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My experience working with Windows is that it is saddled with technical debt more than Posix is. Things like filesystem semantics—you can’t safely put your auxi

My experience working with Windows is that it is saddled with technical debt more than Posix is. Things like filesystem semantics—you can’t safely put your auxiliary functions in aux.c because most programs will treat that as a device rather than an ordinary file. And the locking mechanisms on Windows are crazy—especially when you're doing something more complicated, like opening an Excel spreadsheet on a CIFS volume. Just a couple illustrations. There are a few things that Windows does better than Unix, but there are a lot of things that Unix does better. The Macintosh basically collapsed under its own technical debt, and the only way Apple got out of it was buying a Posix-like system and writing a compatibility layer for it (and this Posix-like system became OS X). The kernel, xnu, is purportedly a microkernel, but some of the most useful parts of it are the BSD systems that were Frankensteined in.

mistrial9 3y ago
rewriting history here - Macintosh was not aimed at being primarily a network and I/O device. Lots of ordinary hardware that most people have never heard of, has filled that specialized role very well, at every stage of tech history.
- klodolph 3y ago
  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.

mistrial9 3y ago

rewriting history here - Macintosh was not aimed at being primarily a network and I/O device. Lots of ordinary hardware that most people have never heard of, has filled that specialized role very well, at every stage of tech history.

klodolph 3y ago
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.