[muchfresh]

The more I understand OSX the more I feel it is a frankenstein OS. There are many parts of the OS with all entirely different origins. All these parts are then forced to work together. The result I feel is not a modern ellegant OS.

Mach Kernel
Mach has been around for many years. Originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University in 1985. Several notable companies have used it. Tenon system's MachTen, NeXT OS, and Digital OSF/1(now Compaq's Tru64). Apple has updated Mach for OSX to include many modern features like plug and play hardware support, real time services, dynamically loadable kernel, network and filesystem extensions.

BSD
BSD one of the early developers of UNIX like operating systems. BSD's history begins back in 1977. Now BSD seems to be a distant second to Linux in terms of UNIX-like OS development. UNIX was very advanced and still to this day powers some of the worlds most powerful computers. But UNIX lacked many modern features that had to be added on top of its 'simple' foundation. Features like object oriented software development, object oriented documents, GUI, Metadata etc. These features are added onto a foundation that *never* considered these concepts in computing. BSD has been updated to the latest distrobution and ported to run on top of the Mach kernel for MacOSX. Other technologies from Next early 90's OS are also incorporated into this layer such as NetInfo

NeXT
NeXT was developed in the late 80's to run on NeXT hardware. In the Early 90's NeXT gave up with trying to be a hardware manufacturer and focused on their Object Oriented Software environment(OpenStep). Core OS(NextStep) development took back seat to the Object Oriented Software development environment. As time went on Client Server software took a back seat to web application development. NeXT introduced WebObjects wich was built on OpenStep. OpenStep then took a backseat to WebObjects. Cocoa is an updated version of those old openstep frameworks.

MacOS 9
Carbon was developed to ease porting of applications from Mac OS to OS X. The Carbon framework is a port and update of a myriad of macintosh technologies wich never were designed for modern OS features such as preemptive multitasking, multiple processors and protected memory. Even many of Carbon's features still can not take advantage of these features such as the Human Interface Toolbox.

Other New and updated technologies
Apple events is a low level OS service that has been brought over from OS 9 but know has been updated to comunicate with carbon, cocoa and maybe BSD layers

Aqua, conceptually similar to NeXT's display postscript has been updated to work with OSX's myriad of application environments.

The event model now must decide wich application environment the event is for and fomat the event and finally pass it.

Core foundation was derived from from the Foundation framework of openstep and provides fundemental software services to both Cocoa and Carbon application environments.

Downsides
performance: With many environments and disparate systems that must communicate the OS spends much time translating and passing messages. The finder appears to suffer from message passing performance issues as highlighted by window resizing.

inconsistancies: each environment is trying to gain features that the other environments had. It appears that many transplanted features are not yet fully implemented, drag and drop, apple events and services. The filesytem is interfaced entirelly differently at the higher(gui)levels than at the shell level. For instance copy a file at the shell level does not copy metadeta but does if copied at the gui level.

Future software features: As apple tries to add features it must waste resources insuring the new features work with all the different environments

Object Oientation: Apple has forced itself into a world where it eschews object orientation for backward compatability. All core features of Mac OS X need to be accessable by both Carbon, Cocoa and possibly BSD and Java. To get this broad reach core os features are built in C. Already Quartz and Core foundation are built in C. Sure Cocoa is Object Oriented but it is old and only provides object orientation for the OS at a high level.

[griffman]

Interesting post that summarizes much of the history of OS X ... but ... what's the alternative? Are you asking for something to be done about it? If so, what? Do you think they should be working on a parallel-universe version OS X that's based on OS 9 code, in case OS X doesn't sell? What should they have done instead? They've been trying for 10 years, after all.

NOTE: The above are 'real' questions - while I enjoyed the post, I'm just not sure if it was an "FYI" kind of thing, or if you're wanting something in response?

-rob.

[G Barnett]

Frankenstein or work of art?

simple answer....

YES!


G Barnett

[HeatMiser]

Both.

Frankenstein's monster was a work of art in the purest sense of the term.

------------------
The suspense is terrible...I hope it'll last.

[rtamesis]

Instead of obsessing about the nuts and bolts of OS X and their different origins, you should be judging the finished product instead and how it actually performs. Is it stable and responsive? Does it let you use most of your old applications and documents? Are you able to easily access the Internet and get your work done without the thing crashing entirely? Can newbies learn to use it easily while letting professionals access its more powerful UNIX features?

[Mr Heliums]

Originally posted by rtamesis:
Instead of obsessing about the nuts and bolts of OS X

A fine pun, given the title of this topic ...

Mr H

[Mr Heliums]

Originally posted by rtamesis:
Instead of obsessing about the nuts and bolts of OS X

A fine pun, given the title of this topic ...

Mr H

[muchfresh]

what should Apple do, What Apple should have done or what should consumers do?

Apple should have been able to develop a modern OS on their own. They should have purchased BE once they decided to go outside for their core OS. Apple should replace the filesystem architecture that is based on the BSD api, metadata should be core part of the filesystem architecture. Apple should make cocoa the primary API of OS X. Carbon is nice for a compatibility layer but future OS development should focus on Cocoa. Update, improve and add features to Cocoa. Either scrap the cocoa-java bridge technology and go pure Obj-C or rewrite the *entire* cocoa framework for the Java syntax. Hopefully they can improve the performance of the event and messaging layers. Fix the Finder/desktop

What is wrong with the finished product
inconsistant operation: file-system operations, drap and drop, apple events, pasteboard
performance: file opening, application launching, interface responsiveness, multitasking

What works
the marriage of UNIX with a simple user interface, smashing success.
plug and play hardware works
Stability good but room to improve.
installation very good
buzzword compliant preemptive multiprocessing,multiprocessor etc...
printing
networking
print to PDF

[Mac_hiavelli]

Does this make Classic/Carbon/Cocoa the bride of Frankenstein ?

[michaelb]

Originally posted by Mac_hiavelli:
Does this make Classic/Carbon/Cocoa the bride of Frankenstein ?

If it's played by Helena Bonham Carter then it works for me.

Come to think of it, why not get *her* to do some ads for it. Add a bit of class to X.

[HBC is the chick from Fight Club and was in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for those of you who haven't seen the 20 other Art House movies she's been in.]