12 Jun
2012
12 Jun
'12
12:21 a.m.
On 11 June 2012 23:30, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
The switch from Carbon to Cocoa was much more significant than the change
to the underlying OS. Pink, et. al. never got any traction because of the
demand to keep old apps and APIs working. OS X accelerated the rate at
which old software was abandoned for something new and shiny. This was not
even considered acceptable before Jobs came back. A ported A/UX would have
essentially looked like Classic, with a lot of hardware driver
incompatibilities
and not a whole lot of perceivable end-user improvements. Making the OS
switch with a substantially different GUI offered something to users in
return for a lot of backwards incompatibilities.
The complete disinterest inside of Apple for anything having to do with
Mach or Unix was something I witnessed through all my time there before
1997. There were two versions of Mach (68K done in by ATG Cambridge and
later Morin's MacMach) that were around. These was considered as pretty
insignificant distractions from the work of getting the next set of features
or a new CPU supported into OS(7,8,9). Pink isolated themselves from the
rest of Apple software and put the nails solidly into their own coffins.
The A/UX group were always outsiders. They lived off on
Bubb Road, and eventually moved to DeAnza 3 as part of the Workgroup Server
(ie. Shiner) folks in the mid-90's.
TFTI - interesting stuff.
But, not wishing to disagree, merely seeking clarification here...
I have never run A/UX. If I can find the money to pay Tony D to fix my
SE/30 and upgrade it, I want to try it, but I don't think that's
likely in the near future. So I am speaking from no practical
experience here, but...
AIUI, it /did/ offer some compatibility with mainstream Mac apps. I
think I have seen screenshots of it running MS Word, for instance. How
good that compatibility was, I don't know.
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?
It seems to me that there must be some reason why it didn't happen, as
with hindsight, it just seems a very obvious move. Apple knew it
needed a more modern, real multitasking OS to rival Win9x and NT, and
it needed to be to some degree MacOS-compatible - and yet, it had one,
sitting there.
It just seems incomprehensibly strange.
I mean, I think that what eventually happened was right and good. The
NeXT deal got Jobs back, OS X had a fresh new look, it is for all its
sins a very advanced Unix, and it has some of the best dev tools there
were. All these were important. Perhaps it would never have happened
if Apple had made A/UX 4 for PPC its new OS, and as a result, Apple
would be a fading memory now.
So in a way, it's a good thing it /didn't/ happen. But the reason sure
as hell was not foresight!
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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