12 Jun
2012
12 Jun
'12
3:05 p.m.
On 12 June 2012 03:12, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
On 6/11/12 5:21 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
Ah, good point. I didn't know that.
Would GCC have been an option back then?
But surely, the same reasons that made it
feasible to develop and
maintain for 7 years and 3 major versions would have still applied on
PowerPC, no?
Well, there was the problem of no toolchain for PowerPC. That wasn't
a problem if they switched to AIX. A/UX was also based on Unisoft System
V, which may have had licensing problems in volume, but I have no real
knowledge of that. The only compiler people Apple had at the time were in
the MPW group, and they would have had their hands full with MacOS tools
which used a completely different object format (PEF).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_%28operating_system%29
It is very difficult to explain what was going on if you weren't in the
middle of it, but that Wikipedia article gives you a pretty good idea of
how dysfunctional and out of control Apple was in the 90's. Remember,
this is the same company that let someone develop "Graphing Calculator"
and let them keep their office when they didn't even WORK for Apple any
more.
Oddly, I just stumbled across & reread the history of that last night!
Note that there is NO mention of A/UX or Unix anywhere
in there. As far
as anyone was concerned, Unix didn't exist. If it was brought up as an
alternative, it was immediately dismissed as not useful as a basis for
the Mac OS, either because of size, or perceived performance.
Yes indeed. I remember watching all this going on closely at the time.
And yet, there it was, still alive in another department at Apple.
Very very odd.
It's a shame how many Apple projects came to nothing and died. The
list is long...
* Newton
* OpenDoc
* OpenTransport
* GameSprockets
* Pippin
* CyberDog
* Sherlock
* Copland, Gershwin, etc.
* A/UX
A lot of these were killed by the NeXT deal.
And yet, what has resulted is really astonishingly good... So I guess
in the end it was all worth it. Even if the new Apple Inc doesn't have
much to do with the old Apple Computer Inc.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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