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Twenty Years of X

Entry 2116, on 2021-03-30 at 21:39:27 (Rating 1, Computers)

Recently Apple's operating system, macOS, had its 20th birthday. Before I discuss this, I should note that there are a couple of complications: first, originally the system was called Mac OS X, then OSX, and now macOS; and second, the latest system is numbered 11, although it is still part of the same range of systems. I will assume all of these are part of the same series, and refer to them all loosely as "X" in this post.

Before X, computers used to crash and require a restart until they crashed again and the process repeated. Generally the user only lost a small amount of data and they just accepted this as normal.

Also before X, most personal or home computers ran a system which really didn't provide some of the benefits we have now. For example, all the programs ran with special privileges (supervisor) so they had access to anything they needed. But that also meant they could crash anything they wanted as well.

Also, having multiple programs running at the same time was achieved through a rather poor system Apple called "cooperative multitasking". That meant the programmer had to specifically allow other programs access to the computer's processor during his program's idle time, or when it was busy performing a long process. So if the program was poorly written other programs might not get any extra time at all. This could be a problem for background tasks which required regular time to perform their function, such as playing music.

There had been more advanced systems which solved these problems around for decades, but they tended to be only used on more "serious" hardware, like servers, minicomputers, and mainframes. The most widely used and established operating system of this type was Unix, which originated from the 1960s. Of course, there was also Linux, which is a very similar system, and usually called "Unix-like".

Apart from being designed primarily for "serious" hardware, Unix also was really hard to use, because it could (usually) only be used through a command line. For example, if the user wanted to see what was in a folder called "My Documents" they would need to type "ls -al /My\ Documents". Once you use a command line for a while it all makes sense, but the average user might struggle a bit!

So Apple decided to get the best of both worlds. They would harness the power of Unix and add the ease of use of the Mac by building a graphical user interface over top of the core operating system. Generally, these are called GUIs (graphical user interfaces) and the command line stuff is called a "CLI" (command line interface).

Note that the CLI has always (and still is) available to Mac users through the Terminal app. If you want to go "old-school" and interact with your Mac by typing commands, you can. Note that there are good reasons to do this, and I use the CLI most days. Also, note that you can erase all your files (with no warning) by typing a few commands, so be careful!

When X first came out the hardware was barely adequate for the task and things were kind of slow and limited. A typical iMac at that time might have had a G3 processor running at 400 MHz, about 256M of memory, and a 20G hard disk. Today a typical iMac might have a CPU with 4 cores, each running almost 10 times faster, 30 times as much memory, and 50 times as much storage, as well as a far superior screen, a massively better graphics card, and many other improvements.

I remember using the first version of X - in fact a beta released before the first real version - and being both impressed by the elegance of how everything worked, but also frustrated by the deficiencies and poor performance. For example, Apple didn't provide a web browser, so you had to use a third party browser, and there was only one written specifically for X (OmniWeb) which didn't support JavaScript (hard to believe now, but not such a big deal back then).

Luckily there was a compatibility layer, called "Classic", which allowed old programs to run on the new OS. Of course, that meant all the old problems came back too, but at least if a classic program crashed it just brought down the Classic environment and not the whole computer.

Along with the reliability and power of Unix, Apple also gained in another area: Unix programming tools. My main development environment today utilises the Apache web server, the MySQL database system, and the PHP programming language. All of these are Unix tools, and I primarily access them from the command line, although there are GUI tools to work with them too.

Note that an advantage of having a powerful command line under the surface is that it is relatively easy to create a friendly graphical program (menus, buttons, text fields) which controls the underlying command line tools (invisibly to the user) to get things done. For example, if you use Apple's "Disk Utility" program you are really sending commands to the "diskutility" command line tool to actually do the work.

Apple have always been a company which likes to move forward, often at the expense of maintaining the use of older programs and peripherals, and this hasn't changed much today.

When X was first released Apple used PowerPC processors in their computers, but the consortium responsible for these (IBM, Motorola, Apple) just couldn't produce good processors which were also power efficient, so as laptops became more important, Apple had to switch to Intel processors, just like those used by PCs.

Now it is Intel processors which are lagging in terms of processing power in relation to the amount of electrical power used, so Apple are switching again to their own processors, often called "Apple Silicon" or "ARM". There is some pain involved with this, just like there was when X was first released, but the overall gains seem impressive.

I always say that the computer industry is young, and we should expect some problems, and a lot of annoying changes, because of this. But that is changing. My 2014 laptop is still very usable today, even running the very latest versions of the OS (Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks was the current system when it was first released; since then we have had 10.10 Yosemite, 10.11 El Capitan, 10.12 Sierra, 10.13 High Sierra, 10.14 Mojave, 10.15 Catalina, and now macOS 11 Big Sur).

Given this stability in hardware I am hoping the same might happen for software. Maybe we might be able to buy a computer and still use it, relatively unchanged 5 or even 10 years later. Yeah, maybe... or maybe not!

Comment 2 (6464) by OJB on 2021-03-31 at 10:50:28: (view earlier comments)

I think it was a conscious decision to try to amalgamate a powerful underlying OS with an elegant, easy to use interface. I agree that Apple were in trouble at that point, and needed to do something big. So they did. BTW, there are massive differences between Mac OS X and the OS it came from: NeXT. Note also, that NeXT was the work of Steve Jobs, who moved there from Apple, then back again.

Comment 3 (6465) by Anonymous on 2021-03-31 at 13:45:36:

Of course it was a conscious devision, reached only after they had failed miserably.
There may be many differences today, but at the time they were close (as seen in Rahpsody, the often forgotten "first" version OSX).

Comment 4 (6467) by OJB on 2021-03-31 at 15:17:54:

Sure, there were various attempts at creating a modern OS which didn't work out. Hey, Apple have had several failures over the years; tell me a company who hasn't. And yes, I know there were many aspects of the NeXT OS which remained in macOS for years. You could see that in the names of the objects, functions, etc used in programming. I can't quite see what your point is here.

Comment 5 (6469) by Anonymous on 2021-04-01 at 11:52:33:

No point really, just filling in gaps in your story.

Comment 6 (6471) by OJB on 2021-04-01 at 15:48:58:

Fair enough. The problems at Apple at that time were not really the focus of this post. Maybe I'll do that in a future blog entry.

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