrea of the Amiga chipsets. The chip features the following: - A 100+ MHz PA-7150 SIMD microprocessor - An advanced DMA engine and blitter with 3D texture mapping and gouraud shading - 16-bit resolution sound processor with eight voices The Display Controller Chip was designed by Tim McDonald, also known as the designer of the AAA Monica chip. It is similar in principle to the Denise, Lisa, and Monica chips found on original Amigas. In addition, the chipset also supported future official or third party upgrades through extension for an external PA-RISC processor. These chips and some other circuitry would be part of a PCI card, through the ReTargetable Graphics system. There were plans to port the AmigaOS Exec kernel to low-end systems, but this was not possible due to financial troubles facing Commodore at that time. Therefore, a licensed OpenGL library was to be used for the low-end entertainment system. The original plan for the Hombre-based computer system was to have Windows NT compatibility, with native AmigaOS recompiled for the new big-endian CPU to run legacy 68k Amiga software through emulation. Commodore chose the PA-7150 microprocessor over the MIPS R3000 microprocessor and first generation embedded PowerPC microprocessors, mainly because these low-cost microprocessors were unqualified to run Windows NT. This wasn't the case for the 64-bit MIPS R4200, but it was rejected for its high price at the time. *Features* Hombre was designed as a clean break from traditional Amiga chipset architecture with no planar graphics mode support. Commodore also decided to drop support of the original Amiga eight sprites because at the time sprites became less attractive to developers for its limitations compared to fast blitters. Despite lack of compatibility, Hombre introduced modern technologies including these: - a fill rate of 30 million 3D rendered pixels per second (similar to Sony's PlayStation performance) - 16-bit chunky graphic modes (to reduce costs, Commodore abandoned 256 color mode with Color LUT registers) - 32-bit chunky with 8-bit alpha channel - 1280 × 1024 pixel progressive resolution with a 24-bit color palette - one sprite with a 24-bit color palette, used for the mouse pointer - four playfields at 16-bit graphics mode each - 3D texture mapping engine - Gouraud shading - Z-buffering - YUV compatibility with JPEG support - Standard TV and HDTV compatibility - 64-bit internal data bus and registers The chipset could be sold either as a high end PCI graphics card with minimal peripherals ASICs and 64-bit DRAM, or as a lower cost CD-ROM based game system (CD64) using cheap 32-bit DRAM. It could also be used for set-top box embedded systems. According to Dr. Ed Hepler, Hombre was to be fabricated in 0.6 µm 3-level metal CMOS with the help of Hewlett-Packard. HP had fabricated the AGA Lisa chip and collaborated in the design of the AAA chipset. Commodore was planning to adopt the Acutiator architecture designed by Dave Haynie for Hombre before it filed bankruptcy and went out of business. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I would have creamed my jeans, as they say....
I was a developer on the LISA, in 1983. The Lisa was never marketed as a general use computer for the public, nor was it replaced by the Mac -- it was specifically provided to upcoming Mac developers to create software so that when the Mac was released in 84, there would be software for it. The Mac, in its original form, was not suitable for development, since it had reduced memory and no hard drives. I developed the first telecom package for the Mac, for "Aegis Development" - long since defunct.That software was for serial communications, so it had terminal emulators, modem interfaces, and transfer protocols common at that time for serial-based file transfer. The OS was promised to be compatible with Mac (with some known variations primarily to support software development). As I recall, the Lisa was either given or leased to companies that signed appropriate agreement with Apple.
I just wanna say thank you. My dad was with Apple 1981 - 1995, and we had a very rough time as a family. As an adult myself, this video opened up a better conversation and brought us closer together. Thank you.
@@LMB222 I can't speak for him, but it was a different time, and a lot of people stayed with one company if they thought the idea was good. But the management "style" of the past 20 (?) years has turned loyalty into a one-way expectation, and the only way to advance while staying technical is to switch companies -- there are only so many team leads compared to middle managers.
If you told someone thirty years ago that Apple would become the first company to be worth a trillion dollars, they would have told you to get your head checked.
My 'computer class' teacher in high school in '98 routinely made fun of me for liking Apple and having the idea that they'd do some great things. I wonder what that fellow is up to now.
Well, the first in modern times perhaps, though not the first in history. Click link below to find out more! Enjoy! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-coIn8DopwY0.html
@@MattExzy funny, apple didn't do anything interesting or innovative for years until the release of the ipod in 2001, and even that, whilst largely popular, was a horrible device that tied you into a walled garden drm infested music library and vastly inferior to alternatives such as iriver. So if you really were claiming they were somehow amazing in 1998 you either could see the future or just loved their horrible dated power pc based computers and OS. Apple fans WERE a joke before the iPhone and OSX, and thats coming from someone who likes their stuff nowadays. Their customer service is a joke though. See Louis rossmann for that.
Mathead - quite extensively, yes. I've been using a few Macs in the mid-80s, and when I finally got my own SE/30 in 1988 it came with System 6. As I wrote somewhere else, I used to leave the machine on all day long, sometimes even overnight or for a few days, saving my work only when it was finished. Hangs and crashes on the Mac? Yes, the frequent kernel panics of OS X. The classic System might have sadmacced me ten times in fifteen years, and it has happened almost exclusively with Pro Tools.
il biggo: I remember frequent crashes with systems earlier than 6. Usually, the Mac would just freeze, often with a flashing, empty alert box on the screen. Or it contained words like: "Sorry, can't continue because of &(/6%)%2=&3"". Or the screen would freeze with parallel vertical lines and noise similar to an electric shaver. I loved my Macs and I still do but that was a great part of my day-to-day experience with early Mac Systems.
Mathead - Parallel vertical lines, I can relate to that: the SE/30 badly needs recapping since the early 2000s .-D Seriously, I never experienced any of the stuff you mentioned. Bad software, yes, I've seen some. I even caused a few crashes myself, by tinkering with stuff I shouldn't have tinkered with (particularly MacsBug). But the OS itself in everyday use has always been stable as a rock to me. Guess I've been lucky, or you haven't.
For a Mac Fan, those Copland years were just this constant drumbeat of "Something great is coming, it's coming, any day now we'll have it, it's coming..." until we realized it wasn't ever coming...
Oh, it was worse. Every Mac-related magazine seemed to have a "Copland!" feature every month or two. It was so constantly hyped, and they'd shoot out screenshots of supposed actual builds that Are Totally Real And Coming Soon, Guys. It was gonna be a revolution of the Mac in ways that'd never be the same, too, it wasn't just cool features. It was supposed to be like the difference between a normal human and superman in terms of how it was going to make use of a PowerPC (of course, I had to upgrade since one magazine suggested that PPC 601 computers wouldn't get Copland).
Copland was in our minds just a kluge bridge to what we _really_ wanted, which was project *Gershwin.* That was the one that competed directly with Windows 95: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system) _Copland's planned successor, codenamed _*_Gershwin,_*_ was intended to add advanced features such as application-level multithreading._
Kiyoshi Kirishima even jobs wasn’t enough, the only reason why apple is still alive is because of the huge investments Microsoft made in apple in the 90s to get them back and profitable.
Nope. I don't know why people still think MS saved Apple. In fact it was all orchestrated by Steve Jobs because MS was caught stealing Quicktime codes, and the "investment" was really an out-of-court settlement, and Jobs realised suing Microsoft is waste of time and money because MS will just drag the lawsuit. www.theregister.co.uk/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_150m/ www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-microsoft-saved-apple/ web.archive.org/web/20041012044019/news.com.com/MS+to+invest+150+million+in+Apple/2100-1001_3-202143.html www.thefreelibrary.com/APPLE+AND+MICROSOFT%3A+JOBS+BAREFOOT+UNDER+A+TREE.-a053999515
When the OS7 screenshot was up, I had to pause for a moment to admire the fact that the machine had Escape Velocity installed on it. What a classic game.
It's more amazing that macOS has technically been around much, much longer. Take a look at the demos of the original NextStep OS and how similar it is to the macOS of this day. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-j02b8Fuz73A.html
I used it for graphics work for maybe five years or so. I recall some crashing, but it wasn’t that bad. I mean I got work done. Of course a lot depends on how you use it. Maybe you guys were pushing its limits more. Anyway, yeah FreeBSD under the hood was a game changer. Seems a little odd not to mention it. But maybe he wanted to focus on the dev hell aspects of the story, which are admittedly more interesting.
@@lo-fidevil2950 I used it for 2d art for work, and photoshop crashed sometimes (definitely more than os9 which never did), but the real nightmare was in my spare time when I was trying to do 3d. That crashed all the time, and with different software.
I remember first seeing that stylized blue X from the logo in high school, I thought it looked hella cool. We were lucky enough to have some powermacs G4s and photoshop in a class (2002).
evandarkfire: _"Thank you for remaking this video, the original one had horrible quality."_ Well... the old version of this video was probably edited on _Windows Movie Maker._ This new one probably on _Final Cut X_ 🤪
NeXT was a great example of Steve's vision, it was a very wise move on Apple's behalf to get NeXT and Steve back into Apple. I have been using Mac since 1986, I have used pretty much every OS from Apple, including Apple DOS, Lisa OS etc etc.. Mac OSX was a massive leap forward. I remember when I first used 10.1 on a G4. This was the first time I was able to import music from a CD at the same time as playing music from iTunes and work on multiple sofware programs whilst doing those tasks, super easy, super quick.
@@evanbarnes9984 Yeah, weird actually, especially since the original Mac OS (pre NeXT) was more or less based on Unix, so I honestly think that it was not multitasking before this time purely because Apple were afraid of how it would perform on the hardware they supplied. Prior to Mac OS X, the operating system was painful when it came to "multi-tasking". Even if you clicked on a menu at the top of the screen, it would hold up almost every process running.
I remember noticing that when using my school's computers at the time which were Macintosh Color Classics that had some version of System 7 installed. Switching tasks would cause the app/game I was leaving to stop making sound and I found it jarring because I had never experienced that when using my parent's Windows 95 computer at home. It's not the only reason, but falling behind so badly in OS development was probably a big reason why they nearly went under in those days.
Interesting, I've ripped CDs while listening to music in iTunes on Mac OS 9 before, and I'm sure the Bondi Blue iMac G3 I was doing it on was plenty capable of doing more than that. Of course, it had a RAM upgrade beyond it's original 32MB. Can't speak for 8.x or anything before System 6, though. The only other times I got the chance to use Mac OS really outside of a very brief time with 8 on a Centris 610 was running System 6 and 7 on my Macintosh SE and PowerBook 180, and let me tell you that "sluggish" does not begin to describe System 7.5's performance on a Macintosh SE with it's original 20MB Miniscribe hard disk! Let me also tell you, however, that there was strong reasoning that OS X dropped support for anything slower than a G3. I assure you it would have been nothing short of an awful experience on a 603/604 or god forbid a 601. Even on some lower spec G3s it was a struggle.
@@AiOinc1 Hey there! Sounds like you may have been in the Mac game for a long time. I'm much the same. Whilst pre OS X systems could do these things, a lot of what happened was NOT true multi-tasking. I can even remember once having a process completely stop when selecting from the Menus at the top. Very bad indeed! Later versions improved a lot, but still did not even get close to OS X. Also a really bad experience was AppleTalk - nice idea, but once you had more than a few Macs connected, made networks extremely busy and prone to issues.
Steven Schneider OS X was a complete overhaul of the Mac OS And Windoze copied the Dock idea and added it to vista I witnessed all of this happen Today in 2018 you can run windows on your Mac if need be Using BootCamp and other stuff using Wine like games I shall not use BootCamp Can a PC do that ? Also you can run Android apps using Bluestacks If you need to.
Right, and, although I say it myself, I never looked much at the look. I was thrilled by that fact that here there was a real new OS. What with Unix underneath and stuff. Yeah, even if the very first releases felt often clunky, I made the transition pretty immediately, relying on 9 just were absolutely necessary. OS X was the reason I stayed with the Mac.
Macorian OS X was why I stayed too But I like the fact that Apples hardware isn't cobbled together junk like a pc Unix made the OS pretty stable and the bugs were reduced through the app sand boxing I worked in the retail environment selling them so I'm not just saying stuff I used them too I used to talk to many Mac users 😊
I was just about to make a very similar comment, i am in full agreement. I felt OS X to be quite the revolution at the time. Who remembers the little demo program Jobs ran at it's announcement that just crashed to demonstrate how nothing else was effected. Seriously stable OS. It did have some clunkiness to it with permissions but a lot of that got polished out real quick.
We all know what the best home computer OS was in the late 80s, and early 90s. A beautiful GUI, preemptive-multitasking, and blessed with powerful hardware. It wasn't DOS It wasn't Windows It wasn't MacOS It was AmigaOS!!
I remember with _some_ fondness a secondhand Mac II a friend gave me... he called it a "frankenmac", it had a Radius Rocket accelerator card. Watching it boot was a trip; the mobo's 020 cpu would boot, hand off to the accelerator card, and then the card's 040 would finally boot the main OS (System 7.5). It was clever enough to continue using the mobo's CPU as a co-processor.
As a network admin that supported a mixed network of about 300 computers 1/4 Mac, 3/4 windows, 1 AS400, and a couple Unix/Linux servers. I can say that nearly 2/3 of my support calls were from the Macs. Mac, Crash different.
@@Applecompuser It's not the same now. When MacOSX was introduced they crashed all the time. All. The. Time. It took them at least 8 years to get them minimally stable. I think my Centris crashed twice in 5 years with os8/9, my G3 crashed at least once a day with OSX.
Back in the 90's I got my hand on a copy of a developer build of Copland. Unstable is an understatement. It always felt like your entire computer was about to self-destruct.
weird audio thing here no? 3:38 "...and while the second version... *seems to trail off* ...and even more so Windows 3!" I think its just a small cutting error, but maybe it's not even an error maybe its like in the right place but I'm hearing it wrong? What's your call on that? It doesn't break the video. I was surprised to find that I was not already subbed to them, I enjoyed the Clippy documentary, I should've subbed then
13:05 "If you think about it, OS X has actually been around and supported for longer than the original first nine versions of Mac OS" Except you literally cannot run a single piece of OS X software from 2001 on modern Macs (well, without emulating an older Mac on top of it, but that doesn't count).
Apple did one thing Microsoft could never do. They maintained a beautiful and consistent OS design for 20 years. Imagine if Microsoft stopped messing with the design during the Windows 7 era. Users might actually be happy!
The only thing I don't like about macOS (or Mac OS) is that they screwed up almost every goddamn time on legacy support. Microsoft wins in this regard. You can't run the original Halo for Mac OS on the latest hardware, or at least without full emulation. The last version of the Mac OS that supported the old PowerPC software was Snow Leopard.
@@nathanlamaire They don't screw up. It is intended. The same way the fought files compatibility until they couldn't do it anymore. Trying to use Mac files on a Pc in the 90s was an absolute nightmare.
Excellent video and great explanation of 'cooperative multitasking'. Apple had a better OS as far back as 1988; it was called A/UX. I'll never understand why Apple never built Copland on top of it, just as Microsoft did with Windows NT and Windows XP.
The most probable reason why A/UX, Apple's own Unix distribution, didn't go anywhere was that commercial BSD/Unix licensing, due to where it came from, was an *absolute nightmare* all the way into the late 90s. Linux was originally created because of what a nightmare this was and how it caused Unix-based operating systems to be really expensive. Other than that there's also the fact that being descended from the mainframe world Unix-based operating systems were much more advanced than most other operating systems and were thus much heavier to run. In contrast classic MacOS, being based on a nanokernel architecture, was very simple and thus took up little of the computers' processor time and memory for itself even by desktop operating system standards.
Windows NT was developed from scratch with one of the core architects of VMS from DEC. Windows NT (which includes XP) are constructed a lot more like VMS than UNIX, but over time it has been beaten into supporting some amount of other stuff (there used to be a POSIX subsystem as well as an OS/2 subsystem).
Oh man, I remember working on Copland in 1996, and finally the "real" OS 8. Still have some extra unused DR1 CD envelopes. There are some small errors in this video, but I don't really want to spend my night spitting 'em out.
V. Sigma well tbf XP came out in 2001, Tiger and Leoaprd from 2005 and 2007 respectively. But to compare say Tiger/Leopard with Vista, I don’t think many people will come to Vista’s defence!
@@garykildall4111 I'd come, by service pack 2 (I know, it was too late and the damage was done), Windows Vista was pretty stable, and the interface, although it looks old by today's flat standards, it's pretty good looking
@@bluesdealer I will take Vista's defence no matter what. I haven't used Tiger of Leopard, but I've used Vista for years (from age 7 to 12, soo of course I'm biased). I never had problems. Idk about OSX, but wonder why, if the gap was so huge, were the apple ads of the days talking mostly about Windows rather than OSX. (I only saw the ads years after the facts, and they are petty at best honestly) iLife was great though.
20 years is an amazingly conservative estimate for the lifetime of the modern macOS. Remember, this is a Unix. The conceptual underpinnings, if not any actual code, date back to 1969. It has been continually updated since then to support new technologies and to be more and more user friendly. Given the five decades of advancement and upgradability that macOS is currently the bleeding edge of, I see no reason to think it and all other Unix and Unix-like systems can't continue innovating and adapting for at least as long as we're using computers based on the von Neumann model.
No, OSX is not UNIX. The mishmash of free operating systems that Apple co-opted to use for OSX were taken from 4.4BSD-Lite that was famously sued by USL to have every last vestige of UNIX code removed from it. The Mach microkernel is not part of UNIX history, nor is the big steaming pile of proprietary stuff that bears no resemblance whatsoever to UNIX that runs on top and cannot be separated out or opened up.
@@StringerNews1 Thats completely wrong. macOS is absolutely UNIX, it is certified by the official UNIX certification agency, and in fact macOS has been a certified UNIX for years.
@@Billy123bobzzz sorry but _you_ are the one who is wrong to use that as an excuse to call me wrong. The fact that the UNIX brand was separated from the UNIX code base decades after the fact, and that now companies can pay to have UNIX branding does not magically give OSX roots all the way back to 1969. Reality does not work that way. The Open Group owns the UNIX trademark, nothing more, nothing less. They are "officais" for themselves only, so don't be a pompous ass with me. You're not pulling the wool over anyone's eyes with all the bluster. And the fact is that OSX was _not_ certified for a number of years because Apple failed to pay its debts.
Great rollup. That last line is pretty amazing - nearly 20 years of OS X with only evolutionary changes to the underlying system. I had forgotten about the dark days of System 7 waiting and waiting and waiting for 8. I basically went from System 8 to OS X because of pausing my upgrade cycle. It was amazing the difference and no, it was not just a face lift. Thanks Steve!
Thanks AT&T, Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley, Linus Torvalds and all the other developers who provided the FOSS that Steve stole and made proprietary. Give credit where it's due.
To be fair to the classic Mac OS, it was only early versions where "if one program freezes it brings down the whole system". Starting from System 7, if the currently-active program froze entirely, you could hit Command-Option-Escape to bring up the Force Quit dialog box. It worked at least 70% of the time. (the other 30% of the time, the force-quit would cause the whole system to freeze or bomb). Also starting from System 7, one program could crash without bringing down the whole computer. You'd get a "This application has unexpectedly quit" message and you could continue working with your other programs, or relaunch the crashed one, although often relaunching it would cause a bomb or a hard freeze. Apple caused a lot of the stability problems themselves by packing in every possible extension or control panel under the sun, which would sometimes cause conflicts. The first thing I did after installing the OS or working on somebody else's computer was to disable any superfluous extensions and control panels. It would make the computer start up faster and be less prone to crashing. It was acceptably stable after that, rarely bombing or hard-freezing.
Not to mention OS7 was so vastly superior to Win3.1 in usability. It's hard to grasp now, because so far in time it may seem like OS7 features were very basic, but at the time Windows didn't even have the most basic stuff like moving icons with the mouse. MacOS7 user interface already behaved like a current OS.
Next was based on Unix for two major reason; 1. It hade real multitasking. The previous os wasn't real multitasking and buggy as you mentioned. 2. Unix was more safe and not exposed as previous os because the Unix was for servers. Even windows understand the power of Unix and their next os is based on Linux. Great video but the sound on the mic low quality. I suggest a dynamic mic like SM7 or similar. Even SM57 would work like sharm with a desktand. ;)
True, I still think it could potentially have been developed into a more efficient, faster OS than what became of OS-X. But with the Unix core underneath, OS-X is at least a solid system, more so than the older MacOS.
One of the causes of instability in macOS 9 (and probably earlier versions as well) is that memory wasn’t protected: any program could alter the content of any part of the memory, including parts occupied by the OS.
I remember the OS 9 days. I brought my WindowsNT machine in to work. The rest of the machines were Macs, mostly dedicated editing machines with tons of RAM and system resources. They would crash about every 2 hours or so on average. My NT has multitasking 3D animation software, photoshop and office software. I rebooted once a month on principle. It was remarkably clean and stable then. Also managed to turn the office computers in a small render farm at night. We also had Final Cut Pro for the PC, before Apple bought it.
Windows NT was THE BEST OS from Microsoft. I never ever crash 3.51 and belive me.. I try hard. ;-) 4.01 wasn't so good. To many M$ code inside I think. ;-)
Crazy how it's the other way around now. My mac has crashed 3 (maybe 4) times since I bought it. 6 years ago. And that's only counting macOS crashing (not kernel panic, just a freeze which I wouldn't wait through); Counting the time I installed Windows 10 on it wouldn't be fair because it never lasted a day without crashing and taking all my work with it.
@@LemonChieff Colossal BS. My Windows 10 crashed maybe twice on 5 separate computers for the last 3 years since its release. While my Macbook Pro I have from work crashed twice in the last week. One of those times forced to use Apple Care and be without a computer for 2 days.
@@Vapefly0815 Your mileage may vary. For the short time I used it for if it crashed once a day that was an achievement. You can call it whatever you want it's still not stable and I still won't use it. I rather use wine in arch if I need to use some windows software since it ends up always being more stable somehow.
You forgot to mention MkLinux! Linux ported to run on top of ("co-located" actually) a Mach 3.0 microkernel that that was ported to PPC mac hardware. Mach contained the device drivers and VM subsystem (that's virtual memory, not virtual machine, kids). That was a project between Apple and OSF, around 1997. After it was abandoned, some of us in the user community took over maintenance and some improvements. (I improved the serial driver in Mach and for a time, integrated each Linux release into the mklinux source tree, which involved a lot of ifdefs.) Later on, the native monolithic linux kernel was ported to PPC and macs (eventually even the Nubus PPC ones like the 7100/80 I had). Fun fact: ext2's on-disk structures were originally native endian, not little endian.
Linux is at 1.68% according to statcounter (world figures). And one can only speculate what the 1.97% unknown is. Chrome OS is considered separately, and is at 1.08%. gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
I said mostly. Also some distros like Fedora change information in the user agent tag within, for example chrome, from "Linux_x64" to "Fedora Linux" Meaning they'll show up as "other" on some of these statistical analysis sites.
All 3 of my desktop computers run Ubuntu Linux and my laptop runs Arch Linux. I don't dual boot. (Actually, I have a laptop with Windows 10, but it hasn't been turned on in over 6 months.) I'm happy to be in the 4.7%.
Very nice informative video! OSX was such a disappointment when it released. My new iMac had OS9, with a free upgrade to OSX in the mail. After the upgrade my Mac was unusable with input audio and other important feature completely inoperable. I ended up restoring the system back to the original os9 and stayed there until OSX 10.3. By that time my iMac was pretty almost obsolete.
OSX was AWFUL. I never had a computer crashing so much as my G3 with OSX. I don't remember my previous Macs crashing pretty much ever when using OS7/8/9. I'm sure they did sometimes, but always after installing something or doing something wrong in the system folder... the G3 with OSX crashed randomly at least twice a day.
I enjoyed this, and I imagine it's mostly factually accurate, although Mac OSX shipped in March of 2001, not Sept. (trivial I know). Thing is every few years there are fewer & fewer people around who recall actively using computers to get stuff done in the time before being connected "online". I bought my 1st Mac in Dec '92 for music production to replace dedicated proprietary MIDI hardware sequencers and allow for non-linear audio editing in an integrated software environment… what we commonly refer to as a DAW today. Windows PCs from the end of the 80s thru the early years of the 90s were still shit compared to the Mac for music production, desktop publishing, and graphic design, page layout & image editing. During this era, my friends, family and acquaintances who ran PCs at home constantly bitched about problems they suffered that as a Mac user I was free of. Of course technical literacy was low among many of those folks because they (like me) had not grown up using computers and mastering the Mac OS was more intuitive by far vs DOS or early versions of Windows. I had taught myself the OSs of many synthesizers, samplers, drum machines and Roland MC sequencers, so I had become accustomed to "picking up" new technology MAINLY from reading the manuals (which most of my peers had little patience for). It's probably true that I've conveniently forgotten some of the Mac woes I went through in pre-OSX days, but overall my 26yrs of Mac usage has been great and my choice of computing platform arguably led to my having spent 7yrs working on the main campus at Infinite Loop in Cupertino until my retirement in 2011 about 3 weeks before Steve Jobs' passing. If I were a "gamer", I would have left the Mac for WIndows a long time ago… but as a musician (hobbyist now), the Mac is still a great choice for music production and general purpose usage. The integration between the Apple trilogy of Mac, iPhone & iCloud makes for a pretty slick digital lifestyle experience with minimum fuss, setup & maintenance.
Robert44444444 I’m a gamer and musician so life is rough. I currently maintain a Mac as a daily driver but also have a self built gaming rig running Windows. I wish Apple gave a damn about 3D APIs (Sony made OpenGL work for the PS3-PS4; what’s Apple’s excuse? Where’s Vulcan support?) and offered the hardware value they did in the mid-2000s, actually shipping decent GPUs or offering user upgradability.
@@bluesdealer I read somewhere that companies are really insincere about standards. When they are weak, then they lobby for openness and collaboration, but when they feel that they are strong then they push their own proprietary standards. Late 1990’s to about 2010, Apple added OpenGL and TCP/IP and Java, and donated OpenCL to the Khronos Group and developed WebKit in the open, and so on. Late 2010’s Apple feels that they are strong, and therefore they are splitting up with the Khronos Group, they have deprecated OpenGL and will likely remove it within the next few years, and they insist that 3D applications should use Metal and the various Kits (ARKit, etc.) instead of open APIs. In short, they do care about 3D APIs, but they believe that they can get developers to use their proprietary APIs instead of OpenGL and Vulkan.
This video really made me appreciate how far computers have come . My OLD laptop right now is like a supercomputer compared to what was available back then . 1MB of RAM ? wow . And I though 4GB was bad .
Computers back then even when they were new were barely useable for anything productive if you already had a graphical environment running. Have you tried doing anything more advanced than word processing on a 128K Macintosh? You can't. I have a Mac Plus from 1987 that originally had 1MB of RAM and even that seems bare minimum even for applications from the late 80s/early 90s. It's been upgraded to 4MB which makes a massive difference and even enables things like PDF editing and primitive web browsing but I've still run into memory errors trying to uncompress software with Stuffit Expander. Even with the limitations, it's pretty damn impressive what can be done with 4MB of RAM.
I had to wait in the 90's until I collected enough money to buy 32MB RAM in order to run Windows NT, and be able to ditch the horrible windows 95. I think it happened around 1997.
@@marcuscook5145 We did plenty with a LCII. Freehand was amazing, and QuarkExpress got the work done really well. Photoshop was hard, but using brightness and contrast/levels on images was already a huge leap forward.
As soon as the 68030 showed up in the hardware builds, the integrated MMU would have made it feasible to just build (completely independently) something akin to modern software virtualizers such as Hypervisor. It would then run the existing real-mode Mac OS in virtualized containment - one program launched into one virtual container. This Mac "hypervisor" would be where a pre-emptive multi-tasking layer of control would reside as well (the co-operative multitasking would now just be directed down into this multi-tasker - a program could be suspended because it relinquished control, because it invoked blocking OS calls like file system, network, etc, or because of a clock interrupt forcing a context switching to give time to another loaded and running program - the classic Mac OS trap dispatch table made it super easy to patch the official OS calls with customizations. I did that kind of thing all the time back in the day.) Each program would be isolated with its own address space - the page mapping would make it look to the program like it owned the entire machine. It would not be able to stomp on the memory of another program. And it would be executing in user mode and would not be able to execute privileged kernel mode instructions of the 68030, thus remain confined to its user mode process. Today there are people in the retro community that would be skillful and knowledgeable enough to go and build such a 68030 Mac "hypervisor" system program - running the class Mac OS. It would be about a 6 month project to get a decent first working version and from there on would be just spit and polish effort. The retro community is capable of doing some amazing system and hardware original design work in respect to all the old class computers. Is a shame that Apple could never manage to do something itself that didn't become a bloated quagmire of corporate paralysis. Alas, what is in the way of doing such a retro community hobby project now is that there is no complete 68030 CPU (or successor) being newly manufactured any more. The famous Vampire accelerator boards have re-implemented the 68000 in FPGA and they run many times faster than any of Motorola's original ASIC CPUs, but they implement just the main CPU and floating point instructions and have left out support for the MMU. Without the MMU, building a Mac "hypervisor" program as described is just not possible. So currently there's just no newly manufactured retro-themed hardware for such a project to live on going forward. This just remains the "what if" concept of what Apple could have done (pretty easily) as soon as they started selling 68030-based Mac hardware.
Very entertaining and informative. Lots of great info and graphics. You covered all the major points and introduced lots of minor points too! Thanks for making this video.
I remember when reinstalling Mac OS 6 that I had to manually add the true type fonts to the system directory...and, similar to Win 95, the stack of floppies that were necessary for an install.
Boy did both the Mac and PC really stink circa 1988-1994. Now I remember why I was such a Commodore Amiga fan in those days. Preemptive multi-tasking, 4096 colour graphics, dedicated sprite hardware, built in sound, etc starting in 1985 :-). Give me Amiga Workbench OS anyday back then. Loved my trusty Amiga 500. I could never understand at the time why anyone would spend 4X as much for an inferior PC or Mac. A remember how a $500 Amiga 500 with its 7MHz CPU could play games that would outperform similar games from a contemporary $2000 486 running at 33MHz with a VGA card.
OS/2 on PC had preemptive multitasking since its first release in 1987. I started in 1993 with version 2.1, which was a 32-bit OS with full preemptive multitasking for native programs, DOS programs, and 16-bit Windows programs. It's not the PC that sucked, but the software that most people ran it with.
Interestingly, MacOS X and the Newton also became precursor of two important products Apple sells today: the iPhone and iPad. Why? Because some of the code behind MacOS X went into what became iOS, and the early ARM processor design used on the Newton eventually became the basis for the Apple A-Series system on a chip (SoC) when Apple bought out PA Semi in 2008.
When you talk about preemptive multitasking for personal computers, there's just no way you can miss talking about Amiga's Workbench, which had it from its first version in 1985, on the exact same CPU that Macintosh had, i.e. a 7MHz 68k Motorola. I'm putting a thumb down because you seemed to have chosen to ignore this!
Good video but needed some explanation on how Apple got from NEXT to Darwin, they are both BSD but as you know there are several flavors of BSD. My understanding is that Darwin is based on BSD proper while NextBSD is based on FreeBSD with some components from Darwin pulled over? Somewhat confusing.
The problem with cooperative multitasking [sic] isn't crashes, it's priorities. Programs are either CPU bound or I/O bound. Preemptive multitasking allows you to give higher priority to I/O bound tasks, so they are responsive to external events (like the user) while still giving most of the CPU to the CPU bound tasks. With cooperative multitasking, you have to give higher priority to the UI, to keep it responsive, and that makes all the background apps lag.
I'll give MacOS credit where it's due. They took the whole "call it TEN and just update it forever while never changing the name" concept and applied it successfully well before Windows 10.
The problem with the classic line of Mac OS was that in order to cut costs after the Lisa failed, they cut corners and got rid of things like protected memory and multitasking which allowed them to make the Mac OS run on hardware with only 128k of memory. This allowed for a much cheaper GUI-based computer from Apple but at the cost of boxing them in when future hardware updates would have allowed features like protected memory and preemptive multitasking to be included. Since they did not want to lose backwards compatibility they had to forgo these important features until OS X which abandon backwards compatibility with Classic Apps (in favor of emulation). They where able to sowhat what address the multitasking issue (as a built-in feature) with the cooperative multitasking of System 7 (no more need for the separate app multifinder) but with the issue that you had to specify memory allotment for each app you planned to run at the same time and be sure not to exceed the total memory of your system. Of course if any one of the running apps crashed because it strayed into the memory allotment/area of another running app, your whole system would crash forcing a reboot of the system. As addressed in the video, it also suffered from the issue that is a app crashed it couldn’t give back control of the CPU causing the whole system to crash. OS X does not suffer from thee problem as it has preemptive multitasking and protected memory which allows the OS to properly manage memory for apps so none can stray outside their boundaries and if one does crash I does not take down the system. Only if something causes a Kernel Panic does the system go down completely (say a driver issue, for example) but that’s rare In my experience with OS X. The Unreleased Copeland OS was to have both protected memory and backwards compatibility but it turned out to be unworkable so they turned to an OS 9 virtual machine as the solution in PPC versions of OS X (know as the “Classic environment”).
While not official, I don't see why Linux wouldn't work with Mac computers. Debian for a while supported PowerPC and there is nothing stopping you from booting any version of Linux on the newer x86 Intel compatible Macs. Granted, I don't know how well Linux ran on anything in the 90s, that was before my time as a Linux user. I have however booted Ubuntu on a Mac book though so I know there is a least some basic support for it. Hardware support like video drivers and wireless card drivers are probably a mixed bag though.
Os10 was barely a rewrite the kernel and a lot of the os wasn't written by apple. FreeBSD was used to revamp the system. They completely left NEXT software and went to freeBSD bc it was FREE Open Source. And ALREADY compatible with Unix programs.
Had things been left up to Jef Raskin, the Mac would have totally flopped after its release, and Apple would not exist today. It's a good thing that Steve Jobs took over that project. Without the technology from NeXT, we would not have macOS, iOS, watchOS, or tvOS.
Loved the video; I lived through most of this, and it's a major nostalgia trip for me to watch it. Obviously this video is mostly concerned with software. Still, the story of MacOS isn't complete without considering how it had to hop between CPU architectures - starting on Motorola 68000 chips, moving to PowerPC, then going to the same Intel chips as Windows. It's a tribute to the skill and work of Apple's engineers that these moves to different hardware happened as successfully as they did. Also a story of the engineers fixing management's mistakes in picking the wrong chip architectures. Might make an interesting video.
Motorola and PowerPC are superior chips to Intel, the problem with them is that they didn't capture the market like Microsoft & Intel did because in great part, the great arrogance of Steve Jobs and that he wasn't willing to make shitty computers like Microsoft and Intel were.
@@laughingvampire7555 MS and Intel didn't make computers, and only in the past maybe 8 years has Microsoft made "computers " (more the MS Studio and then their laptops/tablets, which actually aren't that bad, especially considering the higher-end ones run a normal version of Windows which is beneficial because it runs desktop software, whereas for Apple's they still have two different OSes and not all desktop apps are available for the iPad or lack some features due to limitations of the iPad, but Intel and MS really didn't get into the PC building business). You may be thinking of IBM.... And actually when the IBM PC came out, It gave Apple a good run for its money and I'd say that when the clones started to come out (Compaq, etc) that's where non-Apple computers started to take over and gain a bunch of market share because now you weren't tied one company, and there were other OSes available at the time (OS/2 which failed in the market place) and a few others (such as Linux as well, which could and still can run on Intel-based hardware).
So here's the deal, Sun Microsystems built its first work stations using a Motorola 68000 couple with an external MMU, now in 1986 Tandy came out with the Color Computer 3, which had an 8 bit Motorola 6809 that could only address 64K of memory. They put a new graphics chip into the CoCo3 which also had an 8K paged-based memory management unit built into it, which enabled using 128K (but could actually allow up to 2MB, which many CoCo3 have been enhanced to). This MMU did address translation transparent to software applications - each program seeing its own 64K address space of pages. The OS9 operating system was enhanced to take advantage of this MMU - it would put the kernel in a protected memory space and each process would get its own address space. Apple could have done exactly the same kind of external, page-based MMU for the Mac computer design as well - on the cheap just as Tandy which put their MMU into their low cost home computer CoCo3. Everyone knew how to build an OS to take advantage of this - look at the OS9 team. This kind of approach to MMU would have been perfectly fine until the arrival of integrated MMU in the Motorola 68030. Apple and Steve Jobs really blew it from the very beginning by jettisoning memory management hardware as being too exotic. Tandy and the CoCo3 totally show them up.
There were two key changes that Apple made: OS X was unix (which has been around since 1970's and is thriving), and the switch from their own CPUs to Intel's x86. Instead of worrying about an OS kernel and building chips, they put their effort into what they were good at: nice user experience and awesome hardware.
The CPUs weren't made by Apple - that was Motorola (68xxxx), MOSTEK (65xx) and IBM (PowerPC). Even the Ax series SOCs now are ARM cores with others' peripherals. But you're right - Apple is comprised of cooks. They don't make ingredients, just the finished dish.
You should check out the prices on the Apple III. Over $4,000 and complete garbage. Insane prices on crappy hardware has always been their trademark. Kinda funny how the 128K Mac was supposed to use a Motorolla 6809 processor and retail for $1,000. It ended up selling with almost the same hardware but for $2,500, just because management thought it was so awesome. It was a sales disaster.
Customer service and GOOD hardware. You ever actually open up a Mac and physically work on it? I fixed PCs for 20 years. Plastic crap. My laptop is solid aluminum, and the build quality is excellent.
As someone who tried Mac OS X 10.0 (cheetah) when it was included as an optional install alongside OS 9 with the iMac G3s in 2001, it certainly had some issues at first with it being sluggish and lacking DVD playback & CD-R burning support at first. Version 10.2 (Pumah) fixed all those issues. 10.2 Jaguar was for me where the OS really strarted to gel. I understand that some still felt OS X 10.2 was still not quit ready for prime time compared to OS 9, but I found the stability and IMO the much improved look of the interface made it worth switching too over from OS 9. I don’t recall 10.2 being totally criticized in the press at the time even if some critics were still claiming it was quit ready yet.
The largest challenge for supporting a macOS build team is the difficulty of providing build/test automation farms at any scale due to the lack of enterprise Apple hardware which can be rack mounted for high density. We have had to use Mac Pros with third party 10Gb thunderbolt adapters and VMware to provide an inhouse dynamic build environment which allowed realtime deployment of various OS versions for development and QA testing. It was that or dedicating Mac Minis to specific OS versions and manually allocating them to individuals. Add to that allocating of developer app signing keys to build, test, and distribute. Ugh.
Cross compiling only gets you binaries but you need Apple h/w to run the OS for build tests of the application w/o violating the EULA, not recommended. Most companies have to work within the EULA.
Apple has had a repeatedly sad and demoralizing history within the Enterprise. It was only because of the server capabilities they bought with NeXT that Apple tried that niche again. There were some excellent XServe blades for a number of years accompanies by excellent Mac OS Server versions 10.2 through 10.4. But as of Mac OS X Server 10.5, everything started to fall apart. There was a strong but small market that loved the stuff, not profitable enough for Apple to bother caring any longer. XServe was killed and Mac OS X Server is in notable decay and decline. I'd be surprised to see Apple make another go at the Enterprise. They've been knocked down too many times. This of course has no relationship to the quality of Windows Server, which has had a shocking history, despite it being the darling OS of the Enterprise. I could lecture about the ramifications of appalling Windows security for hours. It's abysmal.
@@zunipus Apple never committed to being an enterprise vendor. Doing so requires long product support windows to last depreciation and capital investment fiscal cycles. Corp buyers need the option to rely on hardware support until it dies. Instead they acknowledged they are only a consumer product company only interest is short release and support cycles and planned obsolescence.
@@zunipus IIS is probably least secure server on the web. I work as a pentester on a small company and most of the issues present are on IIS. I guess someone with good knowledge and experience can easily hack IIS servers.
At 2:18 it got mentioned that a new Macintosh model was released pretty much every year. Sorry if this is a amateur question but could most of these fixes be patched in to older models by software or did you actually have to essentially buy a brand new computer every year or so to stay up-to-date? Thanks in advance!
It seems like those are software updates and not new models. However, it would not surprise me at all if it was the case that they would only sell the new software with a new PC. The whole 'annual upgrade cycle' that seems to afflict everything in our lives is ridiculous and mostly artificial, with there being many instances of 'new products' being released that were essentially identical to the 'old' product just with a +1 version number. *cough* intel 14nm+++++++
I'd love to go back to using OS X over windows 10, but mac hardware is not only way over priced, but it's just not practical for anything beyond casual usage.
OS X has had numerous problems itself. Between 2001-2006 it started as a 32 bit PowerPC OS, then they rewrote it for 64 bit PowerPC. Then Apple finally smartened up and went x86, so they created a 32 bit x86 OS X. Then they settled on 64 bit x86 soon after. And after OS X Tiger, the platform lost all compatibility with classic MacOS apps. That's a pretty rough record of having to get software developers to do major updates as backwards compatibility falters. Meanwhile, with Windows 10/11 systems you can grab a copy of DOSBOX free online and you can easily run any DOS-Windows software built for Intel's 16 bit 8088 processor from 1979 up to today. This lack of backwards compatibility has always been a serious problem for Apple.
Dang this video makes me feel old. 😐 I was one of those people that hated the “lick-able” Aqua GUI. Not only did it distract from content creation, it looked garish to me. I ended up hacking the Extras.rsc that held the GUI images and redoing the GUI. I had noticed others was doing this, but only in a negligible way. No GUI change. Just colors. Apple would however threaten lawsuits against people that offered their GUI hacks online. I ended up manipulating and all out redoing of all the GUI elements to make OSX look more like a modern Platinum look. I took screenshots and showed people on #macintosh on the Undernet IRC server. Many had asked for a copy, so I put it on my FTP site naming the theme “Sosumi” as a play on the name of the infamous Apple chime hoping if anyone in Apple saw it, they would understand what I was trying to convey by naming it what I did. Still 20 years later you can look up Sosumi theme and find info on it. People even ported it to Windows XP and a BB them.
The first OS X version was released 2001, but quite a few users were stuck with OS 9 until like three years later because a certain application did not run correctly in the Classic environment and the developer didn't release a OS X compatible version. I'm looking at you, Quark, Inc.!
Great video! One aspect that you kind of ignored is the entire software development experience. NeXTStep had and Mac OS (OS X) retains an excellent software development experience. The original Interface Builder ("IB"), Objective-C and related SDK were 10 or more years ahead of their time in the late 1980s. This stands in stark contrast to that of the original Mac OS, MS-DOS and even Windows until Microsoft created Visual Basic (and soon after Visual C++ and its progeny) and Borland created Delphi. The ease and effectiveness with which third party developers can build new and better software is directly coorelated to the commercial success of the platform.
"...Objective-C and related SDK were 10 or more years ahead of their time in the late 1980s. This stands in stark contrast to that of the original Mac OS, MS-DOS..." You mean "stark contrast" as in "apples to oranges comparison? :rolleyes: The late "1980s"? Try a decade later. OSX didn't drop until the end of the century, and old Mac OS didn't come with a free Next computer. Get real. IIRC the original IBM PC came out at the beginning of the decade, not the end, so it was a different computer for a different time. But it did come with a ROM-based BASIC interpreter, and offered a variety of OS/development environment choices ranging from the legacy CP/M (the platform that most users were coming from, Pascal (the predecessor of Delphi) and of course PC-DOS, with numerous 3rd party compilers available. For a developer it was freedom of choice vs. owing your soul to the company store. For the consumer it meant more stuff to run. Props must be given to the FOSS community for contributing (much without their consent) the Mach microkernel, the MkLinux/BSD-Lite OS layer that became Darwin, the GCC compiler and countless visual elements that were swiped from the X Window System. Yeah, it's easy when you copy other people's good work. But it's still _their_ work.
StringerNews1 Ummmm no... the OP is exactly right, Objective-C and the associated dev tools came out in the late 80s, and they are direct ancestors of what would become Mac OS X and Xcode years later.
Antonio Tejada, you can save the RDF bullshit for the True Believers, I know better. Although you can trace the heritage of Objective C all the way back to Smalltalk in the '70s, Interface Builder didn't come from Apple until OSX, and OSX did not exist in the 1980s, full stop. When the intention is to deceive, half-truths are full lies.
+StringerNews1 I worked as a software developer on a project beginning in 1990 that used IB on NeXTStep. IB was been part of NeXTStep since about 1988. OS X is a very direct descendant and essentially the same as NeXTStep. Your facts are just wrong, sorry to say.
I know that was not the point, but we can not forget the fabulois transition Jobs did after migrating the holw operational system from MacOS to MacX, do it again on Mac 10.6, changing from PowerPC to Intell, seamless. Even Gates admited that was very well handled..
I can tell you that macs were never a disaster and when I first started using computers I preferred the mac to the windows stuff anytime. This video is king of making the macOS seem like a disaster when it wasn't. Windows aspired to be more like the mac than anything else.
I was excited about Mac OS X from the get-go. I was pining for that protected memory to prevent OS crashes, and I loved the multitasking capabilities. The old Mac OS couldn't very well manage multiple applications running at once. Even when stable, they were fighting and jostling for CPU time. I remember doing a demo of Mac OS X's multitasking in a community college class. I hauled my big G3 tower in (the blue and white beauty) and showed off having multiple movies playing and whatever else all at once. The Mac had kind of leapfrogged Windows on the home desktop with Mac OS X, because Windows 98 was still the current version then, and that thing was pretty janky. It could be better than the old Mac OS, but Mac OS X blew it away. It was so futuristic for its time. It's remarkable how little the system has changed outwardly since its initial release, too. The biggest thing was reintroducing the Apple Menu, in fact, which they had foolishly left out initially. The dock was nice and all, but the Apple Menu was to Mac OS what the Start Menu was to Windows 95 and beyond.
But since the Mac OS isn’t sold as a separate product, anyone with a Mac has always been able to download it for free. There’s never been any activation or CD key BS like on Windows.
Keep in mind that there was nothing better than the original Mac operating system for desktop use. Yes, Apple knew about pre-emptive multitasking and fact memory management because they already had released those and many other geeky features in the Lisa. The problem mac then was that if you wanted do desktop computing with a graphical user interface and make it somewhat affordable then the Mac was the only game in town because the Lisa was just horrifically expensive. There was no other way of building a graphical interface machine without incurring huge expenses, so the hardware had to be limited to your budget and then the software had to be limited to fit into that very limited hardware. The actual point that the video should have made is that the original Macintosh operating system was a brilliant, groundbreaking, miracle in the personal computer industry. The first Macintosh may have only had 128k of memory but keep in mind that the IBM PC (upon which all Windows to this day are based) only had 64k at that same exact time. When Windows 1, 2 & 3 were released, they were horrible, cheap, almost unusable knockoffs of the Macintosh, which is surprising given the fact that Bill Gates had a copy of the Macintosh source code that Steve Jobs gave him (in order for Microsoft to create apps for Mac, instead Bill Gates plagiarized the Macintosh poorly, very poorly). When the original Macintosh operating system added co-operative multitasking, the haters expended every effort to diss Apple, yet in fact the concept of giving the user's active interface is a concept that is being kludged into operating systems right now, Macintosh just happened to be decades ahead of everyone else.
macOS has plenty of bugs in it, it's not perfect by any means. macOS, iOS and tvOS as is watchOS are descendants of NeXTSTEP in a chronological sense, that is true but there is no actual NeXTSTEP code left in them. Apple replaced the user interface of NeXTSTEP with the Macintosh user interface so that 95% of the NeXTSTEP was eliminated in that one move. The rest of the NeXTSTEP code was slowly eliminated and replaced with Apple original code such as: launchD. In addition to eliminating NeXTSTEP components, Appel replaced UNIX components with its own and then added its own "UNIX" components such as: CpMac; GetFileInfo; Plutil; and two or three dozen other unique "UNIX" commands (see www.matisse.net/OSX/darwin_commands.html for a more elaborate list). Apple was also the first to dump OpenSSL because of its security problems (this happened long before OpenSSL made the headlines for its "issues") and continues to create its own UNIX tools for macOS. So in reality, macOS only used NeXTSTEP as a temporary stepping stone to transition macOS into a UNIX environment with a unique to Apple Macintosh user interface. All of the underpinnings are now FreeBSD with a sprinkling of OpenBSD and a smattering of Apple created UNIX tools. Despite all that I still run into plenty of bugs and weird issues, macOS is still no where near as bad as Windows is and Linux is the biggest kludge I have ever experienced in my life so yes macOS appears to be rock solid, stable and dependable because of its UNIX core and yet there are days where the glitches still show up.
"The problem mac then was that if you wanted do desktop computing with a graphical user interface and make it somewhat affordable then the Mac was the only game in town because the Lisa was just horrifically expensive. There was no other way of building a graphical interface machine without incurring huge expenses, so the hardware had to be limited to your budget and then the software had to be limited to fit into that very limited hardware. " Atari ST says hello. 20% faster due to better design, higher resolution, and one third the cost at only one year later. You could literally buy an ST with a 2D accelerator (blitter), 4MB ram, hard disk, monitor and laser printer just for the price of a Laserwriter, or less than the price of two Mac 512k. This is no surprise, the original Macintosh devteam are very open about them having designed the mac to have a healthy profit margin at $1500 and being incredibly surprised and upset when it was listed at $2500. The realistic profit margin of such a machine by 1985 would be over $2000.
The user interface replacement was simply repainting the widgets. AppKit as a whole did not change much at first. The Foundation framework was refactored quite a bit though so that the objective C interfaces were re-implemented in pure C. Which essentially created the CoreFoundation API's. This refactoring of code is what made the Carbon API possible for the early days of OS X. While we sneer at Carbon today, OS X would not have succeeded with Mac Fans without it. Recall a much more straight forward project called Rhapsody was supposed to just re-paint NeXTSTEP in Mac OS "Platinum" clothing. However Developers did not want to rewrite their Apps in the "new" (for mac developers) NextStep API's. See this video for more info ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-OEAgkF3yL8Y.html
I remember my first Macintosh experience. It was 1990, and the company that I was working for as a college intern had bought a very expensive Mac II with a 25 MHz processor. I had been using the PC up until then, and I found the Mac to be utterly fascinating! The Multifinder was incredibly nifty.
The success of the modern mac is actually the success of Linux. As is Android. We think we live in a windows world but actually we are in the age of Linux. Open Source FTW. Luv and Peace.
I'm fairly certain Linux is a large portion of the other part, but "a large portion" of 4.7% is still pretty small, and "Other" includes things like BSD, Minix, Solaris etc. Sure you could have included Linux just for the name recognition, but that was not the point of the video and it made sense to lump everything in "other" rather than having, say 4% Linux and .7% other or whatever the percentages are. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, I love tinkering with settings and whatnot and I'd be using Linux if I didn't end up wanting to game pretty much every time I install it, and then I run into issues. Gaming on Linux has come a long way in the last few years, but I somehow always end up with weird audio glitches that are obnoxious, or trying to run a modded Skyrim install, where I don't know if the issue is with the mods, or Wine and I spend 36 hours in front of my PC trying to get Skyrim to launch with the mods I want, until I get so fed up with all of it I throw out my Linux install, put Windows back and poof, Skyrim launched with 50+ mods. It's still unstable as all hell, but at least now I can google for support that actually is relevant to my issues, as opposed to trying to troubleshoot things from both the Wine and mod angle. Yes, I could dual boot, but that just puts me in Windows mode perpetually. Last time I dualbooted, I didn't launch my Linux install in over 2 years, because I found it a hassle. I could game in a VM, but then I'd need GPU passtrough, and I don't have the cash to blow on an extra GFX card, not to mention I'd have to dedicate a monitor to the windows VM and loose proper multimonitor. There's a capture-into-window thing for that now, though, but I still need a new GFX card, and it's just a big old hassle for when I just want to launch a game. Where Windows provides me with an experience that's not optimal, but works "well enough" for everything. God I wish Linux gaming just magically worked perfectly without any of these hassles. I'd switch in a heartbeat and never look back
Remember iChat & iChat Video? That was basically done in conjunction with AOL, and was basically a modified version of AIM. The software would later be rewritten into FaceTime. Also the FaceTime cameras were previously called iSight.
System 6 with MultiFinder already had cooperative multitasking -- the Mac always had cooperative multitasking, in that Desk Accessories already did that. From a programmer perspective, there's not much difference between an application and a desk accessory.
From a programmer perspective, there actually is a fair amount different, although some compilers tried to make the distinctions as painless as possible. Applications would sit in a "wait for next event" loop, while desk accessories would receive a "program is waiting in event loop" callback.
The first Google hit for "Inside Macintosh Volume 1" looks like it should have loads of useful information. I have no idea if the link is an authorized or pirate source (Apple might have released that edition into the public domain when it was superceded by others, but I have no idea if they did). Any information about the file system is essentially obsolete (the flat file system got replaced by a hierarchical file system, which is described in Volume IV) as is any information about sound (superceded by the Sound Manager, described in Volume V) but the 1984 Volume 1 is a good place to start. Note that the original development language was Pascal rather than C, but Pascal data types translate fairly easily into C types, except that Pascal strings are preceded by a length byte.
I did listen to the Steve Jobs biography some years ago and I heared a lot of the stories surrounding Lisa and NeXT. Well... NeXT is still "virtually" around, with many of the Objective-C classes being "namespaced" with NS, standing for NeXTStep. Watching this video made me realize that, probably, most 10.0 software could actually still run on modern 10.14, except for a lot of deprecation warnings or some features just outright missing. But there is still access to Carbon, which actually surprises me. So far, I am very happy with macOS, and it has something Windows has only started to work on recently - and that is accessibility. The screen magnification and color inversion have very intuitive controls and are super, SUPER responsive. I am really happy with these, and it is one main reason why I have prefered to use Macs over Windows. But, as mentioned, Windows is catching up, with only small optimizations missing that make my day fast and smooth...and, well, the magnifier does crash in some awkward situations, where it is impossible to reboot through the UI and only via hard-resetting...which sucks. But even so, I am glad that Mac had come down this way so far. But what really makes this unfortunate, is that you have to spend your money on overpriced products in order to actually use it - or build a Hackintosh, which is not very easy, requires a lot of super picky component selections, and is not very stable. It works, yes, but you will jump through a lot of extra loops to make it work smoothly. And, each update can potentially break this, too. I am waiting for the day that Apple may remove the hardware restrictions and make it into a freestanding OS instead. I know - they never will... but at some day, they might. Who knows. o.o...
I remember in elementary school we had eMacs and something about the colorful aqua interface of 10.3 / 10.4 drew me to it as a young kid. Still love MacOS to this day lol.