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0 pointsajross3y ago0 comments

Most of the Mac OS ROM was still in assembly (there was a story on the front page last week detailing a time bug owing to a misfeature of the 68k DIVU instruction, even). It wasn't about "safety", just productivity.

And C wasn't chosen because Apple had made an organizational bet on Pascal years earlier with the Apple II. C in the early 80's was still a niche "new vogue" kind of thing from academia[1]. Apple's roots were older, they didn't get the Unix bug until decades later.

[1] c.f. Sun Microsystems, founded by Stanford and Berkeley geeks, launching its very different 68k products concurrently.

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pjmlp3y ago· 2 in thread

Every OS has plenty of Assembly on them, even those written in C.

They never got the UNIX bug really, even with the reverse acquisition from NeXT, or the way A/UX was implemented, Steve Jobs opinion on traditional UNIXes is well known in the Apple community as there some infos on his USENIX session, and NeXTSTEP brainstorming sessions.

pram3y ago

Is that USENIX keynote available somewhere? I see the references but not the actual dialogue anywhere.

pjmlp3y ago

Back in those days conferences weren't filmed.

https://www.usenix.org/blog/vault-steve-jobs-keynotes-1987-u...

Here are some references,

Chris MacAskill did a full overview of what he had to do to convince Job, it was even commented here,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17420674

Now gone from the Internet,

https://allaboutstevejobs.com/blog/2018-07-11-chris-macaskil...

However it is saved on the Wayback machine,

https://web.archive.org/web/20180628214613/https://www.cake....

=> "They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them."

There is also the interview with UNIX Today!

https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1991/11.html

=> "You know, take SGI's new machines-they have 8-bit color frame buffers in them, you can't even put up a bunch of beautiful color photographs without having one of them look good. The rest of them look blah because you can't do it in 8 bits. You know what I'm talking about. So most computers haven't even gotten past the stage where you could put up a bunch of color photographs, much less other types of media, or moving, dynamic media. And I think that that's an advantage that we'll continue to keep. "

=> "We're bringing Unix to the commercial market where what they care about is designing, creating and deploying mission-critical custom apps alongside those in a multitasking environment. They want to be able to use a suite of productivity apps that are compatible in the data formats with all the ones they use in the PCs. And that's where we have an offering that Motif has nothing to compete with and Sun has very little to compete with. But if you take us into the traditional scientific and engineering marketplace, we are a pretty powerful and very cost-effective Unix box. And to address X, we do run X on our product very well. There are two: one X product, soon to be two, that you can buy from third parties that run X-Window right alongside their Next Step windows, and they're quite good. So we don't have anything against X for what it was designed for, but X has not made the crossover into the commercial marketplace. "

Plenty of other similar remarks on the interview.

And some interesting NeXT footage,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU

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