Apple history 102 (not the really early stuff)
A long time ago in a place far far away (Cupertino CA) there was once a struggling computer manufacturer. They were struggling because of a lack of drive, a lack of direction, a lack of vision.
Meanwhile not far away in Redwood CA. the ex founder of the company had moved on with his life and setup another company making bizarre looking black cubes and pizza boxes which run software written originally at a university and modified with a printer technology. They had loads of vision by no money.
This company was also struggling because their technology was just that little bit ahead of the curve that the market and some of the ancillary tech had not caught up yet.
Canon, the Japanese giant that was making the curious black hardware in partnership, pulled out of the project and the company (NeXT) transitioned to become a software vendor for x86 machine and in direct competition with Redmond.
Stick with me on this one, because it is going somewhere topical.
Meanwhile in Cupertino, our “beleaguered” computer company was trying to develop a modern, ahead of the curve OS, to take them into the new century and seal the march on their arch rivals from Redmond. Trying and failing, several times. The new OSs in question were Pink, Copland Taligent and that story is for another day because I don’t want to lose the person who is still reading just yet.
So it was after millions of man hours of development and nothing worthy of the NBT title to show for it, it was decided to look outside for a replacement OS.
The list of contenders was small but the smart money was on an ex-Apple member startup called BeOS. Also in the running was NeXT and some kind of agreement with Sun Microsystems.
NeXT was chosen for various reasons ( not least the Steve part of the deal ). Apple (NeXT, the deal was more NeXT taking over Apple than the other way round) then set about Macifying OpenStep.
Now here’s the topical bit: When OpenStep became Rhapsody and after Apple changed their plans for the OS a couple of times, a structure was devised for the OS that allowed a OpenStep (Cocoa) environment called Yellow Box a Mac Classic environment called BlueBox and another environment for running Windows applications inside the fledgling Apple OS.
This runtime environment was subsequently “Steved” along with the other proposal to allow YellowBox and BlueBox to run under MS Windows NT.
History has a way of repeating itself and it was in interest I read in the rumour sites this week that 10.5 (Leopard) will include a form of Virtual Machine environment that will allow Linux and Windows OSs to run on a Mac OSX machine. I just wonder what else we can look forward to as Apple fish around in their source code database pool of failed projects.
Will the iPhone feature Newton technologies or the next version of Pages be an OpenDoc word processor?
Will we see Mac OS X on third party hardware legitimatly just like OpenStep was designed to be. I hope so, because most of these ideas failed because they were ahead of the time or current technology, not because they were bad ideas. Technology and time are progressive and today there may just be a place for this stuff.
Here’s some bedside reading about computer history related to todays posting (I love wikiwiki);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Computer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_%28OS%29