Who’s rewriting history? I don’t understand your comment.
The Macintosh had a lot of technical debt prior to the Mac OS X switch. This has nothing to do with being “primarily a network and I/O device”—for what it’s worth, it common to see Macs with networking in the 1990s. Ethernet was standard early on, and before that, you could use something like PhoneNET.
If you take a system that is designed to work within 128K of RAM and an 8 MHz, you make a lot of design decisions that just aren’t appropriate for, say, a system with 256 MB of RAM and a 1 GHz processor. That’s roughly the span of the classic Mac OS, in hardware terms. The original Mac operating system would only run one program at a time (not counting desk accessories), and it made sense to give the program unrestricted access to memory.
After that, how would you introduce protected memory, without breaking userland? That’s a big part of the technical debt that I’m talking about. There were several attempts to introduce protected memory to the Macintosh—A/UX, MkLinux, Copland, Taligent, and Rhapsody. Rhapsody is the one that managed to stick around.
The Macintosh had a lot of technical debt prior to the Mac OS X switch. This has nothing to do with being “primarily a network and I/O device”—for what it’s worth, it common to see Macs with networking in the 1990s. Ethernet was standard early on, and before that, you could use something like PhoneNET.
If you take a system that is designed to work within 128K of RAM and an 8 MHz, you make a lot of design decisions that just aren’t appropriate for, say, a system with 256 MB of RAM and a 1 GHz processor. That’s roughly the span of the classic Mac OS, in hardware terms. The original Mac operating system would only run one program at a time (not counting desk accessories), and it made sense to give the program unrestricted access to memory.
After that, how would you introduce protected memory, without breaking userland? That’s a big part of the technical debt that I’m talking about. There were several attempts to introduce protected memory to the Macintosh—A/UX, MkLinux, Copland, Taligent, and Rhapsody. Rhapsody is the one that managed to stick around.