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This article appeared in the May 2001 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
When giant Apple bought tiny NeXT a few years ago, it should have been clear then that Jonah was actually eating the whale. Steve Jobs was running the show, and NeXT was his baby. In rolled all the NeXT programmers--Unix heads to the last, and it was announced that Mac OS X would be based on Unix.
Anyone who's had more than a casual acquaintance with both the Mac and Unix is well aware that there's a cultural divide between the two camps.
The typical Mac user isn't very technically oriented, and probably bought her iMac because it was stylish and easy to use. She could do powerful things without becoming a geek. The Mac is as nonthreatening as a computer has ever been. The classic Mac OS does a very good job of hiding the difficult parts of computing from its users. The price of this simplicity on the surface is an almost unmanagable complexity hidden inside Mac OS, where the user can't go, and a lack of options when something out of the ordinary is required.
Unix represents none of these things. The traditional Unix system consists of a small kernel--often small enough to fit on a floppy disk--that does little but manage memory and talk to the ports. Everything else that makes the machine useful is done with hundreds of small programs, each of which may only do one thing, but do it very well. In some sense, a Unix machine is like a tool chest filled with an amazing assortment of small and simple hand tools. By piecing together the proper combination of little programs, extraordinary things can be accomplished. The price of this power has been the unfriendly and mysterious command line.
To see how the two are different, consider two ways of finding out how many people are connected to your machine over the network. The Mac user might open the File Sharing control panel and count the number of connections in the list. A Unix user would typically open a terminal window and type somethng like netstat|grep tcp|wc -l >> count, piping together three different programs in one shot and saving the answer in a file..
A couple of years ago, it would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall at Apple, inside the room where decisions about the new operating system were being made. There must have been great arguments between the old-time Apple guard, who are used to the Macintosh way of doing things, and the upstarts from NeXT, who are clearly Unix-heads.
It's pretty clear who won. A few days after Apple rolled out Mac OS X 10.0 with barely a whimper on March 24, one long-time Mac user told me, "The Macintosh operating system is dead. Get used to the idea. Mac OS X is here to stay." In many ways Mac OS X looks more like an updated NeXTStep than a new Mac OS. Mac OS 9.1 can still be lured out of the bowels of the beast, but it usually seems like Mac OS X is only grudgingly allowing it to to use a little corner of the machine it once owned.
It didn't have to be like this. Some of us fondly remember Apple's last marvelous foray into Unix, called A/UX. A/UX was a BSD-flavored Unix, like Mac OS X, running underneath Mac OS 7. It was a full-blown Unix that made you believe you were really running Mac OS 7. In many ways, the A/UX interface is what the Mac OS X team should have been shooting for. It ran well on the Macintosh II machines such as the IIcx and IIci, and was terrifically fast for its day on the "wicked fast" IIfx. Greatly overpriced, A/UX was not given the chance to be a commercial success, and Apple quietly let it die at version 3.04 by not upgrading it for the Quadras and the PowerPC machines.
All this is not to say Mac OS X is a failure. In many ways it is a very great success. It's clearly the prettiest, if not the most user-friendly Unix ever shipped. Almost all older Mac programs run well in classic mode. Dozens of companies have committed to releasing Carbon or Cocoa software. And yet, most Mac users don't see it as a Macintosh OS; it's not bad, just something else.
Apple seems to be recognizing this. There was no great celebration when Mac OS X was released. It seems to have been pushed out the door because Jobs said "push!". Within two weeks, there was a 10.0.1 update available, containing speedups and more compatibility with classic Mac OS. The much vaunted dock was not enough; windowshades are back. Can a real Apple menu be far behind?
Apple seems to be saying "Wait until Macworld this summer. We'll have it right by then." Expect a series of tweaks and upgrades over the next couple of months, as the Apple elves come up with mid-flight corrections. In the meantime, we're all supposed to enjoy Mac OS X public beta 2 for only $129.
To support Mac OS X, other upgrades flowed out of Apple in a steady stream. iTunes and iMovie have both been Carbonized. AppleWorks was bumped to version 6.1.2, and as mentioned above, Mac OS X itself was nudged up to version 10.0.1.
The most problem-filled of these upgrades is the Firmware 4.1.8 ROM-upgrade for the G4 machines with AGP graphics slots. As part of the upgrade, the startup memory check was made more stringent, and many users found that some third-party PC100 DIMMs which worked before the upgrade were now failing the test. Apple claims they're just taking extra-special care to make sure the RAM is within specifications in order to make machines more stable.
Several programs have appeared to test RAM to see if it's compatible before the irreversible upgrade is done. One that seems to work well is DIMMCheck, freeware from Glenn Anderson. He's also written another free utility capable of reprogramming some DIMMs that initially fail to meet Apple's guidelines. Many memory sellers are offering to trade incompatible memory purchased from them at little or no cost.
GCC is the standard compiler in the open source software arena, and Apple wisely shipped GCC on the developer tools disk included with Mac OS X. As a result, there has been a flood of open source software appearing for OS X. Here are a few I've installed.
The command line shell preferred by Apple is tcsh, but when I wear my penguin mask, the shell I'm most at home with is bash. Bash is easy to compile for Mac OS X, but if you want a precompiled binary that's also available.
The beta versions of Mac OS X shipped with SSH as a standard component, but it was mysteriously removed in the 10.0.0 release. After laboriously installing SSL and SSH 2.5.2p2 on 10.0.0, I was less than pleased to discover the 10.0.1 update had overwritten the SSH I'd installed by the older version 2.3.0p1. Apparently others noticed the same thing, because an updater is available.
The biggest obstacle to porting many of the heavy-hitter open software programs to Mac OS X is that they're written for X-windows and Mac OS X doesn't use X-windows. Happily, Apple's decision to open-source the Darwin kernel of Mac OS X inspired people to get Xfree86 running on Darwin. From there, it's a short trip to Mac OS X. For an Aqua version of Xfree86, go to the XonX project (www.xonx.org). It's definitely strange to see The Gimp running on my Mac.
More open source software is appearing every day. A good place to look for all the software discussed above is www.macosxsoftware.com.
The speaker at the April LCS meeting will be Lee Larson. He will take apart and reassemble a computer, showing all the parts. It might even still work after he's done.
The Louisville Computer Society meets 7:00-9:00 P.M. on the fourth Tuesday of each month at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the Web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
The LCS also sponsors an e-mail discussion list devoted to Macintosh topics. To join, send e-mail containing only the words "subscribe macgroup" to majordomo@erdos.math.louisville.edu.
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