[rescue] Speaking of Solaris GUI options...

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, "Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366" wrote:

> If you get a chance, have look at a NeXT Machine running v3.3 .  It
> basically does everything OSX does on 1/10 the hardware.  It was
> actually fast and usable on a 68040 @ 33Mhz machine with 64MB RAM.

Definitely.  I love my Color Turbo, and my ND Cubes. :-)

Oh!  And I have actually rescued my first (and only) x86 machine:  a Canon
object.station 41!  Sadly, it's the beige version, not the black; no
matching keyboard, mouse or monitor, just the base unit.  But still, I
swore I'd only own one of two x86 machines, specifically because they were
built for NeXTstep:  the Canon pizza box, and the Intel GX Pro, another
pizza box design built to run NSFIP.

In fact, once I get off my overworked/exhausted/lazy/procrastinating butt,
I'll be able to build QUAD-FAT apps:  Black hardware, HP725, SS4 and now
the object.station all running NS3.3!  Woo!  Even if it's just "Hello,
world!" it'll be cool.  (And, of course, thanks to Interface Builder even
hello world on NeXTstep has an "About..." box, printing and fax support, a
color picker, cut/copy/paste, the "Services" menu... damn, why on earth 
didn't Sun follow through with OpenStep?  Why, why, why?)

<rant> Taking three years to rewrite it all in C++ was one obvious reason
why it died the painful, stupid death it deserved... Remember Taligent?  
Java as a language is okay, but the massively bloated, complex, hideously
huge mountain of crap that comes with it is staggering.  NeXT's Obj-C kits
were elegant, compact, streamlined, and beautiful compared to Java's
Swing/AWT/alphabet soup we're buried in today.  Sun's investment in NeXT
was the best $10M they ever spent - next to acquiring the Cray CS6400 from
SGI :-) - and they pissed it away.  Stupid, stupid, stupid. </rant>

But because of my early exposure to the Perq, I've always been on the
losing side of every major flame war over the last 20 years:  m68k over
x86, BSD/Mach over SysV, ObjC over C++... I'll abstain on VMS vs. Unix and
emacs vs. vi. :-)


> For OSX, you better have a G3 running at 600Mhz or better and 256MB
> RAM.  

Well, I bet if you ripped out all the compatibility crap needed to support 
MacOS9 and various other legacy bits, OSX would be slimmer...


> (Someday perhaps Jobs will allow the internal-to-Apple x86 build of
> OSX to be shipped.)

I wouldn't hold my breath.  Think about it:  Right out of the gate, MacOSX
could have been running on NuBus-based m68k and early PowerMacs, HP-PA,
SPARC, *and* x86 machines, and *possibly* even the Alpha (DEC sort of
flirted with OpenStep with PDO)... Jobs clearly chose to stay focused and
maximize resources on making the Apple PPC hardware the premier platform,
mostly so that Apple could remain viable.  In hindsight, it's
understandable that they simply could not overextend and had to stay with
their installed base.

But it still grates on me that all the work of porting to all those
different platforms was just tossed out the window... and if you don't
like the Mach kernel, hell, OpenStep atop Solaris, NT, and even
(eventually) HP-UX or Tru64 or Linux... talk about the pieces all being in
place for "world domination";  one development environment based on a
highly portable, elegant, powerful, and mature object-oriented base, a
lovely application framework and GUI, all the underpinnings to support fat
binaries across numerous platforms... and look at all the effort wasted 
over the last decade...

"Those who do not understand NeXTstep are doomed to reinvent it, badly."

Sigh.

Okay, back to work.  Have to break things now.

-- Chris