Comment by ktallett
20 hours ago
They are hardly forgotten considering the OS was a key influence of Mac OS X and you can see clear features of it today. It was hugely important in the mid 90's graphics and 3d animation era too. Such a fabulous piece of design, both software and hardware. I would much have prefered a world where Next and Mac OS never combined and we had both, as the Mac O7-9 were also a real treat to use.
NeXT would have died and Mac OS would have been replaced by something . All macOS is is just a different window manager (to borrow a Unix term). Windows and Linux probably be more dominant . macOS is a better system than classic macOS when you realize you still have access to the NeXT internals and even many applications in utilities are really GUIs on top of command line utilities and you can roll back many features by running a command that edits a XML file that really is just a large dictionary to remove or modify features
> and Mac OS would have been replaced by something
The facts are: The only other contender was BeOS, after Talligent flopped and Copland imploded.
But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand.
Source: all of the (other) Steve Jobs books
They did a serious technical evaluation of MS WinNT. They also obviously knew about Linux. Sources: same as yours.
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To put this into more context Apple really needed a modern kernel that for some reason had been tried multiple times and failed . Microsoft succeeded with Windows NT. Practically the acquisition of any company was motivated to just move a GUI with macOS classic like design but modern features like memory protection. I never really understood why Apple had a hard time with this.
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> But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand.
Hence becoming Jean-Louis Passé.
> All macOS is is just a different window manager
This dramatically undersells what MacOS is and was. It was way beyond just a window manager.
From its inception in the 1980s it included a set of APIs that allowed developers to build sophisticated (and consistent) GUI applications with comparatively little effort. eg Quark Xpress, Illustrator, Photoshop, Excel, Word
By the end of the classic Mac era in the late 1990s that API set had grown to include a ton of stuff. QuickTime, ColorSync, TrueType, AppleShare, sophisticated printer support, multiple display support, etc
Like any proper desktop OS from the 16 bit days that got their inspiration out of Xerox.
It is only on UNIX land that is a mess, the only thing that people have managed to agree on are POSIX, and Khronos APIs.
Yes, and although most users don't care (directly), having essentially a BSD command line available on Mac OS is pretty useful for a lot of us.
A command line of any form is the biggest positive of Rhapsody and eventually Mac OS X
Do you realize Steve's other successful business used NeXT and then OpenStep? That little venture, Pixar, is where the cash to save Apple came from.
Mac OS was a step in a different direction, however development was far less compelling for OSX than classic. Think C was far more enjoyable and created far smaller and less power hungry apps, which allowed for a greater range of possibilities on low powered chips.
Going to use alternatives like Haiku that can access many modern systems but on such low powered hardware shows what wastage we have.
I fail to see how this compares to iOS which runs on phones or even devices with 15 watts of tdp laptops.
It's enough of an influence that macOS APIs had (or still have) "NS" prefixes to many functions.