More Details on Apple's Intel Mac

[tjwett]

Exactly.

Are there many viruses on Linux for x86?
How about for BeOS, OS/2, Rhapsody, Darwin, UNIX?
(Not that anybody would make viruses for any for these...)

The venerability to viruses has to do with the OS.
And last time I checked, these new Macs are coming with Mac OS X.

don't know of any for Rhapsody and i've used BeOS a lot over the past few years. as far as i know there is not a BeOS virus in existence. can't wait for the Intel laptops to come so i can run BeOS again...on a Mac?!?! BeOS hasn't run on a Mac since the G3 was introduced. this will be awesome indeed.

 

[GregA]

OpenStep Enterprise for Windows applications could (more often than not) run unmodified in the Yellow Box for Windows developer release. OPENSTEP applications were not runnable at all by the time that Rhapsody 5.1 (Developer Release 2) was out.

Hi RacerX

I'm not fully up on all the names and codes from back then
It's not surprising that the apps worked from one version (Openstep for Windows) to the next version (YellowBox for Windows DR).

Do you (or anyone) know if an Openstep-for-Windows binary ran on Openstep-Mach-Intel - or was that considered a separate compile?

(or in otherwords - if Apple released Cocoa for Windows, would one binary work on Cocoa-MacIntel and Cocoa-Windows? or would it need a 3rd check box during the compile?)

Thanks,
Greg

 

[RacerX]

Do you (or anyone) know if an Openstep-for-Windows binary ran on Openstep-Mach-Intel - or was that considered a separate compile?

Actually, the structure of the apps were radically different between the two environments.

For example, I use Create, PixelNhance and TIFFany a ton in Rhapsody and OPENSTEP and the packages are laid out pretty much as you would expect them to be having seen Cocoa apps. But the versions that run on Windows actually have a Windows executable (.exe) file within the .app folder.

So there is no chance of making a single package that would work on a Mach based system and a Windows system. They would need to be made separately.


As a side note... I was never able to get OmniWeb to run on Windows. The only release were very beta. But I was able to successfully install a number of other apps (what few I was able to find for OpenStep/Yellow Box for Windows) that worked very much as they had in OPENSTEP/Rhapsody/Mac OS X... Tiffany being one of the best examples.

TIFFany running on Windows NT
in Yellow Box​

 

[AidenShaw]

A question for you, ~loserman~

My Dual and Quad Opteron boxes scale memory bandwidth almost perfectly.(with NUMA)

Out of curiosity, why do you buy quads?

Two duals should be cheaper than one quad, and if your jobs are independent a pair of dual would therefore have better price performance than a quad....

 

[~loserman~]

Out of curiosity, why do you buy quads?

Two duals should be cheaper than one quad, and if your jobs are independent a pair of dual would therefore have better price performance than a quad....

The price of the quad is mitigated by decreasing the cost of GigE and Ininiband required. Also we sometimes need a boatload of memory for some jobs that require it. Dual nodes don't always fit the bill. We do have more duals than quads though.
Overall our computing requirements vary from day to day. We have Xeon, Opteron, Athlon, Xserve clusters. We also have several IBM SPs and SGI Origin and Altix clusters. We will be getting an Large IBM Open Power System and Possibly 2 Racks of Blue Gene.

 

[mavherzog]

what is to stop pc people from installing leopard on thier machines? i may as well go out and buy a nice alienware with leopard..

Same thing that stops you from installing AOS4 on a Mac Mini today...

 

[mandis]

Same thing that stops you from installing AOS4 on a Mac Mini today...

Wouldn't it be great though? I only wish that Hyperion will release a mac friendly version of AOS4 soon!! That OS is a legend...

 

[steeldrivingjon]

Hi RacerX

I'm not fully up on all the names and codes from back then
It's not surprising that the apps worked from one version (Openstep for Windows) to the next version (YellowBox for Windows DR).

Do you (or anyone) know if an Openstep-for-Windows binary ran on Openstep-Mach-Intel - or was that considered a separate compile?

(or in otherwords - if Apple released Cocoa for Windows, would one binary work on Cocoa-MacIntel and Cocoa-Windows? or would it need a 3rd check box during the compile?)

Thanks,
Greg

Actually, it was not possible to cross-compile from one OS to the other.

I used to work on an OpenStep trading system at a bank, which we moved from Openstep on Mach on Intel to OpenStep on NT. This was in the late 90s to 2000.

It was generally preferable to do development work on Mach, but at some point you had to go to the NT box, create the nib files for the interface if necessary, and do the build there.

It was a little clunky on NT. It might be better now, especially if Quartz were ported over to some degree. (OpenStep, of course, used a full Display Postscript interpreter process to do the drawing within the Windows windows, and that's a little heavyweight.)

Personally, I'd rather Apple not do a new YellowBox for Windows unless it's absolutely necessary. (Maybe if Microsoft, Adobe, Intuit, and other biggies offer to go all-Cocoa if Apple does it. Which will never happen.)

 

[steeldrivingjon]

As for what Windows systems Yellow Box can run on... I've successfully installed the environment on both Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 Pro.

At the bank I used to work for, the OpenStep/NT apps were successfully deployed via Citrix.

 

[steeldrivingjon]

The 68K is a dead processor for the desktop market, so I'd guess no.

Towards the end of the 90s, Apple provided Y2K patches for 68K NeXT boxes, but that was probably the last development they did. Not bad, giving Y2K patches for hardware last shipped about 7 years earlier.

Sun uses x86 chips now...

On some hardware. I believe they're still using SPARC on some high-end things. Dunno if anyone buys them, but...

HP wanted to use Itaniums, the Itaniums never appeared, and so I'm pretty sure they don't use PA-RISC or, for that matter, anything anymore.

They just announced their last rev of the PA-RISC architecture. They're apparently interchangable with the itanium. Which did ship, just nobody uses them because they're too funky.

Shame about the PA-RISC, though. The "Gecko" boxes (HP 712) were nice.

In 1994 I worked at an investment bank. Somewhere on their network was an HP PA-RISC box running NeXTSTEP. I used to telnet in from the NeXT box on my desk, and start up a Renderman rendering process on the HP because it was much faster than the 68040 NeXT I was using.

(NeXTSTEP 3.0 included Pixar Renderman. There was the regular 'photorealistic renderman", like Pixar uses in their movies, and a "quick renderman", which was optimized for onscreen display and manipulation. OpenGL blows quick renderman away, but it was a cool thing to have bundled with your OS. You could build renderman shaders, render 'rib' scene description files to images, etc. There was also an Objective-C API, called 3DKit, for writing programs that used renderman to do 3D graphics.

NeXTSTEP 3.x, especially 3.3, was the sweet zone of NeXTSTEP, where the peformance and the features really kicked ass. )

 

[peharri]

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

YES!

Everyone read his post again.

And please, please, stop it with the "I don't want my Mac to have a BIOS" because it clearly shows people's ignorance on the subject. You might as well be saying "I won't buy any Mac with a keyboard, I don't want no Windows logo on any of my keys!"

No. No. No. No!

Open Firmware isn't a "type of BIOS" any more than Mac OS X is a "Win32 operating system".

The various BIOSes, Open Firmware, and EFI, are all types of firmware. We talk of BIOSes as a family because various different companies have implemented them, but, nonetheless, if it doesn't boot MSDOS, it isn't a BIOS.

The word "BIOS" predates the IBM version but doesn't describe firmware. CP/M machines used to use something also called a BIOS, which was essentially the hardware abstraction layer. Sometimes this was in ROM, sometimes it was on disk (Amstrad, in the mid-eighties, released something called the "PCW" where the BIOS was on disk, for example.) When IBM made firmware for the IBM PC, they put a BIOS in it so systems like PCDOS and CP/M would have one to use, and called the whole thing (ie all the firmware, including the boot code) the BIOS.

So, to wrap up:

BIOS
1. A HAL for CP/M
2. Firmware based upon IBM's original PC firmware, including a CP/M like BIOS, floppy disk booting, and with more modern systems, hard drive booting and system set up tools. Present in most PC clones.

EFI
A standardized, platform independent, firmware system resembling DOS in some ways, providing system set up and diagnostic tools plus operating system booting features; with support for legacy IBM-BIOS dependent software. Present in most Itanium systems.

Open Firmware
A standardized, platform independent, firmware system written in FORTH providing system set up and diagnostic tools plus operating system booting features. Used by Sun, IBM, HP, and Apple.

 

[reyesmac]

In a recent commencement speech Steve Jobs gave he talked about the doctors telling him he had only months to live and it made him change his view on life and not trying things because he had something to lose. I think before he was reminded of his own mortality he feared taking Apple in bold new directions like the intel switch. I think while Steve is still in charge at Apple that he will try to live out whatever fantasy he has for the company. If that means making Apple into a Sony-like media/hardware company, so be it.