13 May
2013
13 May
'13
6:11 p.m.
On 5/13/13 4:34 PM, Guy Sotomayor wrote:
- They had a messaging microkernel (just like we
did...except theirs was *very*
primitive). As such, messaging was fundamental to both OS's. They had
decided that the fundamental object in a messaging system was a message.
What that meant was that anything you wanted to do involved invoking a
method on the message. So, if you wanted to say create a new task, you'd
say something like msg(task.create) rather than something more sensible
like task.create(msg).
The people that did it were fans of Cheriton's V Kernel.
What became Pink's kernel can be traced back to an ATG project called 'Opus'
done by Chris Mohler and Chris McFall. There were two camps in ATG back then (1987)
working on what would be Apple's new operating system. Note that ATG was not
a product development group, and in fact, was not liked by product development
because it was rarely concerned with backwards compatibility. The other kernel
was heavily influenced by RSX and VMS (Nukernel) and was done by Steve Williams and Tom
Saulpaugh. Well, Opus 'won', Steve and Tom went off to the printer group to
work on embedded systems there and the two Chris' went to Pink.
Then, ANOTHER group of people who came out of Cheriton's group ended up in ATG
Ross Finlayson and Steve Goldberg, and did ANOTHER microkerel, which AFAIK only
resulted in a couple of research papers.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1295471
This all happened before Moto RISC CPUs were being worked on.