Re: Breakthrough/turning point.. a small correction.
Why do all the most competent, rational, sane, and EXCELLENT comments on ElReg get either no votes or massively downvoted?
Mate, your post is somewhere between, and yet both of, brilliant and agonising.
Brilliant for the accuracy, historicity, and validity.
Agonising for the reminder of what we've lost and how far we've gone backwards.
(BeOS should have been the next MacOS, written clean as MacOS-copy for the newly economically-achievable mass-market via new hardware -- so insanely fast! -- 25yrs later and still, on top kit, current OSs can't match it. Plus the"relational OS. But Gassée trashed the apps market/developers. And refused to market. Because people should just reward the brilliance. (He was also responsible for trashing all the early Macs' expansion/integration capacities, and, worse, inculcating and profoundly establishing the Apple culture of "Fuck You" on the hardware side. (Eg, FireWire makes me cry. Eg, Allowing the addition of a SCSI port was his big massive major concession for too many years.))
MacOS remained, and still remains,far and away the most real-world productive of any OS platform to date. People used to casually hack their kernel, and not only not realise that that was what they were doing, but not even need to know what that even frikkin meant. Autocorrect? (At the KEYBOARD level regardless of specific custom code for particular app or desk accessory?) Cf. Thunder, the kernel-hack progenitor.
MacOSX peaked at Panther 10.3 --approx. 70% of MacOS-- and and has gone backwards from there for users. Sometimes startlingly backwards, sometimes just subtly but miserably backwards. But always backwards.
(I was for many years the top tech guy for the London Mac Users Group and the Oxford Mac Users Group (for a few years, the oxmacug home page had a photo with us hard core and Woz). But I bailed, broken finally, at IIRC 10.5, when Apple deliberately created an internal firewall to block NASs they disapproved of. Massive carnage for many many users. I managed to find a way around it, but it required people plugging in an approved NAS plus then carefully stepping through my list of commandline instructions. Well, I'm an oldskool Unix head but that's PRECISELY the sort of shit that Mac was intended to NOT be. I'd already rewritten TimeMachine to allow customisation for various MUGers (turns out I'd accidentally written it in '97 for a different purpose), sorted out & written all sorts of unnecessary shit to get people back to what they used to not just have but took for granted. "Enough. I can't take it any more. This is the antithesis of why I like Mac."
)
Metrowerks. CodeWarrior. Awesome awesome brilliant tools. ...People.
And what people did with it....
Metrowerks didn't give up on CodeWarrior: they got driven out of the market by Jobs. And Avi Tevanian. Deliberately: mens rea, "strategy".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
