8 ms·

Interview with Hansen Hsu, engineer at Apple during transition from OS 9 to OS X

103 points by Austin_Conlon 5y ago

adamgordonbell 5y ago
I'm the host. AMA. Hansen's research into developer cultures is super interesting. Here is a story of his time at Apple I can identify with: It’s like being a cast member at Disneyland, right? If you actually see the back lot of Disneyland, the magic is pulled away, right? It’s not the same, right? You don’t always want to know how the sausage is made. Being smack in the middle like OS 9 at a time when the winds were clearly shifting in OS X’s direction, it was like, the politics of the higher ups, it was definitely being felt. I was looking on the file system team and three months in, they said, “Okay, well, we’re not doing any new features in the file system. We’re going to reassign you to help them work on the multiprocessing API’s with this other guy” I was doing some unit testing for that for like a couple of months. Then, it was announced, “Oh, we’re not doing any new features for that either.” Okay, so then now what I’m going to do? Then, my boss assigned me to write this app showing these two bars for the dual processors. That didn’t go anywhere. He kept telling me, “No. Keep working on it. This is not busy work. This is not busy work.” It turned out to be busy work. --- Edit: bedtime, but will check-in and answer questions in the morning if anyone has any. (Feedback and Guest suggestions welcome)
- jeofken 5y ago
  The interviews are quality stuff, and your accent and demeanour is inviting to listen to. Looking forward to the next one!
  - adamgordonbell 5y ago
    Thanks for listening! > The interviews are quality stuff, and your accent and demeanour is inviting to listen to. It's funny to hear comments on my accent because I think it's relatively uninteresting, but I guess everyone innately thinks only others can have an accent. Anyhow, thank you!
- jebarker 5y ago
  I listened this morning. Great interview, thank-you. Refreshing to hear someone with both an honest appraisal of their skill set (although perhaps a little too hard on himself) and also a willingness to make drastic changes for a happier life rather than just playing it safe.
  - adamgordonbell 5y ago
    Thanks for listening! I found his take on his skillset tragic. It's a downside of working with the best of the best, that you feel your own inadequacies very directly. Perhaps if I had started out at a place like the OS team at Apple right out of school I would have left software engineering behind as well.
    - ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
      Or perhaps you would have found out that the best of the best are also winging it like the rest of us.
- mjhoy 5y ago
  Just want to say I've recently started listening, and I really love the podcast. The last few interviews have been fascinating and really well done!
  - adamgordonbell 5y ago
    Thanks! I've been learning as I go and putting more effort into it and I'm glad the effort is paying dividends.
- stillblue 5y ago
  Adam, I've learnt so much from your podcasts. Amaaazing work. Yours is the only podcast I listen to when I have time and I'm beyond impressed by the quality of it. Thank you from a long time Fan
  - adamgordonbell 5y ago
    Thanks for listening! Spread the word :)
- lordfoom 5y ago
  Just wanted to express my thanks to you for your podcast. Fascinating, educational, inspiring and sometimes a little tragic. Very cool!
  - adamgordonbell 5y ago
    Thanks for listening! It's a hobby project that is slowly taking over a lot of my free time but I really enjoy it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
avalys 5y ago
Thank you so much for posting a transcript. I ignore so many podcasts with clearly brilliant, interesting, valuable content in them because I just can't tolerate the tedium of having to listen to audio.
- adamgordonbell 5y ago
  Thanks! It's surprisingly hard to get good technical transcriptions done.
  - ggm 5y ago
    I have been amazed by otter.ai and like autotranscribe. I have to do the corrections from otter on our conferences, with a variety of English as a second language and idiomatic English accents and it's not perfect, but it's good. The models are improving and it feels like the science behind their methodology, how it learns a new ontology is pretty solid (I believe the corrections we do inform the next run in the same domain of discourse) We used to use court recorders and do the same polish on their product. Automated is worse but not by as much as people might think.
    - adamgordonbell 5y ago
      Very cool, I have not tried otter.ai What I'm doing is preparing a glossary of all the tech terms and what they sound like and then using rev.com human transcription server with provided glossary and then doing a read through and finding any issues.
      - ggm 5y ago
        That's not far off what we did with the court reporter transcription service staff for live transcripts at meetings. Give them a list of acronyms, jargon, names. After the first two or three meetings they had it down pat.
  - Poiesis 5y ago
    I've heard podcasters rave about descript for transcription and editing (podcast audio changes as you edit transcribed text), you might want to check it out if you haven't already.
ggm 5y ago
Something I learned from interaction with apple engineers at IETF is a weird big/little thing. Big: they can't speak to some things without legal review because FAANG have IPR. This causes a lot of friction. You may simply never know really why apple dropped ZFS. You can ask over beers. Sometimes hints is as good as it gets. Little: there might be a team of 4 people on tcp/ip and only 2 of them have something like "commit" rights. You sort of expect its 20 phd and a bank vault of gold, and it's two guys. Smart guys, good guys, but if they both come to IETF then you know the tcp/ip buglist isn't moving and there's a "fall under a bus" risk, England 1966 football squad on one airplane risk.. Apple invents stuff which surfaces later. Appletalk over twisted pair had device discovery almost perfect. Printers shouted "I'm here" and everyone heard. It's taken years to get zeroconf and auto discovery out into the world of gigabit networks. Apple does things other people don't do. They did some stuff in parallel path fetching, using mobile and WiFi to maintain the upper layer fetch in agile ways which was beautiful. The spec was there. I kinda still hate OS9 and like OSX because UNIX but I also have gears grinding on the apple filestore and resource/data fork mapping into Unix .dotfiles which seeds were laid in the old OS world.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > Apple invents stuff which surfaces later. Appletalk over twisted pair had device discovery almost perfect. Printers shouted "I'm here" and everyone heard. It's taken years to get zeroconf and auto discovery out into the world of gigabit networks. In fairness, this is hardly unique... if I had a dollar for every great thing someone got working and then it went nowhere, I could build a company to popularize solutions to all the dumb problems that still persist. Capability-based security, secure X11, ZFS, fully inspect/edit-able environments like smalltalk, 90% of everything Oberon was doing, graphical programming like hypercard, smartwatches as good as Pebble, Ada-level language safety, BeOS filesystem metadata... we barely need to invent anything new for the future, we could progress for ages just by mining the past...
  - dylan604 5y ago
    >we could progress for ages just by mining the past... How much of that progress would be hindered by the mines being patent incumbered?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Aloha 5y ago
I'm kinda curious what the direction they intended to go in to add more modern operating system features to OS 9. Is there a paper design for a preemptive multitasking OS 9 that someone thought about?
- im_down_w_otp 5y ago
  There was an entire promised-for-years Mac OS 8 codenamed Copland that was to, among other things, add preemptive multitasking and process memory protection to the "classic" Mac OS. That project was a disaster on the order of Apple deciding it needed to cancel it and start over working from an OS it would acquire (BeOS and NeXTstep being the big publicly known candidates with the latter being what they went with). A few things from Copland appeared to survive into what became the much less ambitious actual Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9. Namely the full-filesystem content indexing system, the platinum UI, and a kind of intermediate "nanokernel" that offered some improvements to multitasking, like not locking up the whole system when the mouse button was held down and allowing other stuff to happen while intensive disk/peripheral IO were happening. From memory I think it make have also added some basic improvements to memory protection, but by way of padding around the address spaces that applications had allocated to them rather than real memory protection. I can't quite remember anymore. I was a teenager at the time.
  - astrange 5y ago
    > There was an entire promised-for-years Mac OS 8 codenamed Copland that was to, It was codenamed Maxwell, Copland was the marketing name.
  - wmf 5y ago
    Just for historical interest I wonder if it would be possible for some Copland, Gershwin, or Pink docs to leak.
    - setpatchaddress 5y ago
      Gershwin was always vaporware. As far as I know, no real code was written; it was all planning. Pink did exist in various forms, and it would be fascinating to have that material available, though.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wirthjason 5y ago
I always like the covers of Big Nerd Ranch books. I can’t quite describe it but there’s something very aesthetically pleasing about them which stood out from all the other tech books at the time. It almost made me want to become an iOS developer because it was so cool.

103 points by Austin_Conlon 5y ago

I'm the host. AMA. Hansen's research into developer cultures is super interesting. Here is a story of his time at Apple I can identify with: It’s like being a cast member at Disneyland, right? If you actually see the back lot of Disneyland, the magic is pulled away, right? It’s not the same, right? You don’t always want to know how the sausage is made. Being smack in the middle like OS 9 at a time when the winds were clearly shifting in OS X’s direction, it was like, the politics of the higher ups, it was definitely being felt. I was looking on the file system team and three months in, they said, “Okay, well, we’re not doing any new features in the file system. We’re going to reassign you to help them work on the multiprocessing API’s with this other guy” I was doing some unit testing for that for like a couple of months. Then, it was announced, “Oh, we’re not doing any new features for that either.” Okay, so then now what I’m going to do? Then, my boss assigned me to write this app showing these two bars for the dual processors. That didn’t go anywhere. He kept telling me, “No. Keep working on it. This is not busy work. This is not busy work.” It turned out to be busy work. --- Edit: bedtime, but will check-in and answer questions in the morning if anyone has any. (Feedback and Guest suggestions welcome)

jeofken 5y ago
The interviews are quality stuff, and your accent and demeanour is inviting to listen to. Looking forward to the next one!
- adamgordonbell 5y ago
  Thanks for listening! > The interviews are quality stuff, and your accent and demeanour is inviting to listen to. It's funny to hear comments on my accent because I think it's relatively uninteresting, but I guess everyone innately thinks only others can have an accent. Anyhow, thank you!
jebarker 5y ago
I listened this morning. Great interview, thank-you. Refreshing to hear someone with both an honest appraisal of their skill set (although perhaps a little too hard on himself) and also a willingness to make drastic changes for a happier life rather than just playing it safe.
- adamgordonbell 5y ago
  Thanks for listening! I found his take on his skillset tragic. It's a downside of working with the best of the best, that you feel your own inadequacies very directly. Perhaps if I had started out at a place like the OS team at Apple right out of school I would have left software engineering behind as well.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
    Or perhaps you would have found out that the best of the best are also winging it like the rest of us.
mjhoy 5y ago
Just want to say I've recently started listening, and I really love the podcast. The last few interviews have been fascinating and really well done!
- adamgordonbell 5y ago
  Thanks! I've been learning as I go and putting more effort into it and I'm glad the effort is paying dividends.
stillblue 5y ago
Adam, I've learnt so much from your podcasts. Amaaazing work. Yours is the only podcast I listen to when I have time and I'm beyond impressed by the quality of it. Thank you from a long time Fan
- adamgordonbell 5y ago
  Thanks for listening! Spread the word :)
lordfoom 5y ago
Just wanted to express my thanks to you for your podcast. Fascinating, educational, inspiring and sometimes a little tragic. Very cool!
- adamgordonbell 5y ago
  Thanks for listening! It's a hobby project that is slowly taking over a lot of my free time but I really enjoy it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

avalys 5y ago

Thank you so much for posting a transcript. I ignore so many podcasts with clearly brilliant, interesting, valuable content in them because I just can't tolerate the tedium of having to listen to audio.

adamgordonbell 5y ago
Thanks! It's surprisingly hard to get good technical transcriptions done.
- ggm 5y ago
  I have been amazed by otter.ai and like autotranscribe. I have to do the corrections from otter on our conferences, with a variety of English as a second language and idiomatic English accents and it's not perfect, but it's good. The models are improving and it feels like the science behind their methodology, how it learns a new ontology is pretty solid (I believe the corrections we do inform the next run in the same domain of discourse) We used to use court recorders and do the same polish on their product. Automated is worse but not by as much as people might think.
  - adamgordonbell 5y ago
    Very cool, I have not tried otter.ai What I'm doing is preparing a glossary of all the tech terms and what they sound like and then using rev.com human transcription server with provided glossary and then doing a read through and finding any issues.
    - ggm 5y ago
      That's not far off what we did with the court reporter transcription service staff for live transcripts at meetings. Give them a list of acronyms, jargon, names. After the first two or three meetings they had it down pat.
- Poiesis 5y ago
  I've heard podcasters rave about descript for transcription and editing (podcast audio changes as you edit transcribed text), you might want to check it out if you haven't already.

ggm 5y ago

Something I learned from interaction with apple engineers at IETF is a weird big/little thing. Big: they can't speak to some things without legal review because FAANG have IPR. This causes a lot of friction. You may simply never know really why apple dropped ZFS. You can ask over beers. Sometimes hints is as good as it gets. Little: there might be a team of 4 people on tcp/ip and only 2 of them have something like "commit" rights. You sort of expect its 20 phd and a bank vault of gold, and it's two guys. Smart guys, good guys, but if they both come to IETF then you know the tcp/ip buglist isn't moving and there's a "fall under a bus" risk, England 1966 football squad on one airplane risk.. Apple invents stuff which surfaces later. Appletalk over twisted pair had device discovery almost perfect. Printers shouted "I'm here" and everyone heard. It's taken years to get zeroconf and auto discovery out into the world of gigabit networks. Apple does things other people don't do. They did some stuff in parallel path fetching, using mobile and WiFi to maintain the upper layer fetch in agile ways which was beautiful. The spec was there. I kinda still hate OS9 and like OSX because UNIX but I also have gears grinding on the apple filestore and resource/data fork mapping into Unix .dotfiles which seeds were laid in the old OS world.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> Apple invents stuff which surfaces later. Appletalk over twisted pair had device discovery almost perfect. Printers shouted "I'm here" and everyone heard. It's taken years to get zeroconf and auto discovery out into the world of gigabit networks. In fairness, this is hardly unique... if I had a dollar for every great thing someone got working and then it went nowhere, I could build a company to popularize solutions to all the dumb problems that still persist. Capability-based security, secure X11, ZFS, fully inspect/edit-able environments like smalltalk, 90% of everything Oberon was doing, graphical programming like hypercard, smartwatches as good as Pebble, Ada-level language safety, BeOS filesystem metadata... we barely need to invent anything new for the future, we could progress for ages just by mining the past...
- dylan604 5y ago
  >we could progress for ages just by mining the past... How much of that progress would be hindered by the mines being patent incumbered?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Aloha 5y ago

I'm kinda curious what the direction they intended to go in to add more modern operating system features to OS 9. Is there a paper design for a preemptive multitasking OS 9 that someone thought about?

im_down_w_otp 5y ago
There was an entire promised-for-years Mac OS 8 codenamed Copland that was to, among other things, add preemptive multitasking and process memory protection to the "classic" Mac OS. That project was a disaster on the order of Apple deciding it needed to cancel it and start over working from an OS it would acquire (BeOS and NeXTstep being the big publicly known candidates with the latter being what they went with). A few things from Copland appeared to survive into what became the much less ambitious actual Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9. Namely the full-filesystem content indexing system, the platinum UI, and a kind of intermediate "nanokernel" that offered some improvements to multitasking, like not locking up the whole system when the mouse button was held down and allowing other stuff to happen while intensive disk/peripheral IO were happening. From memory I think it make have also added some basic improvements to memory protection, but by way of padding around the address spaces that applications had allocated to them rather than real memory protection. I can't quite remember anymore. I was a teenager at the time.
- astrange 5y ago
  > There was an entire promised-for-years Mac OS 8 codenamed Copland that was to, It was codenamed Maxwell, Copland was the marketing name.
- wmf 5y ago
  Just for historical interest I wonder if it would be possible for some Copland, Gershwin, or Pink docs to leak.
  - setpatchaddress 5y ago
    Gershwin was always vaporware. As far as I know, no real code was written; it was all planning. Pink did exist in various forms, and it would be fascinating to have that material available, though.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

wirthjason 5y ago

I always like the covers of Big Nerd Ranch books. I can’t quite describe it but there’s something very aesthetically pleasing about them which stood out from all the other tech books at the time. It almost made me want to become an iOS developer because it was so cool.