“It has now been a few years (over 5) since NeXT took over Apple, and they’ve had time to implement their ideas. OS X is shipping in it’s 3rd version, and I think we can recap and try to learn from history. Let’s recap. In the mid 1990’s Apple had been working hard on Copland. This was a new kernel underneath the MacOS and new UI and features up above. It was bringing MacOS into the 90’s (and into the next millennium).” Read the interesting article at iGeek. Three more Apple-related articles today, an editorial about OSX 10.2 here, printing capabilities of OSX and more from Seybold here and why OSX on Intel would be bad for Apple is here.
Copland and NeXT – Looking Back at What Happened
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
The author of this article seems to be making an assumption that if Apple switched to Intel CPUs that they would then have to support all the clone PCs in the world. Why would Apple change the way they do business just because they change CPUs? They could still build the hardware to their own specs and not support running OS X on “standard PC hardware”. They don’t support running their OS on non-Apple hardware now and they wouldn’t have to change that in the future.
Now I think a lot of people are assuming that if Apple switches to Intel CPUs that they will be able to go out and buy OS X and install it on their current PCs. I think it would be great for us PC users to add another OS choice, but I don’t see Apple doing that. Unless they really do want to take on Microsoft, and I agree with the author’s opinion that would be a bad idea.
The summary said NeXT took over Apple, I thought it was the other way around?
that’s just a technicality
The article about NeXt and Copland is very interesting.
The article about Apple on Intel is rdiculous. OS X to run on all PC’s? That guy should come here!
The off-the-cuff remark about Next acquiring Apple is a sort of inside joke in the industry, because Apple acquired NeXT, but Steve Jobs (head of NeXT) took control of Apple and the managers and engineers from NeXT really started running Apple from that point on. OS X is substantially based on the NeXT OS, and Apple’s vision and direction really changed once Jobs was back in command, so people joke that it was a reverse takeover of sorts.
The author of the article missed the whole point of the NeXT purchase: Steve Jobs. Oh sure, there was technology there to be harvested but what Apple really purchased as Steve. You can’t but a dollar amount on what Steve Jobs brings to Apple. Love him or hate him, he’s got that “something” no other has.
Apple has done well with NeXT.
They would have done better with BeOS in terms of replacing OS 9 with a modern OS. I think it would have taken them much less time to get a BeOS based OS out of the door than it took to get the slooooow NeXT OS out of the door.
The NeXT development environment is not that big of a deal anymore.
ciao
yc
The strong point in OSX is that it’s unix. BeOS would have failed and probably a Linux like OS would be on Macs right now.
I think that NeXT/OSX’s big strength was/is definitely not speed. BeOS would have been a lot faster, but it would ahve left Apple exactly how it was: non-standard. With UNIX underneath, Apple has opened two new markets that were totally forbidden for them before: geeks and servers. Xserve would have been impossible and/or useless with a BeOS-derived OS. OpenOffice wouldn’t be on its way. The GIMP wouldn’t be there. The XWindows wouldn’t be there. Perl, Apache, Oracle, Java… all those wouldn’t be there. CUPS, Zeroconf, Quartz… Nothing. Those are the BIG features on OSX. Apple would be nowhere without them.
I agree that the unix core is an asset to MacOS X. Just look at the fink project, for example; something like that would not be possible otherwise.
However, it seems that there is an earlier chapter to this story, not addressed in the article. Apple had a unix OS years earlier, when they were still on Motorola 68K based machines. A/UX was a System V based unix. The first release (1988-1989) was just command line stuff, but the second release, in 1990 I think, had a Finder interface and ran standard System 7 Mac apps.
This was the OS that I wanted them to develop. The transition to a unix core should have come first, then the hardware transition to PPC. By doing it the other way around, it seems to have taken about 10 years longer, and they have lost well over half of their market share.
The article mentioned MAS, which I think was the simulator that ran on HP and Sun machines. There was also MAE, which ran native on PPC and RS6000 machines. I think I saw this running (as a demo) under AIX on RS6000 machines in 1994. That was also a lost opportunity for Apple to move towards a modern OS core.
Now, Apple finally has a good OS (maybe the best desktop OS ever), but the world is moving quickly past. Intel chips are pushing 3GHz, with 3.6GHz projected by next summer. MS is testing a 64-bit version of its OS on new 64-bit chips from AMD and Intel. Meanwhile, Apple appears to be moving neither toward 64-bit Motorola G5 chips nor towards IBMs 64-bit Power 4 based desktop chip. It would be a shame to lose OS X, with all of its power and elegance, because of yet another shortsighted vision on Apple’s part.
The igeek.com and businessweek.com articles are possibly the two worst articles I have read back to back in my entire life for two completely different reasons.
I was expecting the igeek.com ‘timeline’ article to be just that, a timeline article. It’s just a bunch of bs management opinions he has.
The business week article is even worse. He is doomed to failure because he starts with a bad assumption. Who in their right minds thinks that Apple would let you run OSX on ANY hardware if they ported x86? That is insane. In reality, if they did go x86, nothing would change except whats ‘inside’. You would still buy boxes from Apple, apple would still enjoy ridiculous hardware margins (look at how much RAM and such is on their Apple Store), still have their legendary compatibility. People hacking dells and hps to run OSX would be in for a huge challenge and it would still be unsupported by Apple.
Nothing would change, save faster clock speeds and the ability to run virtual machines. No more craptastic VirtualPC, you could conceivably run a VMware layer for windows compatibility.
To a Be zealot from a NeXT zealot:
Be is ugly. It’s also dead. But NeXT lives!
I think it would have taken them much less time to get a BeOS based OS out of the door than it took to get the slooooow NeXT OS out of the door.
Hey Be zealot, how’s that nice, speedy NETWORKING
I think apple bought that unix from a friend of my father’s who was at a software company which was working on their own little unix box, and somehow it ran apple mail software (not quite sure ill have to ask him about this but it sounds pretty similiar). Apple bought it so no one could use it.
Anyone who has visted the Apple Store or seen the new Switch Ads should be able to see that Apple is instilling in the consumer’s mind that Apple computer and PCs are two different things. First, the new ads all feature people who mention that they swiotched over fom a PC (presumably an Intel box). Second, when reading about the G4 chip, Apple goes into lengthy descriptions on why the G4 is better (shorter pipeline, Velocity Engine, etc).
Now, if consumers equate Macintosh computers to be different than Intel computers (due to the ads) and if they then read (and believe) the content on the Apple site, how could Apple ever reverse course and throw in Intel chips?
Such a move would quickly destroy all trust among the consumers who follow these things. Also, if Apple did switch over to Intel, who believes they could keep their hardware profit margins the same and lose further sales?
>>Be is ugly. It’s also dead. But NeXT lives!
BeOS is alive and well on my Intel Inside computer.
It’s also superfast!
>>Hey Be zealot, how’s that nice, speedy NETWORKING
Hey NeXT zealot, OS X is a dog on the desktop!
Win2K chews it up for breakfast on the server!
Is OS X really keeping Apple alive? Don’t think so…
You may not realize it but OS X may bring Apple under yet.
OS 9 users are not switching over.
When Apple brings on OS X only machines, Macs may stop selling all together.
ciao
A Be Zealot!
Would be fantastic with support.
Apple is slow.
OS X is slow
Be OS would provide mac users a unique responsive experience they can’t get from XP.
Apple could demo Mac’s with Be OS demos as only Be can demo.
Imagine the crowds saying “wow i want a mac”
clones need not have died. be os is highly portable.
most importantly, apple’s niche is digital content creation, dovetails be’s media os strengths.
The author runs a website http://www.mackido.com/. He’s one of those OS9- guys who loved Apple because of the ease of use issues. He loves Copeland because it would have been a natural evolution of OS9 rather than essentially a port of Nextstep to apple hardware with a compatability layer.
Incidentally his facts are entirely wrong. Next delivered its original promise he basically admits this himself though he phrases it in such a way so that it doesn’t sound like it, “After a year of developing ‘Rhapsody’, they stopped playing their own death-march and realized that developers were not going to rewrite everything they had just to make Apple’s life easier” — that is Next ported Nextstep to Apple hardware and created a next generation OS for Apple. What happened t was just that the Mac community and the Mac developer community, guys like Every, weren’t willing to follow a major paradigm shift so Apple had to spend years nursing people through small changes: dual boot, classic and carbin.
As for the disaster with Copeland in terms of marketing that is very typical of companies with weak senior management. What Steve Jobs brings to the table is strong management and real leadership. Marketing doesn’t mandate project plans they put pressure on IS/IT management and then IS/IT management creates unrealistic project plans that fail. Similarly with his comments about OpenDoc… Apple lacked direction before Steve came back they have it now.
I found a demo of copland/rhapsody, it looks amazingly like the final version of OS 9, with some elements of OS X.
This disc is from 1997.
No offense, but I’ve tried BeOS. Yes, it is fast, but it is ugly, butt ugly, pug ugly, bugly, pugly, fugly… Well, it just looked bad. Also, networking never was very good on it as far as I could tell.
OS X may be slow, although I haven’t had a complain with it while using the last two releases, but it is beautiful. Everything about it. The UI is clean, unobtrusive, easy to use and smooth; unlike Windows jerky repaints. The networking is nice. The UNIX foundation is stable and opens a whole new market to Apple. I really don’t see a down side.
I don’t see one level on which BeOS can compete with OS X, or that it could have offered Apple anything that they don’t get with OS X. If you do, I would love to hear what they are.
People may not buy OS X, and Apple may cease to be. However, people aren’t always the brightest creatures, so I wouldn’t put much value in that. Nobody bought BeOS either.
Apple goes into lengthy descriptions on why the G4 is better (shorter pipeline, Velocity Engine, etc).
The P4 can make up for its longer pipeline with high clock speeds and bandwidth to empty and refill those pipes.
As a programmer, I prefer SSE2 over AltiVec (Velocity Engine) becuase AltiVec does not yet accelerate double precision floating point computations, whereas SSE2 does.
Yes I do agree that switching to Intel CPUs would be a bad move from a marketing point of view. The desire for OSX to run on x86 is not as great as the desire for simply faster processors, be it PowerPC or otherwise.
Mac fans have always expressed how much they appeciate the design of the exterior of Mac systems, so I don’t think Apple would lose hardware revenue even if they put a different CPU in the same box. Many have said this before me: Apple can rig it so that OSX will only boot on Mac specific systems, irregardless of what CPU resides within.
I have Seen comments On Os News (and Other Places) about Weather Apple should used Beos Or NeXT. However Apple was also Considering Windows NT as there Operating System at one time also, But it’s a good thing they didn’t Go that route.
While I don’t know if BeOS would have made a better OS X than NextStep did, it certainly would have been closer to MacOS 9 in appearance and use than the current X is (assuming no massive changes). Remember, however, that no one is comparing BeOS with MacOS X, but rather with NextStep. It took alot of work to turn NextStep into what Apple is offering today.
What exactly is so great about making an OS that looks exactly like OS9? Just because your comfortable with it does not mean that its the definitive best UI design ever created. Unless you try new things in a UI you’ll never know if your missing out on something better.
Imagine what happens if you throw two totally different OS’es (both full of legacy code, one of them – OpenStep – already being a full-blown UNIX-like OS plus some huge additions on top, or was that on all 4 sides ?) plus some glue stuff (Carbon) plus a new freaky GUI (Quartz/Aqua) together. You get – naturally – an engineer’s nightmare. All one has to do is read through the changes-document for 10.2 (the link was posted on this site), and you can imagine the hysterical fits those guys must get if they have to touch THAT beast.
OS X is not maintainable and therefore Apple’s doom.
“OS X is not maintainable and therefore Apple’s doom.”
That applies equally to Windows.
No offense, but I’ve tried BeOS. Yes, it is fast, but it is ugly, butt ugly, pug ugly, bugly, pugly, fugly… Well, it just looked bad. Also, networking never was very good on it as far as I could tell.
You get used to BeOS after a while, and you can use a different background color 🙂
BeOS networking improved with BONE, if Be had the resources
Apple spend on MacOSX It could have been available a lot earlier.
I think apple bought that unix from a friend of my father’s who was at a software company which was working on their own little unix box, and somehow it ran apple mail software (not quite sure ill have to ask him about this but it sounds pretty similiar). Apple bought it so no one could use it.
NOw this is very intersting! Could you tell us more?
I think it would be very instructive to learn the REAL reason why no Unix-like system managed to become Apple’s official OS before Jobs came along.
I mean, they needed a modern, standard, advanced OS right? with real multitasking, etc. and all the other features that Unix-like system aleady had – so whay did Apple get into the terrible mess with Copland/Rhapsody/Next? And what a mess it was! When I was following the story at the time I remember several times i got completely lost at what all these names meant – and I am not exactly a novice. And they went through all this only to emerge with an OS based on FreeBSD!
My Mac friends like to think of some conspiracy theory, I rather suspect mismanagement of the most spectacular kind, together with lots of cultural prejudices that blur what should be rational decisions – i can imagine how UNIX was considered by Mac engineers!
But I am also surprised of how silent and accomodating towards Apple all the Linux-on-Macs companies were. Before OSX came out, Linux distros were more advanced than macs, had more apps, and were much cheaper (i think, I am not a mac user). A riend of mie saved his small lab at the university and his own job by turning a Quadra into the server the lab needed – thanks to linux. Why did these distros not start a “switch” campaign of their own? Apple was not helping them much in any case… Don’t you think a more aggressive stance (“dump MacOS, get a real OS!”) would have been more useful?
let me know what you think,
fred
There are several things that I learned with Mac OS X. First of all I learned that Mac OS 9 was a crap, Mac OS 8,7 were also a crap. They were so crap that, I was even more suprised, because every mac user that I heard and know talks like they own a decent operating system. It turns out that, either they love their macs so much that they don’t want to admit it, or they are being screwed up and they have no idea about it. The Mac OS didn’t have even the basic operating system stuff, that I took as granted. Anyway, but the problem is that, Mac OS X is not really Apple’s OS. They took an open source OS and put their GUI on it, and called it Mac OS X. That was more confusing than my first observation, because Apple admits that they had to change their os, because the older one were crap, but then they give people an older OS, an OS which back way back to ancient Mach system. Where is innovation? There is no innovation in any of these stuff, except the interface. Now Apple totally depends on the open source developers of FreeBSD. Apple is very clever though, they using the name “Unix” to take credit for the OS. But the reality is that, there is nothing there done by Apple and it is not very clear to me how Apple will develop this operating system for the future. Assume that, we will have a very different future, where different things had to be integrated into the OS’s kernel. Like different file systems, different kernel level modules. Now will Apple develop these things by itself. What if the open source developers are reluctant to do something which Apple desparately wants in its products, what if there is some sort of problems in the communication between Apple and open source developers.
When I see Apple developing the core OS technologies itself, and doesn’t really depend on the open source, then I would say it may survive in the future. But depending on the open source for Apple is not very good I believe, because open source guys may have different objectives.
By the way, here is a way to spot a true Mac zealot. A user above doesn’t mention about Windows, but simply says
“OS X is not maintainable and therefore Apple’s doom.” and our mac zealot replies “That applies equally to Windows.”. Totally unrelated, totally absurd answer.
I think that NeXT/OSX’s big strength was/is definitely not speed. BeOS would have been a lot faster, but it would ahve left Apple exactly how it was: non-standard. With UNIX underneath, Apple has opened two new markets that were totally forbidden for them before: geeks and servers. Xserve would have been impossible and/or useless with a BeOS-derived OS.
What inherent limitation does BeOS have that would prevent it from running on a server?
OpenOffice wouldn’t be on its way.
Again, please explain what inherent limitation of the BeOS would prevent a port of OO.
The GIMP wouldn’t be there.
Last I heard, the lack of GIMP on BeOS has more to do with a lack of developers interested and commited enough to port all the stuff required to run GNOME. But if you know of a fault in BeOS that prevents it, I’d be interested to hear it.
The XWindows wouldn’t be there.
http://www.bebits.com/app/1838
Perl,
http://www.bebits.com/app/2171
Apache,
http://www.bebits.com/app/2919
Oracle,
Useful for all the designers who want to run industrial-strength databases on their PowerMacs, I’m sure.
Java…
Be ported PJava for BeIA and it is supposedly floating around in the wild for those so-inclined. There was a port of Kaffe, but the developer abandonned it. Be, reportedly, had a lot of work done of a full-fledged JVM for the “BeIA Dev. Platform” (aka, Dan0).
all those wouldn’t be there.
Bull.
CUPS, Zeroconf,
Once again, what would prevent those being written for BeOS?
Quartz…
Why do you assume Apple wouldn’t have been able to write a vector-based app_server replacement?
Those are the BIG features on OSX.
And they did not pop fully-formed from the womb of NeXT, as you seem to assume.
Apple did a lot of work on what the purchased from NeXT to provide what we have today as OS X.02. I doubt that, had they bought Be, they would have let it languish in the state it was back then (the DRs or R3?).
“People may not buy OS X, and Apple may cease to be. However, people aren’t always the brightest creatures, so I wouldn’t put much value in that.”
Great. Can I use that as signature? It’s a good example, you know.
> Mac OS X is not really Apple’s OS. They took an open
> source OS and put their GUI on it, and called it
> Mac OS X.
Not really. The took NeXT, open-sourced the guts, and then
put an Apple GUI on it.
> That was more confusing than my first observation,
> because Apple admits that they had to change their
> os, because the older one were crap, but then they
> give people an older OS, an OS which back way back
> to ancient Mach system. Where is innovation?
Yeah, I’m a bit puzzled about that as well, but there are advantages to using Mach as well. Not sure if they overcome
the disadvantages, but the kernel in MacOSX isn’t really
pure mach anymore anyways. They have a number of “hooks”
in the BSD layer that give it speedier access than just
running a pure “BSD personality” under Mach like you’re
supposed to if you’re working in pure microkernel terms…
> Now Apple totally depends on the open source developers
> of FreeBSD.
Not at all. Apple is developing their *own* OS, Darwin,
that is open-source, but is still definitely theirs. They
are taking the FreeBSD *userland* and integrating it just
to bring current some of the legacy stuff left over from
NeXT, but they aren’t blindly just taking whatever FreeBSD
makes.
OpenDarwin (http://www.opendarwin.org/) was set up to
answer some of your comments as to Apple doing things and
not making them available to the community. It allows a
more direct BSD-like or Linux-like sandbox of development,
and then those changes will, if deemed commercial-grade and
compatible, be merged back into Apple’s Darwin.
Just like it has been for the past 15 years! Please.
I don’t always agree with Mr. Every, but he’s probably quite correct when he says that it wouldn’t have taken Apple any less time to get a BeOS-based “next generation MacOS” out the door than it did to get a NeXT-based one. They’d have just been trading one set of problems for another. Face it, guys, as much as I loved BeOS, it wasn’t quite ready for prime-time even when it died (or became undead, depending on how you look at it). A lot of Be fans seem to expend a lot of effort picking at nits in OS X, but in Be we’re talking about things like no OS-level scanning support, no hardware graphics acceleration, the lobotomized networking layer, problems in the ever-changing media kit, horrible printing functionality (even in BeOS 5, despite finally being able to actually generate Postscript instead of just sending pages as big honking bitmaps to printers). These are not “the window resizing speed is slow and I hate the drop shadows” level complaints for most people.
I think it’s easy to forget why Apple chose NeXT in the first place. It certainly wasn’t because Gil Amelio wanted to be replaced by Steve Jobs; it was because Amelio was, at the time, convinced Apple needed to get enterprise credibility to survive. NeXT had enterprise accounts and support. Be didn’t. Unless Be had chosen to make itself available at a significantly lower price than NeXT (which Gassee refused to do), they just weren’t a practical choice for that strategy. Based on a couple email conversations with folks at Be later on, I don’t think they regretted not being bought by Apple, either. (Maybe that’s changed now, but I wouldn’t bet on it.)
They took an open source OS and put their GUI on it.and called it Mac OS X.
Well yes, they released XNU and the other components of Darwin under their own open source license. However they kind of, you know, developed XNU in house.
XNU is definately not Mach in the traditional sense, as it’s essentially a monolithic kernel, with all functionality traditionally handled by Mach servers replaced by BSD code. The only parts of Mach in XNU are the VMM, the process management, and of course Mach messaging.
That was more confusing than my first observation, because Apple admits that they had to change their os, because the older one were crap,
I’m proud of them for having the guts to do it. Win32 is likewise crap but you don’t see Microsoft being ready to replace it any time soon.
but then they give people an older OS, an OS which back way back to ancient Mach system.
Well, yes, it’s some “ancient” Mach components with much more modern components welded on to form a hybrid kernel. XNU’s problem is it hasn’t been very well optimized yet, especially for SMP. I think Apple will need a few more years before this happens.
Hmmm.
OSX is that dog-slow! It runs on a G3 400 like a Win2k on a Pentium 90Mhz. And that is not a lie!
Its that you …
can hear if you launched a program
its even that you can see that you launched a program
AND its that you MUST wait for the program to be launched.
From my experiences I got I must say that OSX is not usable for me… It looks good but thats it!
-A
Before I buy again a new Mac I’ll wait at first for a real Operating System
The truth of the matter is that Steve Jobs coming back to Apple made a much bigger difference than giving OSX UNIX underpinnings (how many Apple users really care that they are running BSD, to quote their commercials, “it just works”).
Before Steve Jobs came back Apple’s management didn’t have any real direction. The Apple community was slowly dying. When Steve Jobs came back, people were interested in Apple again. He exudes confidence and enthusiasm and provided some fresh ideas (the iMac has done more for Apple than OSX).
The article is probably right that Copeland would have produced a capable next-gen OS faster, but I don’t think the company would be better off. BeOS would probably have worked out very well technically, but again, I don’t think Apple would be doing as well now if they had gone in that direction.
he GIMP wouldn’t be there.
Photoshop and Macintosh go together like peanut-butter and jelly. I really don’t see the availability of the GIMP (no, it is not a Photoshop replacement, don’t even say it) on the platform as a major draw for anyone.
quote “Be didn’t. Unless Be had chosen to make itself available at a significantly lower price than NeXT (which Gassee refused to do), Based on a couple email conversations with folks at Be later on, I don’t think they regretted not being bought by Apple, either. (Maybe that’s changed now, but I wouldn’t bet on it.)”
uh
they would rather be bought by Palm inc for $14 million than Apple for, say, $100 million? I’d bet on it.
If i were a be investor i’d have JLG hanged.
Basically an old friend of my dad (who was later involved in my father’s startup in the 80s), had a unix company which had absolutely nothing going for it other then the ability to run Apple’s Mail program. He tried to sell it to many hardware companies, all of which did not want another unix, or whatever their reasons were. Max ended up selling it to Apple, since the only selling point was the ability to run some apple programs, and Apple did not want anyone but them running apple software.
I am ONLY guessing that a/ux was the unix system, or at least a slightly upgraded version of what Max’s company sold to apple. He did not get a great price for the OS, but it kept apple from being emulated on unix boxes and was just smart business.
Keep in mind this is really only an interesting story because apple became such a big computer company and there was no dmca back then.
There were alot of great stories about my dad’s startup or his friend’s startup’s similiar to this which I was brought up knowing. Sadly I can no longer contact the person whom told me most of them.
Ranger and Bascule thanks for the info, but what I found from apple’s web sites related with Darwin is that it is based on the following projects and heavily borrowed code and ideas from them
– Mach
– 4.4BSD Lite2 (FreeBSD,NetBSD,OpenBSD)
Although I am convinced that Apple itself has developed some of its own OS components, I still think that the whole Mac OS X idea is troubling for several reasons. Apple couldn’t develop their own OS gradually, instead at one point they had to cancel the old os and buyout a new company for a new os and now what they have is totally a new os, a totally new gui. I think a better path for Apple would be to develop the existing OS, adding new stuff to it and gradually make it better and better. I don’t know why they changed the GUI so fundamentally. Mac OS 9 had a very nice GUI too.
“… the war is over. Wintel controls PC computing and always will…”
I remember something like this being said about C/PM’s dominant position in the early days of DOS
I run BeOS on a PM, and I laugh every time I boot into MacOS.. the speed difference is amazing. BeOS is way ahead of MacOS 8.1.
As for Classic.. can we all say ‘SheepShaver’?? I often run MacOS that way because the actual speed of MacOS run as a Be application/partial emulation is comparable to it running on the Hardware.