9 Jun
2014
9 Jun
'14
2:54 p.m.
On 6/9/14 12:36 PM, Sean Caron wrote:
I don't see why A/UX would have been any less
suitable a
foundation for Apple's next-generation operating system than NeXTstep?
A/UX died with the switch to PowerPC. Apple had an AIX product which lost
all MacOS compatibility. There was a push inside for Mach around
the time that MacLinux came out, but deep down inside no exec inside Apple
wanted a Mac operating system based on Unix. It came up over and over again
from the time A/UX started until NeXT was bought, Apple
thinking that they
could do an entire OS and operating envrionment from scratch and
each time
it went down a rathole for one reason or another. The closest anyone ever
came to building a system with the Apple mindset was Be, who had a lot of
high-level ex-Apple people that designed it. NeXT was created starting from
Rich Page and BigMac, which was Apple's Sun workstation competitor. The
vision was more focused and higher end than anyone at Apple was thinking at
the time, and ultimately it too failed first as a workstation (a space that
had already switched to RISC before they tried to build something with an
88110) and as a software product (Windows had already taken over the desktop
market). OS X would have failed if CPU speed and memory density hadn't been
where it was, and if they hadn't glued enough MacOS vernier over it to make
it palatable for the user base. It didn't hurt that Apple has never had to
care much about backwards compatibility the way that Microsoft has had to
and could jettison the existing MacOS application and system code base. I
suspect that Microsoft had more testers as Apple's entire software staff
in the late 90's.
I can't imagine how big the iOS and MacOS teams are now.