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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

I am guessing here, but I worked at SCO (when it was a UNIX VAR, not three vexatious lawsuits in a trenchcoat) and the killer was always licensing fees, especially to AT&T. Sun bought a royalty-free license to SVR4 from AT&T which became Solaris, but it cost them on the order of $200M (if the figure I was told was accurate). SCO had a royalty-free license to SVR3.2 but had to pay out $250 to licensees for each copy of SCO Open Desktop 3 they sold (the precursor to SCO Open Server in 1995) for stuff like Motif, IXI Desktop, the Microsoft C compiler they still used ...

I suspect Apple went to AT&T for royalty-free terms and were quoted a price that, in the troubled Spindler/Amelio era, they simply couldn't afford for a niche product (the servers).

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They could have ported their user space to Linux or BSD though?

I never used A/UX, so I can't comment on its relative quality.

But it took half a decade for Apple to ship OS/X after the palace coup that brought Jobs back and killed off all their indigenous OS development. And what they ended up shipping with the first revision of OS X didn't really feel very "Mac" like, and ended up being this weird fusion of NeXT tech with a sort of pseudo-Mac UX.

I guess I wonder what was wrong with the A/UX tech that stopped them from utilizing that as a foundation for something new.

EDIT, answering my own question: from WP "cooperatively multitasks all Macintosh apps in a single address space by using a token-passing system for their access to the Toolbox."

Not sure if this would apply to "hybrid" apps that used the Toolbox but with Unix syscalls as well, but I'm guessing yes, and that sounds like a serious limitation. Pure (non-GUI) unix applications would be fully multitasking, but GUI apps would have the same kinds of limitations as on System 7 -- poor/no memory protection, cooperative multitasking, bad memory management.

At the time BSD was mired in a lawsuit from AT&T, and Linux was working but it wasn't clear it would become the most widely adopted *nix. This was Linux kernel 1.x days.

Yeah I was a Linux user in those days (1992 and onwards), and yes, 1.x was a bit rough around the edges but the momentum was pretty good. And 68k support was good fairly early on.

I can see that a large company like Apple wouldn't have gone near it at that point though.

Apple was transitioning away from 68k by the time Linux was released. So 68k support wasn't really that useful to them.

In your original question I think you're forgetting the context of the Unix market of the time. It was the high Unix Wars and A/UX was a minority position of a minority player.

The buzzword of the decade was Object Oriented and anyone not elbows deep in an existing Unix was trying to build an OS around objects. It was entirely unclear if jumping on the Unix bandwagon at that time would have a future. Even with Apple's acquisition of NeXT it was their high level OpenStep that was of most interest rather than the BSD base layer.

And with some success too: Cocoa/AppKit is still hanging around as an actual API that’s still being used by application programmers after 30 years, unlike winapi.

I’m sure there were organizational, business, and technical failures, too, but it seems to me like Apple’s disastrous ~decade attempting to put the Macintosh on a modern foundation was primarily a product failure.

They wanted to do the right thing and synchronize the OS kernel switchover with the PowerPC transition, but chose to pursue a radical software compatibility break alongside the hardware swap.

When that failed for what should have been predictable reasons, they had no choice but to fall back to a pure emulation strategy with no OS architectural changes, and the opportunity to put the MacOS on a new path was lost.

Apple actually did investigate Linux with MkLinux (a project to port Linux to PPC and run it on top of Mach). Neat, but arguably a symptom of their larger issues which were less technical and more leadership which was stifling whatever technical and design excellence there was left. Plus the Clones were eating them alive.

Any OS they released to replace the classic OS, which at that time would have been System 7, needed Macintosh App compatibility, and they wouldn’t have needed Linux or Unix or BSD or OPENSTEP or BeOS if they could have just shut up, clamp down on the mission creep and ship Copland. Apple’s Executive leadership in the mid-90s was unable to execute on that, and none of their side-projects were going anywhere in a sustainable (to Apple) fashion either.

Yeah, after some quick looking into this, cost seems to be the reason why. And ultimately their decision to purchase an external solution seemed to have paid off handsomely.

Yeah, after AT&T was allowed to gain commercial value of UNIX they were clearly minded in recovering all the lost revenue from the free beer days of UNIX early adoption.

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