[SCC_Active_Members] History of Apple OSs

[Ike Nassi]

The MacMach project demonstrated feasibility on 68K around 1991.   The full 
Macintosh environment was running on it.  I demonstrated this to Ed Birss 
and Roger Heinen (separately) and showed Excel and MacMissle Command running 
on what appeared to be the MacOS but were in fact Mach.  It was only when I 
launched the c-shell that it became obvious what was happening.

The MkLinux project produced a working prototype of a Mach 3.0 kernel 
running on PowerPC.  CD's were distributed with all the sources at the 
Developers conference in 1996. Mac OSX of course runs on the Mach kernel. 
This was a necessary step in enabling the transition to x86.  Apple wasn't 
ready for it with Star Trek, and they still weren't ready for it in 1996, 
but in 1997 after Avie came on board, Mach was adopted.  Avie was one of the 
authors of Mach as a CMU grad student.  My team worked with him on the 
multiprocessor version back in the mid to late 80's while I was at Encore.
---
Ike

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Al Kossow" <aek at bitsavers.org>
To: "Randall Neff" <randall.neff at gmail.com>; 
<SCC_active at computerhistory.org>
Sent: Tuesday, Jul 25, 2006 12:01 PM
Subject: Re: [SCC_Active_Members] History of Apple OSs


>
>
>
>
>> The original 140 page history is available as
>> a free pdf from a link at the bottom of:
>>
>> http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter1/
>>
>
> I don't think I ever had any direct contact with the author, though I 
> think
> he arrived at Apple in the late 90's. First thing I noticed is the picture
> of the Apple I board and the screen shot of Neptune running on an Alto are
> images I created. One sentence on NuKernel, which was a project I had some
> peripheral involvement with for about 10 years is disappointing.
>
> While the techies at Apple knew the OS had to be replaced since the mid
> 80's, it was impossible to build momentum and get the right resources to 
> do
> it until well into the PowerPC era, when Microsoft's products and the
> erosion of the Mac market put upper management into panic mode.
>
> His comment that Apple's switch to x86 as a vindication of the "Star Trek"
> project is revisionist history. The need to switch was the fault of Moto 
> and
> IBM being unwilling to develop anything Apple could sell in the portable
> space, and IBM's disinterest in Apple in the high end desktop space.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> SCC_active mailing list
> SCC_active at computerhistory.org
> http://mail.computerhistory.org/mailman/listinfo/scc_active
>