The Challenges of Integrating the Unix and Mac OS Environments (2000)

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/usenix2000/invitedtalks/sanchez_html/sanchez.html

by DvdGiessen • 5 years ago

82 33 5 years ago

pwinnski3• 5 years ago

I still remember being in awe that they pulled this off at all, clumsy as some of the compromises were.

Newer filesystems and application designs have eliminated many of the differences, although I still miss resource forks.

klodolph• 5 years ago

I feel the modern approach takes the main strengths of resource forks and builds on them—instead of needing to use ResEdit, all of your application resources are just ordinary files stored in a directory. Images are stored in standard formats like PNG, data is often stored in plist or text formats.

pwinnski3• 5 years ago

True, I do like 'Show Package Contents'

asveikau• 5 years ago

Maybe somebody who knows classic Mac well can correct me here if I'm wrong, but I feel like resource forks were also solving a "constrained memory and an OS that didn't do paging" problem.

So the library deciding how to load and possibly when to evict sounds like it was kind of the point. Simulating what might be the job of mmap() on a modern system.

donatj• 5 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but macOS still has resource forks, right?

My understanding is that's where file tags, file comments and custom file icons are stored.

rvense2• 5 years ago

Maybe, but Mac APIs don't use them, so you can't mod your games with ResEdit anymore.

NTFS also has multiple forks, and also has many of the same fancy attributes capabilities that made the BeOS filesystem (in)famous, but they're not used in the same way, so it's kind of moot.

What really what made BeOS and Mac OS good was not so much the technical underpinnings, but the way they exposed these in the APIs and standard applications.

The power of Unix isn't just from the presence of the standard I/O routines, but the fact that most programmes are written to adhere to a specific paradigm that allow them to work together.

grishka• 5 years ago

It has extended attributes instead. You can look at them with `xattr -l /path/to/file`. Tags go into `com.apple.FinderInfo`, and resource forks are, predictably, `com.apple.ResourceFork`, though they're probably still stored in a format classic Mac OS understands.

m4633• 5 years ago

I think resource forks suck.

That said, I think metadata about a file outside of the file has always been problematic. I don't know if there's ever been a clean solution to timestamps, r/w/x, ACLs and more.

tobr• 5 years ago

I’m curious, could you expand a little bit on why you think resource forks suck?

lordleft• 5 years ago

Does anyone else remember when MacOS marketing made UNIX a significant part of its sales pitch? I remember a giant, titanium UNIX logo

mhd• 5 years ago

Yes, they got it certified with 10.5, I think. Small market these days, although I'm always surprised when I hear that both AIX and HP-UX are still receiving updates...

pram• 5 years ago

It worked on me! I bought a PowerBook G4 in 2003, when I heard Fink/MacPorts and Jaguar were no longer complete nightmares to use. Been Mac only since then.

kergonath• 5 years ago

They also had adverts such as this one: http://www.brainmapping.org/MarkCohen/UNIXad.pdf [edit] also linked by mrpippy below.

There used to be things like this on Apple's website, too: https://www.apple.com/media/us/osx/2012/docs/OSX_for_UNIX_Us...

I can't find any mention of UNIX in Big Sur's pages, even though it is listed as certified on the Open Group's website.

PascLeRasc• 5 years ago

Those are so cool, thanks for sharing. Can’t believe they got celebrity endorsements like Mark Cohen back then.

jonjacky2• 5 years ago

Yes, I do. I recall they had ads where they showed the amazing things you could do with one-line commands at the shell - they had examples of pipelines including grep and awk etc. I remember being amused that these familiar idioms that had been used in the Unix/Linux world for ages were being presented as amazing new capabilities.

bluejekyll• 5 years ago

For Mac users, this was a new capability. Before that, I was always using remote X sessions to get onto shared Unix systems.

bsharitt• 5 years ago

That's what got me onto MacOS X for many years.

mrpippy• 5 years ago

"Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null"

https://www.brainmapping.org/MarkCohen/UNIXad.pdf

bad_username• 5 years ago

some of the user interface features pioneered by Mac OS such the desktop

That is not true. The desktop metaphor, for example, was first introduced at Xerox PARC in 1970, and used commercially in the Xerox Star workstation in 1981.

mattl• 5 years ago

That's not what pioneered means.

eschaton• 5 years ago

Not really, the basis for the desktop metaphor came from research done at IBM, and it was very extensively revised at Apple for Lisa. (See “Inventing the Lisa User Interface” from ACM Interactions in 1995.)

JohnBooty• 5 years ago

Seems a deliberate and acceptable word choice. pioneer != inventor

musicale• 5 years ago

Apple seems to have a long history of integrations of Mac OS (and the Mac user interface) and UNIX, starting in the 1980s and continuing through today: A/UX, AWS (Apple Workgroup Server), MAE, Rhapsody, OS X, modern macOS...

Not to mention the OS X-like variants for their other platforms: iOS, tvOS, iPadOS, watchOS...

Also consider the various Mach implementations on Apple hardware: MacMach, MachTen, MkLinux, OS X/Darwin...

Sadly it seems that the classic Mac API died when Carbon and 32-bit apps died, so you can't easily port old Mac apps to modern macOS. macOS (and iOS) seem to have a rather poor record for backward compatibility, and it's only going to get worse with the current architectural switch to Apple Silicon...

The Challenges of Integrating the Unix and Mac OS Environments (2000)

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