The History of OS/2
I’ve been reading Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software Substack which follows his career at Microsoft. In the early sections there are lots of mentions of Microsoft’s partnership with IBM on the OS/2 operating system. I was familiar with this effort in name, but never knew the details and turns out they are fascinating. The story of OS/2 is the story of IBM’s fall from dominance in the personal computer industry.
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18849795
If you are into computer history, give this a read.
Ars Technica’s history of OS/2.
And if you want this in podcast format, Flashback #14 covers OS/2.
My new iMac
Introducing my new Blueberry iMac G3! (Well, new to me.)
After replacing the PRAM battery, which thankfully hadn’t leaked(!), I crossed my fingers and powered it on for the first time.
It works!
I had forgotten what hard drives from this time sounded like. So when it first spun up and started clicking away, I thought “that’s too loud, something must be wrong!”
But lucky for me, it’s working without issue! I was able to wipe the system and do a clean install of OS 8.6 from the original restore disk which came with the machine.
Amazingly, internet access just worked thanks to the Ethernet port. Browsing the web with IE 4.5, well that’s another matter. Thankfully there’s a decent amount of retro resources online that have minimal browser requirements. Mac84.net is a good example and has links to other resources.
I was even able to get a game of Quake in!
Emulating Macintosh System 7 on iPad
Just in time for System 7’s 30th Anniversary, I got it running in emulation on my iPad. I was surprised how well it works and I think it actually looks kind of nice on the iPad screen.
It’s interesting how simultaneously familiar and odd this operating system is. Also is interesting that TCP/IP support is an add on extension!
I was inspired by Matt Sephton’s post to give this a try. I found these guides helpful to figure out how to get BasiliskII up and running on iPad:
Emulating Mac OS X Server 1.2
Before Mac OS X 10.0 and it’s Developer Preview, the first public appearance of Mac OS X was Server 1.0, codename Rhapsody, which was released in March 1999.
This is the first time we can see the descendent of the NeXTSTEP operating system dressed up in a Mac-like theme. I was able to get Server 1.2 running in QEMU.
Instead of the logo and progress bar, our boot screen is a text console.
I suppose this would be the first piece of software that allows you to log in to your Mac as root.
Instead of Finder we have Workspace Manager.
The Server 1.x releases didn’t yet have the Carbon framework, so only newly written apps using Yellow Box (which became Cocoa) were supported. OmniWeb was one of the few apps that could run in this environment.
The Apache web server is included out of the box.
Check out how this was marketed on Apple’s website in 1999. Some of the notable features are the Mach BSD kernel, POSIX compatible APIs, and 100% pure Java. Technologies to enable web serving were also emphasized, such as Apache, QuickTime Streaming, and WebObjects.
Let’s not forget, a virtualized copy of Mac OS 8 is present.
There you have it, Mac OS X Server 1.2! The 1.0 release debuted at a price of $499 and was met with a poor reception. Even in 1999, I can’t imagine that there was much of a market willing to pay this price to host websites and run Unix network applications on Apple hardware. Despite how impractical it might have been in its time, it is an interesting piece of history showing a critical step of the evolution of NeXTSTEP into the Mac OS X we are familiar with today.