The magazine archives linked from the article really take me back. I like how colorful they are. I like the weird studio photography they would do with a bunch of hardware on weird pedestals.
This was how we knew what Apple was doing, how to keep computers running, etc.
There are some things I really miss about the classic Mac era. Computers were cool. The entire experience of using a computer was very consistent. Poking around in MacsBug or ResEdit was interesting. Install an app by dragging it to your hard drive, uninstall it by dragging it to the trash. Word 5.1a, a.k.a. the best version of Microsoft Word ever made. Still waiting for Google Docs to catch up in terms of feature parity, it’s not even close.
Plenty of things I don’t miss. No memory protection. Cooperative multitasking. Open Transport. As much as Unix is a bit of a mess, it doesn’t have any of these problems.
The only reason I still go back is for the games. A few of the old games can be played on new computers—if it ever got a PC port, there’s a chance you can run it in DOSBox, but the Mac exclusives got left behind, and a bunch of them were just cute little shareware pieces that never had a bunch of money behind them.
I always wondered why Apple didn't consider A/UX for the base of its future OS, rather than spending 5+ years on the obviously-in-retrospect-doomed Copland/Taligent stuff and then buying NeXT. Unix licensing costs maybe?
A/UX was forked from UNIX System V Release 2.2, with "additional features from System V Releases 3 and 4 and BSD versions 4.2 and 4.3". It also had a TCP/IP stack, since before MacTCP (if I recall correctly).
I don't have any direct knowledge of Apple's licensing issues with AT&T, but I worked for SCO in the early 90s, back when it was a UNIX OEM, not a litigation zombie.
AT&T licensing fees for UNIX back in the late 80s/early 90s were fiendish; that's the whole reason for the ascendancy of Linux today. (Linus couldn't afford his own Intel UNIX shrinkwrap, so he began rolling his own kernel.) I heard a ballpark figure that SCO paid out $200 in royalties every time they sold a copy of Open Desktop 3.0, which included royalties on SVR3.2, a third-party TCP/IP stack, X11 (which was free), and OSF Motif (which wasn't) and IXI's X Desktop (the desktop and utility apps build with Motif/X11). This drove the price of a copy of ODT 3 up to the $1000-2000 mark depending on trim. SCO also paid royalties to Microsoft every time we sold the developer tools, because SCO had inherited the MS C compiler by way of their Xenix license in the late 80s, and SCO SVR3.2 was built using MS C.
The AU/X "additional" features from SVR 3 and SVR 4 was probably the result of a similar process to SCO's cloning of SVR4 features in the early 90s. SCO's UNIX license only covered SVR3.2. AT&T jacked their license prices for SVR 4 so much that going to true SRV 4 would have drastically raised the price of Open Desktop. It worked out cheaper to assign a couple of hundred developers to work for 3-4 years at cloning SVR 4.3 (needed to hit the standards compliance checkboxes required by customers), while keeping the AT&T SVR3.2 copyright declarations in the header files (and on the box).
My guess would be that Apple hit the same wall that SCO hit after 1995; AT&T licenses were too expensive and cloning features and bolting them on top of an ancient code base was also becoming expensive. (As I remember it, SCO bought a license for SVR 4.3 in the end and switched to that, some time in the mid-to-late 90s, too late to dodge the bullet of Linux gobbling up the Intel/Posix world.)
My take is that Apple didn’t just need a good kernel and a good UI, but a good API for making applications. NeXT had the whole Objective-C API which was, well, a lot easier to use than contemporary alternatives. It also had tools like Project Builder and Interface Builder. The only other OS people thought Apple would buy was BeOS.
It took a long time for Mac developers to really buy into Cocoa, many of them saw it as a less-capable version of existing APIs rather than the future of Mac development. That viewpoint wasn’t entirely without reason, at first, but the longer you spent with Cocoa, the more clear it became that Carbon was a second-class citizen.
My other thought is that Apple didn’t just want tech, but the experience to develop it. That’s why acquisitions were at the top of the list. Apple has certainly bought a few other companies just to access their engineering talent.
I think also retooling build systems to work with XCode took a while to do, or at least be worthwhile to do - especially if you're shipping a multi-platform beast like anything from Adobe. If I remember, the only real way to ship a Cocoa app was with Xcode.
I have ported applications to Mac OS X, including applications that other people wrote and ones that I wrote. Let's say that you're starting with a C or C++ application using the Macintosh Toolbox APIs, built with MPW or CodeWarrior. A common path is:
1. Switch to using the Carbon API, and create a "carbonized" application that works on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X (same executable for both platforms, basically a special executable format and some restrictions on how you used various APIs)
2. Once you don't care about Mac OS 9 support, migrate to Project Builder (or at least GCC)
3. Eventually, migrate to Cocoa
The path was set up so that you could stop at any point along the way and keep shipping your application. In my personal experience, steps #1 and #3 could be difficult and labor-intensive, but step #2 was usually easy.
My understanding is that Quark got stuck and took too long to complete step #1, long enough that their customers didn't want to keep Mac OS 9 around just so they could use QuarkXPress and switched to InDesign.
Step #2 mostly involved fixing the parts of your code which used weird, non-standard C extensions that GCC did not support. Things like:
(long)*ptr = x;
Adobe got stuck on #3, which is understandable because it's an enormous amount of work with a relatively low payoff. The main drawback of not completing step #3 is that you're stuck with a 32-bit application until you complete it.
> My take is that Apple didn’t just need a good kernel and a good UI, but a good API for making applications.
That's hard to side with, when preemptive multitasking and protected memory wasn't a thing in Classic Mac OS. Those were some big sticking points when trying to Get Shit Done on a Mac, especially in the late nineties.
I agree Cocoa was amazing tech, but I don't see the sluggish migration from Carbon being because people didn't buy into it. I think it's more that Carbon worked, and there's just other things to put the expensive engineer's time to good us on.
> I agree Cocoa was amazing tech, but I don't see the sluggish migration from Carbon being because people didn't buy into it. I think it's more that Carbon worked, and there's just other things to put the expensive engineer's time to good us on.
My experience with the Mac developer community at the time was that someone new would come to the mailing lists and ask whether they should use Cocoa or Carbon for developing. These are people who don't have any legacy code and don't have a bunch of skills they've built up, working on greenfield projects.
A common response was along the lines of, "Carbon is a Serious API for developing Serious Applications, and Cocoa is a kids tool for making toys."
NeXT failed because of its hardware strategy/cost of manufacturing, and very high hardware sales price which kept away 95% of the potential customers. By the time they were "done" with making hardware and ready to be acquired, NeXT's OS was quite solid and stable, representing a good base to develop MacOS 10.0 from. If you take a look at MacOS 10.0 server, the first release, it's incredibly close to NeXT.
They probably looked at projects like FreeBSD at the time (1997-2000 era) and decided that too much time would be required to re-implement what they wanted to do, vs buying NeXT.
You're partially correct... NeXT's refusal to fully implement Posix is what locked them out of many government contracts, as it was and may still be a requirement.
Only the NSA was exempt from this requirement, and they did buy a lot of NeXT's equipment.
It's funny that you mention FreeBSD, because large portions of FreeBSD were incorporated into Mac OS X. If you look through the Mac OS X man pages you'll find references to various BSDs, mostly BSD and FreeBSD.
Of course, but not to the extent that they took a freebsd base (vs NeXT) and put an osx GUI on top of it. When I first used osx from a command line at v10.4 and saw macports, the freebsd heritage was obvious.
A/UX used the 68k microprocessors and would have needed to be ported to the PPC chip to be viable. A number of us A/UX hard-core fans really pushed Apple to do so, but instead, Apple decided to drop A/UX in favor of some sort of combined effort with IBM and their AIX system (which never panned out).
Their office was just down the street from me. It closed sometime last year although their website still seems to be active. From what I understand the company may just be Andrew Welch at this point.
It still hurts me that I no longer have access to the email address I used to buy the Escape Velocity series. One day I'll have to suck it up and repurchase them...
Unfortunately if you look around at Reddit and such it appears that they no longer actually sell liscenses, you need to badger the one remaining employee for a code, etc.
That's a shame. I actually reached out to them asking if there was any way to look up my license by name and they said no.
At this point, what would be the downside to open-sourcing the original code and putting it under GPL 3? Why hold onto IP that you aren't making any money off of?
A lot of it probably comes down to IP. A lot of their games contained graphical or sound (especially sound) assets that they licensed from outside sources; relicensing those to GPL would be impossible.
Additionally, some of the games distributed by Ambrosia were written partially or entirely by outside developers. It's not clear if Ambrosia even had the source to all of their games, let alone the rights to relicense it.
In that case I would say the same recursively to all of the different vendors and contractors involved, but that quickly becomes a much more complicated problem than someone just dumping the source online.
Yep, and it's massively complicated by the age of the software. Most of Ambrosia's catalog was released in the 90s -- most of the consulting groups involved have probably long since been acquired or dissolved, any contact information Ambrosia had for the developers is probably stale, and some of the developers may no longer even be alive to grant permission.
I don't think that any one person or group has all of the IP and they can't be persuaded to communicate enough to release it. I get the sense that it was pretty freewheeling back in the day.
> Word 5.1a, a.k.a. the best version of Microsoft Word ever made. Still waiting for Google Docs to catch up in terms of feature parity, it’s not even close.
It's also lightning fast, unlike Google Docs. It's seriously mind-boggling how far we've regressed that we're running Javascript word processors on eight core 3 GHz machines and yet are arguably worse off in terms of performance and UX than we would be on a 486/33 running Word 2.0.
Office 95 was a beautiful thing too. Oh how I miss the no BS interface and the UI consistency of Windows 95 and its applications.
https://archive.org/details/macworld-magazine?&sort=date
https://archive.org/details/macaddict?&sort=date
This was how we knew what Apple was doing, how to keep computers running, etc.
There are some things I really miss about the classic Mac era. Computers were cool. The entire experience of using a computer was very consistent. Poking around in MacsBug or ResEdit was interesting. Install an app by dragging it to your hard drive, uninstall it by dragging it to the trash. Word 5.1a, a.k.a. the best version of Microsoft Word ever made. Still waiting for Google Docs to catch up in terms of feature parity, it’s not even close.
Plenty of things I don’t miss. No memory protection. Cooperative multitasking. Open Transport. As much as Unix is a bit of a mess, it doesn’t have any of these problems.
The only reason I still go back is for the games. A few of the old games can be played on new computers—if it ever got a PC port, there’s a chance you can run it in DOSBox, but the Mac exclusives got left behind, and a bunch of them were just cute little shareware pieces that never had a bunch of money behind them.