4 ms·

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 mult

by 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.
    - astrange 5y ago
      ICU (https://icu.unicode.org https://icu.unicode.org) started as a Pink/Taligent project.
  - setpatchaddress 5y ago
    No real need for Copland — there’s an entire book about it — search for Mac OS 8 by Tony Francis.
    - wmf 5y ago
      Thank you! I had no idea this book existed. To save others from searching: https://archive.org/details/mac_Mac_OS_8_Revealed_1996_raw-poor/ https://archive.org/details/mac_Mac_OS_8_Revealed_1996_raw-p...
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    There is a Taligent (Pink) book whose first chapters are available online. http://www.wildcrest.com/Potel/Portfolio/InsideTaligentTechnology/WW6.htm http://www.wildcrest.com/Potel/Portfolio/InsideTaligentTechn...
  - Poiesis 5y ago
    It's a crazy little thing to remember, but I used to have not one but two demo CD's for Copland. For some reason I even remember when I threw them out...
eschaton 5y ago
Since applications recompiled against the Carbon framework used the framework to access what was traditionally global state on the classic Mac OS, it could have just been to make Carbon applications preemptive and run in their own protected address spaces. The nanokernel already supported that; MPTasks were preemptive since their introduction with the Multiprocessor API.
- setpatchaddress 5y ago
  Not a chance.
setpatchaddress 5y ago
I don’t know specifically what this person was told, but there was low confidence before the turn of the century on the classic Mac OS side that the NeXT people would developer a consumer-grade OS capable of replacing classic Mac OS[footnote]. So there was ongoing speculative development on various things. However, by Mac OS 9, Mac OS X was clearly where all of Apple’s resources would go, whether it was any good or not. Most classic work at that point moved to building bridges to OS X via Carbon. Mac OS 8.5 was the last chance to build major new features into classic Mac OS. None of the ongoing work then or later was on the scale of Copland or putting a new kernel under the OS or anything of that sort. Mac OS 9 was known to be a dead end internally, and nothing like that would have been funded. Footnote: This skepticism was well-placed: arguably it didn’t actually happen until Mac OS X 10.4. (You can argue that 10.3 was usable — or say “but UNIX” — but I don’t want to hear from you unless you actually tried to support that version on the machines of your less tech-savvy family members.)
- adamgordonbell 5y ago
  That mirrors what Hansen says in the interview. That the classic mac side had low confidence in the OS X team right up until the end. What is your connection to this time at Apple? It sounds like you might have been involved.

by Aloha 5y ago

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.
  - astrange 5y ago
    ICU (https://icu.unicode.org https://icu.unicode.org) started as a Pink/Taligent project.
- setpatchaddress 5y ago
  No real need for Copland — there’s an entire book about it — search for Mac OS 8 by Tony Francis.
  - wmf 5y ago
    Thank you! I had no idea this book existed. To save others from searching: https://archive.org/details/mac_Mac_OS_8_Revealed_1996_raw-poor/ https://archive.org/details/mac_Mac_OS_8_Revealed_1996_raw-p...
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  There is a Taligent (Pink) book whose first chapters are available online. http://www.wildcrest.com/Potel/Portfolio/InsideTaligentTechnology/WW6.htm http://www.wildcrest.com/Potel/Portfolio/InsideTaligentTechn...
- Poiesis 5y ago
  It's a crazy little thing to remember, but I used to have not one but two demo CD's for Copland. For some reason I even remember when I threw them out...

eschaton 5y ago

Since applications recompiled against the Carbon framework used the framework to access what was traditionally global state on the classic Mac OS, it could have just been to make Carbon applications preemptive and run in their own protected address spaces. The nanokernel already supported that; MPTasks were preemptive since their introduction with the Multiprocessor API.

setpatchaddress 5y ago
Not a chance.

setpatchaddress 5y ago

I don’t know specifically what this person was told, but there was low confidence before the turn of the century on the classic Mac OS side that the NeXT people would developer a consumer-grade OS capable of replacing classic Mac OS[footnote]. So there was ongoing speculative development on various things. However, by Mac OS 9, Mac OS X was clearly where all of Apple’s resources would go, whether it was any good or not. Most classic work at that point moved to building bridges to OS X via Carbon. Mac OS 8.5 was the last chance to build major new features into classic Mac OS. None of the ongoing work then or later was on the scale of Copland or putting a new kernel under the OS or anything of that sort. Mac OS 9 was known to be a dead end internally, and nothing like that would have been funded. Footnote: This skepticism was well-placed: arguably it didn’t actually happen until Mac OS X 10.4. (You can argue that 10.3 was usable — or say “but UNIX” — but I don’t want to hear from you unless you actually tried to support that version on the machines of your less tech-savvy family members.)

adamgordonbell 5y ago
That mirrors what Hansen says in the interview. That the classic mac side had low confidence in the OS X team right up until the end. What is your connection to this time at Apple? It sounds like you might have been involved.