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What can a "modern" OS do than something like NextSTEP absolutely cannot? Aside from the chrome, and performance-bound things like video streaming and gaming,
by lxe 3y ago
What can a "modern" OS do than something like NextSTEP absolutely cannot? Aside from the chrome, and performance-bound things like video streaming and gaming, the functionality of what we can do with computers changed very little over the decades.
- mepian 3y agoDid NeXTSTEP have any support for threads and their synchronization? POSIX introduced its thread model around the time Apple absorbed NeXT.
- mpweiher 3y agoYes. NeXTSTEP had Mach threads, both kernel and user-space.
- wahern 3y agoMost if not all systems had threads before POSIX Threads. POSIX Threads brought a standard interface to replace the chaos that reigned. It took many years for the ridiculous amount of thread API portability cruft in Unix ecosystem software to be excised. You saw something similar with atomics until C11 and C++11 atomics displaced old interfaces, though that switchover seemed to happen much quicker, perhaps because it was principally a userspace issue and you could bring newer toolchains and binaries to older platforms.
- pipeline_peak 3y agoThere’s not much more else to push towards, Xerox pretty much figured it all out in the 70s. End users don’t use operating systems, they’re a burden of security vulnerabilities and compatibility issues. If I had to round it out, the tech industry as a whole would prefer we all do everything in browsers over the cloud. Disregarding freedom and privacy, I would prefer things to be that way.
- thsksbd 3y ago"Disregarding freedom and privacy, I would prefer things to be that way." Reliability too. The cloud is 99.9999 reliable until your power, therefore your internet cuts off. Your local office, or emacs, or whatever, will gladly chug along until the M1's battery drains
- pipeline_peak 3y agoThat’s pretty much someone in 1900 going, “so what happens when yer fancy electricity runs out? I’ve got candles for days!”
- thsksbd 3y agoWell, Ive had to buy a fancy generator and powerful LED flashlights because my fly-over America town's infrastructure has terrible reliability. Not that Im in a bad neighborhood: I just realized I might be the only one in my block that doesn't have a luxury vehicle. 8 year old Hyundai and 10 year old Golf for me in a sea of Mercs, BMW, Lariats and Lexuses. Of course, I must be poor. I have a portable, Chinese clone 7000 kW gen that only feeds 6 circuits and sounds like a pneumatic gun. Half my neighbors have full-house automatic, natural gas fed GENERACs.
- qubex 3y agoThe cloud and browsers is a truly miserable paradigm. Serfdom and a thick client with an absurd amount of chrome and a dumb multitasking interface (tabs). What on Earth is enticing about any of this? I see people using Google Docs and/or Office in the browser, and they’re contending with a UI rendered underneath a browser UI and it all looks so cramped and of course eventually somebody instinctively clicks the back button to undo something and all hell breaks loose.
- draw_down 3y agoHmm, personally I enjoy both chrome and video streaming but to each their own!
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoTheoretically you could build a self-contained browser and run it there. In practice, even if you managed, say, to port a modern Firefox and all its baggage down to OpenSSL and even GCC to compile it in a mighty for of herculean effort, it would still likely die of a thousand paper cuts anyway because quite a lot of syscalls would be expected to have evolved since.
- notbeuller 3y agoHad to be about a year ago - I pulled down the latest sources for gnu emacs and built them on my next slab running OpenStep 4.2 (I think? 3.3?) - I think I had to tweak one source file and I joked about how long it took to build ("this really feels like I'm getting something done!") but it worked. Not Firefox, obviously, but an impressive amount of backwards compatibility in that codebase.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoYeah, but that’s Emacs, they are known to keep compatibility with some odd Sun box running SunOS a greybeard contributor just won’t let go of. But other modern codebases will want more modern syscalls without fallbacks and compromises (see those atomic file operations which solve some nasty vulnerabilities for an example).
- mpweiher 3y agoNot much. I had a NeXT cube and the user + developer experience on my M1 Air is largely the same. More portable, obviously, and more colourful. Faster, but not nearly as much faster as it should be, IMHO. Well fortunately I write very little Swift, so at least compile performance is OK, and a lot of the user-noticeable speed improvements come from SSDs. > video streaming NeXTStep had NeXTtime, which IIRC was also important in sealing the Apple deal, as Be's big claim to fame was (multi-media) performance, with the for-the-time impressive demo of 4 videos playing simultaneously. Nobody had really thought of it before, but playing 4 videos was also not an issue in NT, so Be-blocked. https://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/AppleNeXT.htmld/present.html https://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/AppleNeXT.htmld/present.h...
- KerrAvon 3y agoI only have experience with OpenStep 4.x on PC hardware, but I feel like you may be vastly underplaying the speed gain from then to now, unless NeXTstep on black hardware really felt that much faster than on one of the blessed 486 configurations. I mean, NeXT was not known for speed, and this was the age of slow spinning rust or, for NeXT, even slower MO drives. I remember NeXTtime - it was essentially a prototype tech demo that could play some -- only some -- QuickTime movies in a very small window. I find it unlikely that it was significant in the deal. IIRC the Apple tech team wasn't that impressed with the interrupt latency of Mach, which later had to be fixed at Apple out of necessity.
- worik 3y ago> Not much. I had a NeXT cube and the user + developer experience on my M1 Air is largely the same. I recently (3 years ago) started developing on iOS and MacOS. I learnt programming on Mac Plus in the late 1980s early 1990s Wow, what a change. In the 1988-92 Macs were the bees knees for development. Really good. Now, definitely not. I regularly switch between Mac, Linux, and Windows for development. Development on iOS and MacOS is deeply painful. The tools are flash, lots of features, and they mostly work, that is they do not really work. Apple took US$99 from me for a license to write software for their machines, and now I cannot run my software on iOS unless I am connected to the Internet, so they can "verify" my license. (I never got the license - another sad story) Many times, regularly, the "verification" process goes awry and I spend time trying to work out which particular string of gobeldy gook I need to enter n which obscure part of Xcode to get the equipment I (my boss) paid for to do anything other than be dead weight. The flagship language (Swift) is half arsed. Some bits are OK, but the threading model is from the 1990s dressed in drag. Memory management by reference counting? Golly, how 1990s. Passing class parameters by reference as default, but not struct parameters - say what? Distributing the software we write to the users that need to use it is immensely painful, not my immediate problem, but I watch people in my firm tear their hair out trying to make it work. How the mighty have fallen.
- nxobject 3y agoI think there a lot of niceties that make laptops and portable computing possible - suspend to disk, advances in scheduling, ubiquitous hotplug support - that I do appreciate, but also do take a bit of architecting.
- Shawnj2 3y agoAlso basic stuff like multi theading, 64 bit, etc.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoRun on more than two screens? Support modern networking? Support Unicode in all applications?
- vondur 3y agoGood question about the screens. Under OpenStep on PC hardware, I think you can do multiple monitors. I believe TCP/IP was native to NextStep, but doubtful about Unicode way back then.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoHave there been Matrox drivers for OpenStep? I don’t remember what other multihead graphics cards existed at that time. For multiple video cards, you again had to reach for Matrox, since they were produced in both PCI and AGP variants and I’m unsure about other brands.
- vondur 3y agoYes, I built my first PC that could run OpenStep with a Matrox Millenium. Since I was new to Unix at that point I assumed that Netscape was available for OpenStep. I later found out that the Unix guru was running an X session from an SGI machine.
- spitfire 3y agoIn 1990 you could have up to 4 displays on a NeXT Cube + 3 NeXTDimension 32bit colour boards. These were 1152x864 32bit colour displays at a time when people were using 80x25 16 colour text (likely, wordperfect/Lotus 123), or /maybe/ 640x480 16 colour graphics in windows 3.0. NeXT had full ipv4 support from the start. Unicode wasn't a thing until after Apple bought them. One experiment I've done on my own NeXTStation turbo was run equivalent applications on both a NeXT and a modern Intel mac pro. Mathematica, email, Framemaker/affinity publisher all take roughly the same time to load and execute similar tasks. Yes you can't do 3d, video, or AI on a 33 year old NeXT, and the image files would be smaller, but beyond that you could easily do your day to day work on such a system. It doesn't feel old at all.
- bdcravens 3y agoDitto for Windows 95.
- wk_end 3y agoWindows 95 didn't even have proper memory protection. Nein danke. Now Windows NT, on the other hand...
- qbasic_forever 3y agoI'd go for XP or Windows 7 instead, it uses the NT kernel and is much, much better than 95 in every way (performance, security, multitasking, etc). Win 95 is still just a glorified DOS shell. After win 7 the only innovation in windows has been incremental features mostly to upsell Microsoft services.
- somat 3y agoIt is not so much a question of modern or legacy but of intended audience. The OS(or more specifically the desktop environment) intended for a general audience will be more bland, uniform and legacy than the one made for a smaller more specific audience, perhaps it was made for the sole use of the author and they decided to share.. The general audience will have a preconceived expectation, you might say an intuition, about how the environment works, this mean, that an environment intended for such an audience cannot really have too much advancement or it will drift too far from expectation.
- TheCleric 3y agoWell, apart from medicine, irrigation, health, roads, cheese and education, baths and the Circus Maximus, what have the Romans ever done for us?
- qbasic_forever 3y agoRun a modern web browser with an up to date and secure networking/https stack.
- ithkuil 3y agoFwiw the first web browser was developed for NeXT
- rcme 3y agoContainers, virtualization, user-space IO.