4 ms·

Was the classic macOS source put out at some point?

• skissane 3y ago
  > Was the classic macOS source put out at some point? A large (but apparently incomplete?) chunk of the System 7.1 source code was leaked 10+ years ago, and isn’t hard to find. But AFAIK, there has never been an approved release by Apple. Apple did publicly release the Lisa source code (through the Computer History Museum), so maybe they'll do that with Apple source at some point too. Reading the article, my impression is the author may have more source code that isn’t widely available. Probably, they know some ex-Apple engineers who have saved code from their time at Apple, and shared it with them on the condition it isn’t made public. I’ve heard of things like that happening before, for other historically important closed source systems.
  • astrange 3y ago
    HFS is in the open-source Darwin/OSX releases. But before that it was well documented in public, and the article links to the patents.
    • Lammy 3y ago
      To me the appeal of the old source code is in the comments and changelogs from the original devs as a way to get inside their heads, not in their actual implementation.
    • ksherlock 3y ago
      I believe most of the open source HFS code was from NeXT rather than Mac OS. A lot of classic Mac OS was still 68k assembly. eg: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/hfs/blob/hfs-106/hfs_util/hfsutil_main.c https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/hfs/blob/hfs-106/... 13-Jan-1998 jwc first cut (derived from old NextStep macfs.util code and cdrom.util code).
      • i386 3y ago
        I wonder how they got this working on x86 with Star Trek. Porting to x86 assembly? ouch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
      • astrange 3y ago
        That's the wrong place (confusingly enough), look in here. https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/tree/rel/xnu-124/bsd/hfs https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/tree/rel/xnu-...
        • ksherlock 3y ago
          ok but still: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/rel/xnu-124/bsd/hfs/hfs_vnodeops.c https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/rel/xnu-... (c) 1997-1999 Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved (c) 1990, 1992 NeXT Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved
          • astrange 3y ago
            I think NeXT might've written an HFS Standard reader or something, but they used the Apple code for HFS+ so it ended up as a hybrid. https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/rel/xnu-124/bsd/hfs/hfscommon/Misc/FileExtentMapping.c https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/rel/xnu-...
• Lammy 3y ago
  Try http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-os-71-source-code http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-os-71-source-code in `/OS/HFS/`