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Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)
- cactusplant7374 1y agoHas his opinion changed on Mac at all over the years?
- analog31 1y agoAt that time was he talking about 68k or Intel Mac? I had a Power Mac.
- slater 1y agoThis is from 1997, so PowerPPC + System 7 or w/e, not OS X
- bluGill 1y agoThis was pre OSX so it is a safe assumption. OSX is sortof nextstep for the masses, but the differences might be things he cares about.
- tracerbulletx 1y agoMacOS is NEXTStep.
- SoftTalker 1y agoMacOS X and later, yes. MacOS 9 and earlier entirely different, even though some of the look and feel was ported to OS X.
- tracerbulletx 1y agoI assumed it would be clear from context I meant in the present day. It's just called macOS now again.
- flohofwoe 1y agoMacOS definitely wasn't, but macOS is (formerly known as OSX) ;)
- grg0 1y agoWhy does this matter to you at all? It's funny to see all the Mac apologizer comments having to clarify that "oh no, but that Mac was so different". As if the modern incantation is any better; we just had a thread two days ago of how absolutely botched it is from a UI/UX perspective, and the hardware is the most anti-hacker, anti-consumer, DRM-riddled thing in existence if you watch any of that Ross boy's channel. > If I can convince apple to do a good hardware accelerated OpenGL in rhapsody Yeah, that comment aged well. Mac users are still waiting for full OpenGL 4.6 compliance and that spec is already ten years old. Edit: of course, I will get down-voted despite laying out very basic facts. Happens every time you poke the dogma bee's nest. Edit edit: I am still genuinely curious why the man's opinion from 30 years ago apparently matters to you that much. I'd like to understand the psychology behind it if you would care to write a response.
- taejavu 1y agoI mean, why does it matter to you that some random internet commenter is curious what John Carmack thinks about macOS?
- analog31 1y agoFor me, it's just historical curiosity. I lived through that era, but had no hope of getting actual exposure to all of those OS's. I went from MS-DOS to 68k Mac, to Win95. I can't even claim to have been particularly prescient about any of those choices.
- grg0 1y agoYeah, for sure. It's interesting to read about what developers thought of OSes or programming languages of yore, especially from Carmack. But GP is already begging for praise on Mac or something.
- JojoFatsani 1y agoI downvote anybody who complains about getting downvoted personally
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- commandersaki 1y agoHe presented a quake 3 port on Mac at one of the Apple events with Steve Jobs on stage.
- flohofwoe 1y agoThat doesn't mean much though, big games are presented every couple of years on Apple events, doesn't mean that anybody respects the Mac as a gaming platform (including Mac users and most importantly: Apple).
- commandersaki 1y agoI think its fair to say he changed his position considering he explicitly says he wouldn't develop for MacOS but did for OSX.
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- tavavex 1y agoI wonder what he'd say today, if he were to give his updated opinions on modern operating systems. I didn't even exist when this was written, but as far I know, OSes are extremely different today. This was still before MS was even hinting at having NT take over as the mainline Windows OS. And then, the macOS of today probably has a lot more in common with NeXTSTEP than classic MacOS, so I'm curious if he changed his opinion on it after OS X came out. The most timeless thing here is Linux retaining its "highest hacker to user ratio".
- deaddodo 1y agoKnowing Carmack, and the market, not much would change about this. Windows still rules the roost, though it wouldn’t be referred to as Win32 today for various reasons. Linux is even more important today, given the Steam Deck and Proton; but still a smaller market than Windows. And macOS is even more of the third-option today given their antagonistic support to OpenGL/Vulkan and non-Apple-first developers (in general). If anything, Linux would probably be switched to first since Carmack was always a hardline supporter and it seems to have the most capture velocity; but that’s still quite unlikely. And obviously all the other platforms would be missing from the list altogether given the triopoly/triculture that the modern desktop OS sphere has evolved into.
- doctorpangloss 1y agoWhy not count Android as Linux? It’s the biggest Vulkan target, by far. Is John Carmack the Ja Rule of programming?
- pjmlp 1y agoBecause the only Linux thing Android exposes to userspace is the Linux kernel. Everything else is either Java/Kotlin based or the set of official NDK APIs. https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis It is hit and miss if using unstable APIs works across devices.
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- dang 1y ago[stub for offtopicness] (but yes, year added above!)
- gnabgib 1y ago(1997)
- leohonexus 1y agoI feel like this needs a (1997) on the title.
- Havoc 1y agoThat must be the first “essay” I read by him. I just recall tweets and interviews Sounds like the weighs and considers everything very carefully
- Eisenstein 1y agoHe wrote tons of them. I find them great reads. Here is an archive for anyone interested. I think the most interesting stuff is when accelerated GPUs started becoming available to consumers and he talks about the developments in that area. From what I recall that is in the 1997 - 1998 era. * https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan EDIT: I found one... * https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan/blob/master/archive/1998-02-12.md https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan/blob/master...
- Snild 1y agoMy favorite is his email on inlining code: https://cbarrete.com/carmack.html https://cbarrete.com/carmack.html
- awkwardpotato 1y agoCarmack also used to have some really insightful articles on AltDevBlog. I recently read his one on functional programming and thought it was very well thought out. This site had nice re-uploads for the some of the articles. You can maybe google around and find more [0] http://sevangelatos.com/tag/john-carmack/ http://sevangelatos.com/tag/john-carmack/
- tom_alexander 1y ago> It has an achingly elegent internal structure, but a user interface that has been asleep for the past decade. [...] I was writing a civilized window manager for it in my spare time Brutal, but the window manager is probably one of the three big things hurting plan9 adoption (along with the lack of common editors like emacs/vim, and the lack of modern web browsers)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- GianFabien 1y agoThe Plan9/9Front folks must like the look or rio, sam, acme. Otherwise somebody would have written a more modern looking desktop for it. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he brought NextStep with him. The new version of the OS was basically FreeBSD core with a NextStep inspired desktop. The same could have been done for Plan9.
- deaddodo 1y agoNeXTSTEP was never a “FreeBSD core”, at least not as is usually implied by that. It was XNU (Mach with FreeBSD’s world bolted on and IOKit shoveled in) with a custom Desktop Environment.
- tom_alexander 1y agoWhile the look certainly isn't flashy, I'd be fine with the look. It's the reliance on 3-button mice that's a problem for me. At least modern laptop touchpads can do middle mouse click with 3-fingers but that's a pretty lousy UX, so it's really only practical with a real mouse. Also I'm much more of a keyboard + tiling window manager kind of a person, so the plan9 focus on the mouse isn't my cup of tea.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- wvenable 1y agoThat's not a correct characterization. OS X is entirely NeXTStep with some classic Mac OS UI elements bolted into it. You couldn't just swap some bit out for Plan9.
- a-dub 1y agohah! i forgot all about quake c. in 1997 i had a windows nt 4.0 machine (might have been a beta) on my desk and a next turbo mono slab. visual studio wasn't terrible for development (and was a great place to get good at c++ and multithreaded), and they managed to bring all the directx stuff over. it was like windows 95, but serious and stable. it replaced a slackware machine and a sgi indy. the indy was cool because it played a little song when you started it up and it had a novel ui with lots of cool color gradients, but otherwise it was kinda buggy. (the "objectserver" would frequently crash inexplicably. what objects did it serve? i have no idea.)
- geocar 1y agoobjectserver (cadmin) was part of the account management system suite. The desktop would use it to mount disks, route speakers/audio, create/manage users, connect things over the network, and all sorts of other stuff. It would crash because the code was garbage.
- a-dub 1y agoahh man you just reminded me. the cd-roms on those machines didn't have the silly audio cable that pcs of the time did, rather they were just connected via scsi. playing audio cds would rip the redbook cd audio stream in real-time and transfer it over the scsi bus where the host would reconstruct the pcm and write it to the dac. i liked the aesthetics of those machines and the tactile feel of the keyboard.
- ErroneousBosh 1y ago> the indy was cool because it played a little song when you started it up I've half an idea that the "guitar" like sound it played it on was done with Karplus-Strong synthesis on-the-fly, as it was playing out.
- b0rbb 1y agoThis makes me wonder if Carmack's feelings on NeXTSTEP had anything to do with the decision to release the first publicly available release of Quake 3 on OS X only at first. See https://web.archive.org/web/20000229083216/http://macweek.zdnet.com/1999/04/25/register.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000229083216/http://macweek.zd... . At the time, I remember the ATI Rage128 chipset being the big deal and reason for why Q3's beta came out first on Mac... but gosh now I wonder if it was the feelings for NeXTSTEP.
- hmstx 1y agoQ3test came out in 1999 - on the classic Mac OS he despised, even a bit before its final OS 9 incarnation. This was to get the biggest bugs ironed out on the most restricted hardware scope available as they were going HW accelerated only during a bit of a wild west period when it comes to that. We were all only reading about OSX in the press at the time - and when Q3 first made it to OSX proper, it was through a third-party (Omni Group). JC did however switch to OSX as his primary development environment for some time when Apple was the first to ship the Geforce 3 in 2001, which was really the generation of hardware needed to do Doom 3 justice. A year later, it was all about ATI's new flagship card which pushed things further for his needs - back to windows, and I can't rembember from his .plan files whether he moved back before getting access to that hardware.