6 Jun
2014
6 Jun
'14
10:30 a.m.
On 6 June 2014 18:18, David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
Al has hashed that over several times here, and there
are plenty of other
accounts, but the short answer is "politics happened". My understanding
from all those accounts is that it was a badly managed product with WAY
too many cooks, and other projects kept glomming onto it so they wouldn't
get cancelled. They eventually took it out back and shot it
You may be right & Al will probably set us straight shortly, but my
impression is that the project was just technically too ambitious and
they couldn't get it working successfully. Killing it was the right
thing to do.
Of course, this was a far easier decision for Jobs to make. His
company had been bought in to replace it, and he had one of the worst
cases of not-invented-here syndrome ever - also see the fate of the
Newton.
But his move was, in hindsight, inspired - as you say, he got the team to...
skinned it
and clad NextSTEP in its trappings, which is how we got OS X.
Ah, but hang on, you're missing a few step.
Before the Copland theme went onto NeXTstep to make Rhapsody, it went
on to MacOS 7 to make "MacOS 8". This was a really good move - the
multithreaded Finder delivered a real, visible & useful enhancement to
MacOS users, it looked different so delivering a visual refresh, and
he was able to exploit the fine print of the Mac licensing deal to cut
off the cloners because they only had rights to MacOS 7.x -- and this
was 8.x.
OK, so, Apple milked the facelifted MacOS for a looooooong time - 8.0,
8.1, 8.5, 8.6, 9, 9.1, 9.2 - but it had to in order to buy time to get
OS X ready.
Do I recall that they almost went with Solaris as the
kernel? That would
have been interesting.
I don't recall that. I know NeXT had OpenStep running on Solaris, but
I don't think either it or the SPARC edition of OpenStep ever made it
out of the labs and onto the market.
I also saw a demo of Netware for PowerPC once - that never went on
sale, either. I believe there was NT4 on SPARC as well and that never
escaped.
--
Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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