[HN Gopher] The Apple Network Server's all-too-secret weapon (fe...
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The Apple Network Server's all-too-secret weapon (featuring PPC
Toolbox)
Author : classichasclass
Score : 124 points
Date : 2023-11-12 07:38 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
| nxobject wrote:
| The history section is depressing: a whole conga line of promised
| collaborations and technologies that Apple seems to have
| promised, and then completely dropped the ball on. (Even apart
| from the famous crash-and-burns of Copland and OpenDoc, don't
| forget A/UX 4.0! A/UX and AIX on PowerOpen! Mac OS 7 on DR-DOS!
| Netware on PPC Macs! Mac OS on the ANS! Okay, wait, MAE on AIX on
| the ANS! Whoops, no SMP on the ANS! Okay, now we're shipping Mac
| OS, A/UX, _and_ NT on ANS!)
|
| It puts contemporary Apple's NIH complex in context.
| aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
| > Mac OS 7 on DR-DOS!
|
| Seriously?
| II2II wrote:
| I believe it is a reference to the infamous Star Trek
| project. I did not know of the Digital Research connection,
| but it sounds like it was another one of those
| collaborations.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
|
| The funny thing is, the industry knew that collaboration
| would be necessary back then, but it took open source models
| for it to become effective. (I guess direct business to
| business agreements made competitors to dependent upon each
| other.)
| classichasclass wrote:
| (author) Yes, exactly. Star Trek got a lot of heat at the
| time for being a bad idea and at the time it probably would
| have been a real strategic blunder (Spindler was right to
| kill it IMHO), but it really worked, and Marklar ended up
| being analogously the same thing.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| The biggest problem with Star Trek was that it didn't run
| existing Mac software, and you couldn't emulate the 68k
| ISA reasonably on x86 at the time. The key piece of Mac
| OS X on Intel a decade later was translation software for
| PowerPC binaries, so that your existing software still
| worked.
| minimaul wrote:
| The huge list of projects from that era of Apple really shows
| how aimless they were.
|
| I remember at the time how more and more irrelevant they seemed
| compared to the Wintel behemoth, and that really didn't start
| to turn around until the G3 iMac, and later the iPod.
| krger wrote:
| >The huge list of projects from that era of Apple really
| shows how aimless they were.
|
| Most of those projects involved active collaboration with
| other companies who were similarly aimless, so Apple was by
| no means alone in their aimlessness.
|
| It's truly wild just how much time, effort, and money the
| various companies spent smelling each others' farts back in
| the 90s.
| minimaul wrote:
| I guess you can also draw similarities to the MS/IBM joint
| venture that was OS/2, but that actually released products
| - even if MS dumped it for NT.
| lstodd wrote:
| Oh, OS/2 Warp was fine. I even had it as my default OS
| for a while back then.
| p_l wrote:
| MS/IBM joint venture failed through Windows 3.0, which in
| turn apparently was kickstarted by _one_ person in the
| company.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, if I am not mistaken, this is one of the books that
| tells which person was it.
|
| "Undocumented Windows: A Programmers Guide to Reserved
| Microsoft Windows Api Functions (The Andrew Schulman
| Programming Series/Book and Disk"
|
| https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/0201608340
|
| Pity as SOM was much better alternative than COM, and
| OS/2 in general.
|
| However that wasn't the only issue that nailed OS/2's
| destiny, higher hardware resources and lack of proper
| management direction from IBM side also played a big
| role.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > It's truly wild just how much time, effort, and money the
| various companies spent smelling each others' farts back in
| the 90s.
|
| I wouldn't say they stopped doing it in the 90s,
| personally.
| flenserboy wrote:
| The era was one of fits & starts, mainly because the basic
| things which could be done were done already, & pretty well
| -- word processors, spreadsheets, databases, page design,
| software which fit needs, was powerful enough, & wasn't too
| buggy to use. The long hardware stall of the 80s (think
| about how the 6502 lasted, basically the same, for well
| over a decade, & how IBM was still selling an 8086 machine
| in '87) forced software makers to focus on quality
| products. What wasn't there yet, even with the improvements
| through the 90s, was enough grunt in the hardware to do the
| things that were significantly past those basics, & so
| there was a lot of "let's try this, let's try that"
| throwing things at the wall. There were great ideas, &
| shots at getting them right -- contemporary interfaces
| still look sad beside NeXTSTEP, & the Newton wasn't
| approaching what it was supposed to be until near when it
| was axed. Companies don't just want to do bug fixes &
| incremental improvements; they want their customers to be
| excited about something, & the 90s churn had a lot to do
| with keeping people interested & invested.
| narinxas wrote:
| > The huge list of projects from that era of Apple really
| shows how aimless they were.
|
| so there is still hope for google?
|
| but if we take Apple as a guide, this means one of the
| original founders either gets back in "the game" or they
| won't be able to use Apple as a guide
| tambourine_man wrote:
| It takes a long time and a lot of wrong doing to bankrupt
| humongous companies.
| toast0 wrote:
| Especially when the humongous company has a major
| profitable division.
|
| Google probably can't goof off forever on the back of
| Search and adwords; but it can for quite a while.
| rodgerd wrote:
| And clearly a leadership/partnering-driven madness. They had
| the answer all along: A/UX, a MacOS UX on a Unix base, gave
| them what they wanted to get to (modern memory management,
| stability, multi-user security with a MacOS AI), and what
| they'd end up buying with NeXT.
|
| Instead at the time I was working at an Apple reseller and we
| were treated to hugely over-optimisic promises for MacOS 8 that
| included a Microkernel that could run Windows apps alongside
| MacOS applications.
| selimnairb wrote:
| Interesting to think about a world where Apple was able to embed
| AIX with PPCToolbox running on the same machine with classic
| MacOS essentially as the window server. Assuming they could get
| around licensing cost issues, this might have been a viable path
| forward for a modern OS in an alternate future.
| sillywalk wrote:
| There was also Latitude porting toolkit, which was a sort of
| reverse engineered MacOS toolbox that mapped Macos calls to
| native Unix calls, including Rhapsody, at the source level.
| Adobe used it to port Illustrator and Photoshop to Solaris &
| Irix
|
| [0]
| http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Ju...
| thanatos519 wrote:
| I had one of these and ran Yellow Dog Linux on it. Linux
| supported all of the hardware very well including hotswap SCSI
| and the 20x4 LCD with a nice multi page mini 'top'.
|
| Physically, it was amazing. No tools required, and the processor
| board rolled out on rails.
|
| Had no idea about all this craziness!
| knuckleheadsmif wrote:
| This is a great and accurate historical history of the Network
| Server and its software.
|
| I worked at Apple, in the same building with the Apple's Shiner
| team and AIX teams, and had a Network Server in my office because
| I was on the team at Apple porting NetWare to the machine--I
| still have a bootable CD. The project was cancelled just as it
| was entering Beta when disks were to get into customers hands.
| mietek wrote:
| Please image your CD and preserve it in the Internet Archive,
| for the sake of computing history.
|
| Do you happen to have any other unpreserved items from this
| era? In particular, APDA publications are almost all lost to
| time.
| classichasclass wrote:
| (author) Was this PIN or Portable NetWare? How did it look on
| the ANS? Same interface as regular NetWare?
|
| That CD would also be very interesting to run on real hardware.
| ckaiser at floodgap dawt com if you're willing!
| knuckleheadsmif wrote:
| I sent you an email. Yes it was PIN.
| knuckleheadsmif wrote:
| It looked just like Netware except setup was actually more
| simple as it auto detected stuff on the network simplifying
| the process. At the time it was being developed for MIPS,
| PPC, SPARC, and PA-RISC (I'm thinking there was a fifth
| platform, or maybe that was X86?)
|
| Netware dropped the other RISC processors and until it was
| cancelled focused mainly on PPC and X86. Apple did all the
| PPC drivers, and all the device dependent code as well as a
| modified version of setup. It was dropped as both companies
| were going into a death spiral about the time Micheal
| Spindler left and Gil A started. We were told it was a
| "mutual" decision by both companies but I don't have any
| insight into the reason for cancellation beyond that.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| > A/UX, Apple's own Unix with a bolted-on Mac compatibility layer
|
| I used a Mac running A/UX circa 1990-91. It worked rather well
| for the period. I was really surprised when Apple dropped it
| because it solved a lot of what I saw as problems in MacOS.
|
| The article also mentions Apple talk. There was some free
| software called UAB, Unix-to-AppleTalk Bridge around that same
| timeframe.
| sillywalk wrote:
| There was also Netatalk (like Samba but for AFP) released in
| 1990.
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(page generated 2023-11-12 23:01 UTC)