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I'm surprised that such a buggy piece of software was developed by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, who made QuickDraw and the original Macintosh Toolbox work

I'm surprised that such a buggy piece of software was developed by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, who made QuickDraw and the original Macintosh Toolbox work in even less RAM (128K, soon upgraded to 512K). I wonder what caused the later project to go so badly.

Aloha 11y ago
See the "Second System Effect" in the mythical man month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_sec...
- Esau 11y ago
  That explains IPv6 and uEFI/EFI.
  - Aloha 11y ago
    I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on both of those things - I've considered IPv6 to be elegant even, as elegant as v4 - EFI I don't know enough about to have a strong opinion.
smacktoward 11y ago
The article hints at one explanation, namely GM's consortium of BigCo backers being so huge that it could never really come to consensus on a single vision of what exactly GM was supposed to be developing. So they end up getting pulled in a dozen different directions chasing the particular needs of each backer, instead of putting all their energy behind one product.
- blacksqr 11y ago
  I think that's pure ass-covering. The reality was they just couldn't deliver a product that wasn't riddled with bugs, leaving the consortium partners scrambling to integrate the OS code with their hardware, and trying to raise hell to fix the situation. All they got from GM was rainbows blown up their *. (I worked for Motorola at the time, see comments elsewhere.)
setpatchaddress 11y ago
It shouldn't surprise any student of the original Mac system software. In retrospect, QuickDraw had some limitations, but it was a pretty clean piece of work overall. But the Mac toolbox application architecture had fundamental issues that ultimately caused a lot of trouble. (Not to say the original Mac API wasn't awesome in its own way -- you can do a lot of really cool stuff. A hacker's delight, in ways that the original Windows API wasn't.)

Aloha 11y ago

See the "Second System Effect" in the mythical man month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_sec...

Esau 11y ago
That explains IPv6 and uEFI/EFI.
- Aloha 11y ago
  I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on both of those things - I've considered IPv6 to be elegant even, as elegant as v4 - EFI I don't know enough about to have a strong opinion.

smacktoward 11y ago

The article hints at one explanation, namely GM's consortium of BigCo backers being so huge that it could never really come to consensus on a single vision of what exactly GM was supposed to be developing. So they end up getting pulled in a dozen different directions chasing the particular needs of each backer, instead of putting all their energy behind one product.

blacksqr 11y ago
I think that's pure ass-covering. The reality was they just couldn't deliver a product that wasn't riddled with bugs, leaving the consortium partners scrambling to integrate the OS code with their hardware, and trying to raise hell to fix the situation. All they got from GM was rainbows blown up their *. (I worked for Motorola at the time, see comments elsewhere.)

setpatchaddress 11y ago

It shouldn't surprise any student of the original Mac system software. In retrospect, QuickDraw had some limitations, but it was a pretty clean piece of work overall. But the Mac toolbox application architecture had fundamental issues that ultimately caused a lot of trouble. (Not to say the original Mac API wasn't awesome in its own way -- you can do a lot of really cool stuff. A hacker's delight, in ways that the original Windows API wasn't.)