11 Jun
2012
11 Jun
'12
10:30 p.m.
On 6/11/12 2:12 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
What is odd to me is that, looking back from the OS X
era, A/UX would
have been a really obvious successor to classic MacOS, if only it had
been ported to from 68K to PPC. But I never spotted it at the time,
and nor did Apple. Given all the expensive protracted
commercially-suicidal flailing around with Pink, Taligent, Copland and
all that, this seems really strange.
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.