Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
Speaker 1: tech are you? So chances are if you're listening to
Speaker 1: the show, you have a handle on what an operating
Speaker 1: system is. Lots of stuff you use as an operating system.
Speaker 1: You know, you're a computer, your smartphone, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: An operating system's job is to serve as a sort
Speaker 1: of liaison between a device's hardware, you know, the actual
Speaker 1: chips and circuits that really make it work, and the
Speaker 1: software that runs on top of it and gets those
Speaker 1: hardware things to produce output that you actually want. So
Speaker 1: operating systems create a starting point or foundation for programmers.
Speaker 1: If you design an application meant for a specific operating system,
Speaker 1: then that app should work on pretty much any device
Speaker 1: that's running that specific operating system sort of. There can
Speaker 1: actually be exceptions due to various hardware configurations, but you
Speaker 1: get the idea. So, the operating system manages all sorts
Speaker 1: of processes like memory management. It also handles data sent
Speaker 1: to peripheral devices like displays or printers. Before there were
Speaker 1: operating systems. Computers were far more limited and much less efficient.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to run a program on an old
Speaker 1: computer pre operating system days, first you had to wait
Speaker 1: until nothing else was running on that computer. Then you
Speaker 1: would have to directly load your program onto the hardware itself.
Speaker 1: So the classical version of this was a program designated by,
Speaker 1: say a long strip of paper tape that has holes
Speaker 1: punched into it in specific places, or a collection of
Speaker 1: punch cards, that you would have a program built onto,
Speaker 1: and you would have to load this on a computer.
Speaker 1: You would also have to preset physical switches on the
Speaker 1: computer itself to make certain that the computer began in
Speaker 1: the proper state before you would execute your program. If
Speaker 1: it wasn't, then you wouldn't get the result you had intended,
Speaker 1: and you might not know that until much further down
Speaker 1: the line. So very complicated. It was a physical activity,
Speaker 1: like it wasn't just click on an icon or type
Speaker 1: something into a command line, and it didn't always go smoothly.
Speaker 1: Either a mistake in the programming or a bug in
Speaker 1: the computer system itself could cause a crash, and that
Speaker 1: might require a lot of backtracking to fix it. You
Speaker 1: would have to identify what went wrong, and then fix
Speaker 1: the problem. This was not always an easy thing to do,
Speaker 1: but over time, computer scientists developed programming languages and operating
Speaker 1: systems in order to enhance the capabilities of computers and
Speaker 1: to make it easier to use them, and eventually there
Speaker 1: was an explosion of operating systems. Some were peculiar to
Speaker 1: a specific type of computer or a specific line of computers.
Speaker 1: While the operating system made things easier for programmers who
Speaker 1: were working on those machines, you would still often need
Speaker 1: to specialize in certain classes of computer systems because of
Speaker 1: differences between them, Like just because you know how to
Speaker 1: program for computer system A, doesn't mean you could program
Speaker 1: for computer system B, because how fundamentally different they were.
Speaker 1: So today I thought I would talk a bit about
Speaker 1: a few discontinued operating systems. These were once important, but
Speaker 1: they are no longer in widespread use today. Some of
Speaker 1: them live on, at least in part. Sometimes they're partly
Speaker 1: a legacy element that's still found in modern day operating systems.
Speaker 1: Some of them are supported by hobbyists. And I could
Speaker 1: go all the way back to the days of like
Speaker 1: mainframes and micro computers, but I figured it would be
Speaker 1: best to kind of limit ourselves to personal computers and
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. Maybe in the future I could
Speaker 1: go further back. Also in the future, I might do
Speaker 1: things like smartphones, because there's some smartphone operating systems that
Speaker 1: are largely discontinued this today, and it would be interesting
Speaker 1: to have a conversation about those as well. So it's
Speaker 1: just important to remember that, even though I'm just really
Speaker 1: talking about PCs in this episode, there have been a
Speaker 1: lot of other computer systems that had come and gone
Speaker 1: by the time we get up to that. I decided
Speaker 1: to start with PCs because I would argue the PC
Speaker 1: era is really kind of a transformational point in our world.
Speaker 1: You know, miniaturization and mass production had made it possible
Speaker 1: to create a computer that could fit on a desktop
Speaker 1: and also not cost a bazillion dollars. Although I should
Speaker 1: point out early personal computers were still really expensive, like
Speaker 1: if you were to compare them to computers today, far
Speaker 1: more expensive than what you could get today if you're
Speaker 1: just buying like a basic system, a basic system back
Speaker 1: in like the late seventies early eighties would cost you
Speaker 1: a whole lot more than what you would spend today.
Speaker 1: Comparatively speaking, you have to take inflation into account. So
Speaker 1: let's start off with a computer system that launched in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five. So nineteen eighty five was a year
Speaker 1: after Apple had introduced the Macintosh computer. There was this
Speaker 1: other company called Commodore International. It had originally started out
Speaker 1: as this humble business of typewriter repair and reselling. Like
Speaker 1: it was a business that bought old, busted up typewriters,
Speaker 1: fixed them up, and then sold them again, and eventually
Speaker 1: they became more of a computer company. They made the
Speaker 1: Commodore sixty four, one of the most famous personal computers
Speaker 1: of all time. But in nineteen eighty five they introduced
Speaker 1: a new machine that seemed to have a whole lot
Speaker 1: of promise, and it was called the Amme. Now the
Speaker 1: Amiga didn't actually start off as a Commodore project. A
Speaker 1: group of folks who had previously worked for Atari decided
Speaker 1: that they would strike out on their own and make
Speaker 1: their own company. So they created a business that they
Speaker 1: called Hi Toro. I don't know why I gave a
Speaker 1: little role in the r there Hi Toro, Hi Dash
Speaker 1: t Ro. It was this group that would receive an
Speaker 1: acquisition offer from Commodore, and they took it. So the
Speaker 1: Amiga measured up well against competing computers at the time,
Speaker 1: computers like the Macintosh and the IBM PC. It boasted
Speaker 1: superior graphics and sound. The Amiga was incredible in that regard.
Speaker 1: Games on the Amiga had a tendency to look and
Speaker 1: sound leagues better than similar titles that you could find
Speaker 1: on other platforms. Animators and artists were drawn no pun
Speaker 1: intended to the Amiga, and it was seen as a
Speaker 1: really powerful tool for creative types in the computer space,
Speaker 1: very much the way Macintosh computers would be viewed a
Speaker 1: decade later, even though creatives also like Macintosh computers even
Speaker 1: back in those early days. But when I think about
Speaker 1: when I first got into media, anyone I knew who
Speaker 1: worked in media and worked with computers, they had a Macintosh.
Speaker 1: The mac was seen as the computer for creatives well
Speaker 1: in the mid eighties. The goal for Commodore was to
Speaker 1: make the Amiga that type of machine, and for a
Speaker 1: lot of creatives it was. Now the Amiga operating system
Speaker 1: was known as Amiga OS, which makes sense, and it
Speaker 1: had some pretty cool features. For one, it could allow
Speaker 1: for multitasking. Now not all PCs at this time could multitask.
Speaker 1: Most would require the user to quit out of one
Speaker 1: application entirely before they could launch another, But the Amiga
Speaker 1: OS was different. Now, it wasn't perfect multitasking. The operating
Speaker 1: syste would have essentially freeze whichever app you were leaving
Speaker 1: in order to dedicate the resources to whichever app you
Speaker 1: were switching to. So if you've got app A and
Speaker 1: app B and you're leaving app A to go to
Speaker 1: app B, app A just goes into kind of hibernation mode.
Speaker 1: This method is called preemptive multitasking, and what it means
Speaker 1: is that you couldn't start a process, then swap to
Speaker 1: another window and expect the process in that first window
Speaker 1: to continue while you're doing something else. But still the
Speaker 1: ability to go back and forth between tests was a
Speaker 1: big advance over many competitors. Like these days, I think
Speaker 1: that would I would find that frustrating because sometimes I
Speaker 1: will start a process in one window and it'll say
Speaker 1: it's going to take like forty five seconds. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't have time for that. I'm going to go
Speaker 1: do something in this other window while that completes, and
Speaker 1: computers today can handle that. The Amiga could not. But
Speaker 1: you have to remember computational resources were much more limited then, right,
Speaker 1: We were still in the very early days of personal computers.
Speaker 1: The operating system also included a disc operating system or DOS.
Speaker 1: We'll be talking more about the famous MS DOS later
Speaker 1: in this episode, but this was called Amiga DOSS naturally,
Speaker 1: and this disc operating system gave the user access to
Speaker 1: things like the computer's file system and directory, so you
Speaker 1: can navigate through that way if you didn't want to
Speaker 1: use the graphic User interface or GUI version of the
Speaker 1: operating system, and you might normally use Amiga's graphics user
Speaker 1: interface to get around, but this would give you a
Speaker 1: much more direct and text based method of navigating the machine.
Speaker 1: In some ways, it was more efficient and faster if
Speaker 1: you knew what you were doing, but if you didn't,
Speaker 1: you could just use the GUY to get around using
Speaker 1: its various file management systems. Now, one thing a Mega
Speaker 1: OS did not have was memory protection. Now, as the
Speaker 1: name implies, the purpose of memory protection is to prevent
Speaker 1: processing from accessing memory for which they do not have
Speaker 1: the permission to access. You know, if you're running a
Speaker 1: process and another process says, oh, yeah, that memory over there,
Speaker 1: that you're using, I'll have that and takes it. That's
Speaker 1: not good. You want to have a system in place
Speaker 1: to stop that from happening. Memory protection helps mitigate malicious
Speaker 1: processes from causing damage to other processes or even to
Speaker 1: the computer system itself. Right, you could program a purposefully
Speaker 1: malicious program or application that would be meant to steal
Speaker 1: resources from all other applications and essentially shut a computer down.
Speaker 1: You don't want that to happen, so usually you would
Speaker 1: have a memory protection method in place with your operating system,
Speaker 1: but the Amiga OS did not have that. But this
Speaker 1: shortcoming was not what led to the discontinuation of Amigo OS.
Speaker 1: It's not like one day some Amiga based malware broke
Speaker 1: out and ruined all the computers. That would have been
Speaker 1: hard to do anyway, because networked computers were pretty darn
Speaker 1: rare during the era of Amiga OS. Now the reason
Speaker 1: why the Amiga OS operating system was discontinued and I
Speaker 1: realized I was just repetitive there, But it's because it
Speaker 1: has to do with business. Commodore, the company that made
Speaker 1: and sold the computer, hit hard times really really quickly.
Speaker 1: So in the early eighties, Commodore was measuring up really
Speaker 1: well against competitors like Apple and IBM. They were selling
Speaker 1: computers like hotcakes. Commodore was riding high, but then there
Speaker 1: were dips in the mid eighties, and then there were
Speaker 1: more crests and then dips again. Like it got pretty
Speaker 1: rocky throughout the eighties and into the nineties, and in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety two things were going okay. But in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three, sales dropped like a rock and the company
Speaker 1: lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and it wasn't in
Speaker 1: a financial position where it could recover from that. So
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety four, Commodore announced it was entering into
Speaker 1: bankruptcy and that it would liquidate all its assets. Now
Speaker 1: it's true to say that Amiga OS faded away. It
Speaker 1: lost all official support because the company that supported it
Speaker 1: ceased to be but the operating system itself is not
Speaker 1: totally gone. Hyperion Entertainment Overseas essentially a descendant of the
Speaker 1: Amiga OS, and in fact, the most recent update I
Speaker 1: can see dates back to April of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: and that's when Hyperion Entertainment released a hot fix for
Speaker 1: Amiga OS three point two point two so I guess
Speaker 1: you could say it's only mostly dead. There's still hobbyists
Speaker 1: who very much are into creating things for the Amiga OS,
Speaker 1: and it is still supported, just not by the company
Speaker 1: that created it, so that's kind of cool. But as
Speaker 1: an official operating system, it's more of a curiosity than
Speaker 1: anything else. And that's why I decided to start off
Speaker 1: the episode with that one. Now we're gonna take a
Speaker 1: quick break, and when we come back, I'm gonna talk
Speaker 1: about a pair of operating systems that are deeply entwined
Speaker 1: with one another and all the drama that comes with it.
Speaker 1: That's what's coming next. But first let's take this quick break.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, So next we have next sort
Speaker 1: of all right, Like I said, this is a really
Speaker 1: a two for one entry, and it involves a whole
Speaker 1: lot of drama. And I have talked over this story
Speaker 1: before in other episodes of Tech Stuff, but it's such
Speaker 1: a juicy story we're gonna have to rake the coals
Speaker 1: once more. Now, this story starts back arguably in the
Speaker 1: late seventies, but really the tipping point is in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty five, that same year that the Amiga came out,
Speaker 1: and this was due to something that was going on
Speaker 1: over at Apple, because things were getting rough, all right.
Speaker 1: The reason things were getting rough, or one of them,
Speaker 1: is that Steve Jobs had become a bit of a handful. Now.
Speaker 1: Jobs had co founded Apple along with Steve Wozniak. Wosniak
Speaker 1: was the actual programmer and engineer of the pair, and
Speaker 1: the two had grown the company very quickly, but they
Speaker 1: really weren't the right fit to lead a growing tech
Speaker 1: corporation right. Investors were a little leery of backing a
Speaker 1: new bayle tech company run by a couple of college dropouts,
Speaker 1: and if they wanted to get support from their investors,
Speaker 1: they needed to make sure they had a quote unquote
Speaker 1: real leader. And they got a few real leaders in
Speaker 1: those early years. First up was a guy named Michael Scott,
Speaker 1: not the guy from the office, and the next was
Speaker 1: an early Apple investor named Mike Markula. Markula would actually
Speaker 1: step up to be the chairman of the board of Directors,
Speaker 1: and a new leader named John Scully the third would
Speaker 1: come in to take over as CEO of Apple or
Speaker 1: President of Apple originally now number three here. Scully he
Speaker 1: had previously served as the president of Pepsi COO so
Speaker 1: clearly he was the perfect pick that had a computer
Speaker 1: company anyway. The point is Steve Jobs wasn't the one
Speaker 1: calling the shots. He was not the executive ultimately in
Speaker 1: charge of Apple, but occasionally he would act like he was.
Speaker 1: In the late nineteen seventies, a computer engineer named Jeff
Speaker 1: Raskin proposed a project that ultimately would become the McIntosh,
Speaker 1: and apparently Steve Jobs thought this wasn't really a worthwhile pursuit.
Speaker 1: I should also mention that Raskin's version of the McIntosh
Speaker 1: was a very, very different thing than what would emerge
Speaker 1: from Apple in nineteen eighty four. The Raskin's Macintosh was.
Speaker 1: It could not have been more different. Really, It was
Speaker 1: a text based, utilitarian workspace as opposed to what the
Speaker 1: Macintosh would become. Anyway. Jobs wanted the company to back
Speaker 1: the project he had been working on, which was the
Speaker 1: Lisa personal computer, and he lobbied to have the Macintosh
Speaker 1: killed off, but leadership sided with Raskin, and Jobs got angry.
Speaker 1: The Lisa would end up being pretty much a forgotten
Speaker 1: failure of Apple. It did not do so well, but
Speaker 1: by that time Jobs was even angrier because in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two, the rest of the Lisa team forced Jobs
Speaker 1: off the project. They just felt his demands were kind
Speaker 1: of making things go askew. So Jobs got kicked off
Speaker 1: of the project he was running. And that was a
Speaker 1: tough look because arguably Lisa took its name from Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs's own daughter, or maybe it didn't, because stories vary
Speaker 1: on that one. Some stories say no, no, no, it
Speaker 1: was never meant to be named after Steve Jobs's daughter.
Speaker 1: That was a coincidence. It was an acronym. But most
Speaker 1: of the stories seem to say, like, yeah, it was
Speaker 1: kind of named after his daughter, and then the acronym
Speaker 1: stuff came later. It was acronyms, not acronyms. It's people like,
Speaker 1: how can we let's come up with an acronym to
Speaker 1: justify the name, and then we can argue that we
Speaker 1: never named it after his daughter in the first place. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Jobs then honed in on Raskin's team because now he
Speaker 1: had an ax to grind. He had a grudge against
Speaker 1: the Lisa team, and so he sort of waded into
Speaker 1: the Macintosh project and sort of took it over. And
Speaker 1: like I said, originally that Macintosh project was a text based,
Speaker 1: keyboard centric machine, and Jobs kind of turned it into
Speaker 1: a sort of a Lisa clone. It was another computer
Speaker 1: with a graphic user interface and a mouse, which he
Speaker 1: had lifted from Xerox Park. And he was now in
Speaker 1: secret competition with the Lisa team, which meant he was
Speaker 1: furiously working to prove that they were wrong and that
Speaker 1: he was right. And maybe you could argue he also
Speaker 1: lost sight of the fact that they were all actually
Speaker 1: working for the same company and arguably for the same results.
Speaker 1: So the Macintosh would actually come out in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: four looking very different from what Raskin's original nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: nine concept was, and this would be the birth of
Speaker 1: the classic mac OS operating system. That's important because macOS,
Speaker 1: the classic version of macOS, is one of the two
Speaker 1: operating systems that I'm really focusing on in this section.
Speaker 1: But Jobs' behavior was seen as being really disruptive and
Speaker 1: counterproductive to most of the teams that he interacted with,
Speaker 1: and Scully and Jobs clashed numerous times, and Markola, the
Speaker 1: chair of the board and the former head of Apple,
Speaker 1: sided with Scully against Jobs. So Jobs left the company
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty five or he was fired. Interpretations on
Speaker 1: this vary as well. It's clear that Scully did his
Speaker 1: best to distance Jobs from any meaningful projects, So I
Speaker 1: guess it all comes down to semantics, Like you could
Speaker 1: argue that, Okay, Jobs wasn't fired, he was just removed
Speaker 1: from operations to the point where he wasn't really doing anything,
Speaker 1: so he decided to leave. Fun fact, years later, Marcula
Speaker 1: would actually be instrumental in forcing Scully out of Apple.
Speaker 1: So I guess what goes around comes around. Anyway, Jobs
Speaker 1: went off to found a different company. This would be
Speaker 1: the next company. Now, the focus of the next company
Speaker 1: was to create hardware for education. Jobs saw an opportunity
Speaker 1: to design computer workstations specifically meant for the education sector,
Speaker 1: so like professors and researchers, that kind of thing, not
Speaker 1: like necessarily your average teacher, because, as it would turn out,
Speaker 1: the next system would be very expensive and beyond the
Speaker 1: reach of a lot of say, you know, smaller schools.
Speaker 1: But people in those fields were already using personal computers.
Speaker 1: The problem was that PCs are general purpose machines, so
Speaker 1: they're supposed to be, you know, pretty good at everything,
Speaker 1: but they're not necessarily really good at any one thing.
Speaker 1: So Jobs's aim was to create a computer that would
Speaker 1: be ideally suited for education. Several former Apple employees went
Speaker 1: with jobs to create this company and they got to
Speaker 1: work designing the next computer. The operating system for this
Speaker 1: computer would be called next Step one word. It would
Speaker 1: take several years to bring this computer to market. So,
Speaker 1: like I said, starts in nineteen eighty five, and the
Speaker 1: original hope was to have a machine ready to launch
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty seven. But in reality, the next computer
Speaker 1: wasn't ready until nineteen eighty nine, and even then it
Speaker 1: was a small number of test machines that were ready.
Speaker 1: And that initial batch cost six thousand, five hundred dollars
Speaker 1: per computer. Now, if we adjust that for inflation, because
Speaker 1: remember this is nineteen eighty nine, today, a computer like
Speaker 1: that would cost you sixteen thousand, five hundred dollars. Right,
Speaker 1: That's how much this initial batch, the test batch of
Speaker 1: next computers cost when they actually were ready to launch
Speaker 1: the computers in nineteen ninety For realsi's and make it
Speaker 1: a larger batch. It went for an eye wateringly high
Speaker 1: nine thousand, nine hundred ninety nine dollars. So again, if
Speaker 1: we adjust that for inflation, brace yourselves. Those computers cost
Speaker 1: twenty four thousand dollars a pop. So yeah, this was
Speaker 1: not a computer aimed at the consumer market. In fact,
Speaker 1: even universities would look at that sales price and say, who,
Speaker 1: that's steep. It didn't take long for Jobs to reconsider
Speaker 1: NeXT's role in the industry. So the funny thing is
Speaker 1: when he was first thinking about this, originally his plan
Speaker 1: was to create hardware that was meant for the education
Speaker 1: sector and not to create software, like he was going
Speaker 1: to license the software from someone else, but then ultimately
Speaker 1: changed his mind and created a hardware and software combined approach.
Speaker 1: But at these computer prices, it was clear the company
Speaker 1: wasn't going to sell that many units. It just couldn't.
Speaker 1: These educational institutions just you know, they couldn't afford these
Speaker 1: incredibly high prices, and he made the decision to gradually
Speaker 1: shift over to become a software focused company, with the
Speaker 1: heart of that focus being the next Step operating system.
Speaker 1: Next Step was built on top of a Unix operating system.
Speaker 1: It also it featured an object oriented application layer. It
Speaker 1: had had a graphic user interface or GUY. It could
Speaker 1: handle multitasking, and it was interesting. It didn't exactly set
Speaker 1: the world on fire at the time, but it did
Speaker 1: gain the interest of certain folks in the tech and
Speaker 1: research and education spheres, so people realized there was value
Speaker 1: in it, even though it wasn't exactly becoming the next
Speaker 1: big thing. All right, But now we've got our classic
Speaker 1: Mac operating system or macOS, and we've got our next
Speaker 1: step operating system. To continue our story, we actually have
Speaker 1: to go back to Apple and back to the nineties
Speaker 1: and see what happened with the company. So Scully had
Speaker 1: effectively pushed jobs out of Apple. Under Scully, Apple took
Speaker 1: a path that wasn't very Apple like. One of the
Speaker 1: things that had set Apple apart from IBM is that
Speaker 1: when IBM made their personal computers, they used off the
Speaker 1: shelf parts to do so, and that meant that competitors
Speaker 1: could build their own IBM style computers also known as
Speaker 1: IBM compatibles or IBM clones, and they would just use
Speaker 1: the same or similar parts that IBM used, and they
Speaker 1: would get an operating system that was compatible with IBMS.
Speaker 1: Because IBM had failed to secure an exclusive agreement from
Speaker 1: the provider of their operating system, which I'll talk about
Speaker 1: later on in this episode. So this ended up being
Speaker 1: really bad news for IBM's personal computer division, because suddenly
Speaker 1: the company was facing competition from numerous upstarts, most of
Speaker 1: which were offering computers that were comparable to IBMS but
Speaker 1: at a much lower price point. Apple, by contrast, had
Speaker 1: traditionally developed its own hardware and software in house and
Speaker 1: jealously guarded its proprietary approach, so if you wanted an
Speaker 1: Apple computer, you had to go to Apple. But under Scully,
Speaker 1: that began to shift and began to change. He pushed
Speaker 1: the company to build a version of its operating system
Speaker 1: to run on the power PC microprocessor architecture. This was
Speaker 1: later on seen as a huge mistake. There was also
Speaker 1: then a move to license Apple technology to other companies,
Speaker 1: leading to what were called Mac clones that didn't exactly
Speaker 1: match Apple's own quality standards. This was seen in retrospect
Speaker 1: as a really big old pair of booboos, bad enough
Speaker 1: that the board of directors decided to give Scully the
Speaker 1: boot in nineteen ninety three. They replaced him with a
Speaker 1: guy named Michael Spindler. Michael Spindler had previously been the
Speaker 1: chief operating officer, but Spindler also didn't impress the board
Speaker 1: that much. He led some massive cost cutting measures. While
Speaker 1: he was at Apple, he shut down several R and
Speaker 1: D projects. He laid off a lot of folks. But
Speaker 1: Apple was in a chaotic mess at the time, and
Speaker 1: the board lost its confidence in Spindler just after a
Speaker 1: few years, so in nineteen ninety six they swapped him
Speaker 1: out with a guy named Gil Emilio. So Emilio inherited
Speaker 1: a really rough situation. Things were in a real mess
Speaker 1: at Apple. One of the things that was going really
Speaker 1: poorly was this evolution of the classic Macintosh operating system
Speaker 1: aka the original mac OS. Because you see, there was
Speaker 1: a team at Apple that had been working on a
Speaker 1: next generation operating system for the Mac and it was
Speaker 1: code named Copeland. But this project had languished in development
Speaker 1: and was rife with feature creep. So that's when a
Speaker 1: team gets bogged down by a product. When they add
Speaker 1: more and more features that don't necessarily contribute to whatever
Speaker 1: the end purpose of the product is, it just gets bloated.
Speaker 1: And on top of that, there were also personality conflicts
Speaker 1: within the team, especially at the leadership level. Project management
Speaker 1: was in a shambles. It was just a total mess.
Speaker 1: So Copeland was intended to be macOS eight. It was
Speaker 1: intended to replace classic Mac operating system and become the
Speaker 1: new standard, but it was in such a mess that
Speaker 1: when Apple brought on Emilio, he said, I need to
Speaker 1: have somebody come in and try and get this into shape.
Speaker 1: He brought on a woman named Ellen Hancock to try
Speaker 1: and get Mac OS eight to a point where it
Speaker 1: could ship, and she essentially said, Yo, this thing is busted.
Speaker 1: Not in so many words I'm paraphrasing, and she concluded
Speaker 1: that the project was so mired in issues that it
Speaker 1: would actually make way more sense to scrap it than
Speaker 1: to attempt to salvage it. And Emilio didn't really have
Speaker 1: any other options. He said, I guess that's what we
Speaker 1: have to do, because it was a real mess. So
Speaker 1: Apple switched gears and released a far more modest evolution
Speaker 1: of the classic Mac operating system, and then they called
Speaker 1: that Mac OS eight. And in the meantime, Emilio was
Speaker 1: looking outside of Apple to try and find a solution
Speaker 1: to create an actual next generation operating system. At one
Speaker 1: point he was said to be looking at a company
Speaker 1: called be Incorporated. This was led by a guy named
Speaker 1: Jean Luis Gesse, and I ironically Gass had formerly been
Speaker 1: an executive at Apple. In fact, you could say he
Speaker 1: was Scully's choice to replace Jobs back in the eighties,
Speaker 1: but that deal with b Incorporated fell through, and instead
Speaker 1: Emilio looked to drum roll please Next Computers and next Step.
Speaker 1: So that's right. Apple's solution to the problem of having
Speaker 1: no next generation operating system strategy was to negotiate with
Speaker 1: the former co founder of Apple. So Emilio convinced the
Speaker 1: board of directors to pursue an acquisition of Next Computers,
Speaker 1: and Steve Jobs would more or less come along for
Speaker 1: the ride, essentially at least initially as a consultant. And
Speaker 1: Emilio's real goal was to get hold of the Next
Speaker 1: Step operating system and use that as a foundation for
Speaker 1: the next generation version of the Mac operating system. So
Speaker 1: this acquisition happened in early nineteen ninety seven. Apple would
Speaker 1: release another modest Mac OS update, called fittingly macOS nine,
Speaker 1: but the plan was to merge next Step with elements
Speaker 1: from Copeland and other work done at Apple, and so
Speaker 1: eventually the next generation operating system would come out and
Speaker 1: it would be this kind of mishmash's combination, and this
Speaker 1: would be macOS ten, or you might call it mac OSX,
Speaker 1: because they switched from using you know, the numbers that
Speaker 1: we would be familiar with and went to Roman numerals
Speaker 1: for ten. By the time mac OS ten launched, Jobs
Speaker 1: had convinced the Board of directors to give Amelio his
Speaker 1: marching orders, so Emilia was no longer the head of Apple.
Speaker 1: Jobs initially took over as interim CEO of Apple, but
Speaker 1: he became way less interim over time. He also alienated
Speaker 1: Ellen Hancock, you know, the woman who came over to
Speaker 1: evaluate Copeland and determine whether or not could ship. She
Speaker 1: did not want to use next Step as the found
Speaker 1: for the next generation Macintosh operating system. She had argued
Speaker 1: against that, so Jobs obviously did not like her at
Speaker 1: all because the next Step OS is what brought Jobs
Speaker 1: back into Apple's fold. So he pretty much made sure
Speaker 1: that she didn't have a whole lot to do, so
Speaker 1: she ended up resigning, you know, not long after he
Speaker 1: kind of took power. But mac OS ten, despite a
Speaker 1: somewhat slow launch, did become the bedrock for Apple's operating
Speaker 1: system strategy moving forward, and it would take a few
Speaker 1: years for Jobs to get things turned around, and it
Speaker 1: was helped tremendously by some creatively you know, designed products
Speaker 1: courtesy of Johnny Ive and the legacy operating systems of
Speaker 1: the classic mac os and next step would kind of
Speaker 1: ride off into the sunset, and mac OS ten would
Speaker 1: end up taking their place. All Right, I'm gonna take
Speaker 1: another quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about
Speaker 1: another discontinued operating system, this one coming courtesy of Microsoft.
Speaker 1: But first let's take this break. Okay, it's time to
Speaker 1: talk about DOS. This one, also, you could argue, has
Speaker 1: some pretty significant drama associated with it, and this one
Speaker 1: predates the other operating systems we mentioned because the family
Speaker 1: of DOS operating systems, beginning with eighty six DOS and
Speaker 1: ending with MS DOS eight point zero, starts in the
Speaker 1: early eighties and stretches on until two thousand. Now, to
Speaker 1: be clear, there have been lots of other DOS versions
Speaker 1: since MS DOS eight. The family of operating systems has
Speaker 1: a few branches, more than a few. So I'm specifically
Speaker 1: talking about MS DOS here, But DOS itself is still
Speaker 1: alive and well, it's just it's no longer that particular
Speaker 1: line of DOS. So this family of operating systems ties
Speaker 1: in with the history of the eighty eighty six microprocessor,
Speaker 1: which came from Intel. There was this company that was
Speaker 1: called Seattle Computer Products, and there was a guy who
Speaker 1: worked there named Tim Patterson who was a pretty brilliant
Speaker 1: computer engineer and programmer. Patterson built a primitive eighty eighty
Speaker 1: six based CPU card, and he actually worked with Microsoft
Speaker 1: in order to get a version of Microsoft Basic, the
Speaker 1: programming language, to run on this card, along with an
Speaker 1: extremely primitive operating system. Patterson also became acquainted with an
Speaker 1: earlier operating system from Microsoft that sometimes it's called m DOS,
Speaker 1: sometimes it's called MIDAS, but this was an operating system
Speaker 1: designed to actually run on an older generation of processors,
Speaker 1: not the eighty eighty six family, but it did give
Speaker 1: Patterson some ideas. So Patterson then goes back to Seattle
Speaker 1: Computer Products and gets to to create a suitable operating
Speaker 1: system to run on top of the eighty eighty six
Speaker 1: based computers, or at least their computer motherboards. So this
Speaker 1: is in nineteen eighty. Within half a year he's got
Speaker 1: one and he calls it q DOS, which he said
Speaker 1: stands for a quick and dirty operating system, but Seattle
Speaker 1: Computer Products rebrands it as eighty six DOS, meaning it's
Speaker 1: a disc operating system that runs on top of eighty
Speaker 1: eighty six architecture. The company reaches out to Microsoft to
Speaker 1: create a cross licensing deal. Microsoft would get access to
Speaker 1: the operating system if Seattle Computer Products could adapt Microsoft
Speaker 1: Basic for it. Now. This eventually leads to Patterson joining Microsoft.
Speaker 1: He leaves Seattle Computer Products and joins Microsoft, and then
Speaker 1: Microsoft outright buys the rights to eighty six DOS from
Speaker 1: Seattle Computer Products the following year. And here's the thing,
Speaker 1: this is why there's some drama here. Microsoft buys those
Speaker 1: rights and then proceeds to go on a crazy licensing
Speaker 1: deal with this operating system. So while they paid like
Speaker 1: seventy five grand initially at least for the rights, they
Speaker 1: made so much money licensing it to all these other
Speaker 1: companies that folks felt that Microsoft had kind of screwed
Speaker 1: over Seattle Computer Products. That especially since the perception was
Speaker 1: that Microsoft had developed MS DOSS when in fact they
Speaker 1: had purchased it from another company. They did tweak it, like,
Speaker 1: they didn't just keep it exactly the same and sell it.
Speaker 1: They did make changes, they made advancements to it and
Speaker 1: everything and improvements. But the heart of that work came
Speaker 1: from a totally different company, and so there's some who
Speaker 1: feel that it was like reverse robin Hood, steal from
Speaker 1: the poor and give to the rich. Anyway, that all
Speaker 1: depends on who's story you really want to listen to,
Speaker 1: I suppose. But Microsoft around this time also signs a
Speaker 1: deal with IBM, and IBM had wanted an operating system
Speaker 1: from Microsoft that it could run on its eighty eighty
Speaker 1: six based machines, specifically its personal computer line, which it
Speaker 1: was launching. So Microsoft then decides that it will license
Speaker 1: eighty six DOS to IBM, but they rename it to
Speaker 1: MS DOS. Now again, if you didn't look further, you
Speaker 1: might think Bill Gates designed all of this, but he didn't. Again,
Speaker 1: it came from this other company, although the guy who
Speaker 1: made it for the other company was now working for Microsoft,
Speaker 1: So I guess there's some argument to be made there too.
Speaker 1: So if you've never used MS DOS, let me explain
Speaker 1: what it was like. And you still can use at
Speaker 1: least a facsimile of MS DOS if you're using a
Speaker 1: Windows machine. It's a text based command line operating system.
Speaker 1: So when you would boot up your computer back in
Speaker 1: the olden days, you might actually be using a floppy
Speaker 1: disk to boot your computer up if you didn't have
Speaker 1: a hard drive, because back in the olden days hard
Speaker 1: drives were not standard either, and the operating system would
Speaker 1: be on your desk. It would load into computer memory.
Speaker 1: Once it loaded in, you would be presented a command
Speaker 1: prompt and you would type in commands on the command prompt,
Speaker 1: and then the operating system would execute those commands, assuming
Speaker 1: that you did it correctly. So you might list in
Speaker 1: a command to do something like list out all the
Speaker 1: file directories that are on a disc, whether that's a
Speaker 1: hard drive or a floppy disk or whatever, and this
Speaker 1: would be so that you can just see what's on there. Right.
Speaker 1: There were times where I would have a floppy desk,
Speaker 1: there'd be no label on it. You put it into
Speaker 1: a drive, and you would have to, you know, navigate
Speaker 1: through the file directories just to see what the heck
Speaker 1: is on this thing, what kind of files? You know?
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe the organization would give it away right away,
Speaker 1: or maybe you'd have to dig in to figure it out.
Speaker 1: Those are the days, man, You would use commands to
Speaker 1: navigate through the directory, like if you wanted to switch
Speaker 1: to specific folders and drilled down you would have to
Speaker 1: do that by typing it in and typing in the
Speaker 1: command and changing directories that way. You might want to
Speaker 1: switch to a totally different drive. Maybe you don't want
Speaker 1: to look at the flobby disk, Maybe you want to
Speaker 1: look at the hard drive. Maybe you just want to
Speaker 1: execute a program, or you would have to type in
Speaker 1: the command to that too, So you would have to
Speaker 1: memorize a list of commands that you would type in.
Speaker 1: You could get by just by knowing like half a
Speaker 1: dozen of those or so, maybe not even that many
Speaker 1: if you really want to just basic operations for folks
Speaker 1: who don't work on command line systems. When you first
Speaker 1: look at this, it looks really obtuse and challenging, like
Speaker 1: it's got a huge learning curve to it. But it
Speaker 1: really wasn't that hard. You just had to get some
Speaker 1: basics down. It just wasn't intuitive the way that a
Speaker 1: graphics user interface was. That's what the beauty of guy
Speaker 1: based operating systems happens to be. They are easy to
Speaker 1: grasp and easy to navigate. If you're using these old
Speaker 1: text based DOSS systems, they are a little more intimidating.
Speaker 1: Now I'm old enough that I remember using Doss on
Speaker 1: computers and loving it. And I actually remember that when
Speaker 1: Windows rolled around, I hated Windows, not because I didn't
Speaker 1: think Windows was useful. I certainly recognized how it could
Speaker 1: be a lot easier for a new person who wasn't
Speaker 1: familiar with computers to navigate a system that had Windows
Speaker 1: versus DOS. Right, Like, I knew that that was easier
Speaker 1: to do. There were times where I felt like it
Speaker 1: was dumbing things down a bit too much. But really,
Speaker 1: the reason why I didn't like Windows is that Windows
Speaker 1: required a decent amount of your computer's resources to run.
Speaker 1: That meant there were fewer resources are your actual programs.
Speaker 1: So I resented the fact that so much of my
Speaker 1: computer's processing power had to go just to running the
Speaker 1: operating system of all things. I mean, why not just
Speaker 1: take the time to learn DOSS. It's a much more
Speaker 1: lightweight operating system, and then your computer runs faster and
Speaker 1: you could devote that processing power to the actual programs
Speaker 1: that you want to run. But it turned out I
Speaker 1: was your typical old man yelling at a passing cloud,
Speaker 1: and the whole world moved on to guy based operating systems,
Speaker 1: and eventually all the software that was coming out for
Speaker 1: PCs required Windows. Like when I would go to an
Speaker 1: electronics store and look at the computer games and they
Speaker 1: were all like Windows required. The writing was on the wall.
Speaker 1: There was just no way for me to get around it.
Speaker 1: I could not continue to hold out against Windows. I
Speaker 1: had to get it, and you had to get with
Speaker 1: the program literally, or just be satisfied with running obsolete
Speaker 1: software for the rest of your life. And you might
Speaker 1: be able to tell that I'm still a little bitter
Speaker 1: about this. Even though it's decades later. Microsoft continued to
Speaker 1: support DOS and they updated it all the way up
Speaker 1: until two thousand, that's when they shut down support for
Speaker 1: MS DOS. But they do still include DOS or DOS
Speaker 1: like tools in Windows, so you can find little command
Speaker 1: prompt Windows to help run things sometimes you need to
Speaker 1: in order to do things like, you know, maybe check
Speaker 1: a driver or that sort of stuff. And as I said,
Speaker 1: there are other versions of DOS that are still around.
Speaker 1: It's not like all versions of DOS died. Microsoft after all,
Speaker 1: licensed DOS out to dozens of different companies. That's how
Speaker 1: they made so much bank. Early on IBM, like I said,
Speaker 1: used a version of DOS that for many years was
Speaker 1: essentially identical to MS DOS. They had DOS and the
Speaker 1: two were essentially identical until they finally kind of parted
Speaker 1: ways many years into that relationship. And as I said,
Speaker 1: it's one of the reasons why IBM lost the personal
Speaker 1: computer battle in the first place, right because not only
Speaker 1: were they using off the shelf components, they were using
Speaker 1: this operating system that they licensed for Microsoft, and they
Speaker 1: did not make it an exclusive licensing deal. If they
Speaker 1: made it exclusive and Microsoft had only been allowed to
Speaker 1: license to IBM, there would have been nowhere else to go,
Speaker 1: and this would be a totally different world. But because
Speaker 1: they didn't do that, it meant that these other companies
Speaker 1: could attempt to copy IBM by buying those same sort
Speaker 1: of off the shelf components and then licensing the same
Speaker 1: MS DOS for Microsoft, and it would be close enough
Speaker 1: to IBMS to be essentially compatible. And that's where you
Speaker 1: would get your IBM clones or IBM compatible machines, and
Speaker 1: you could sell them at a fraction of what IBM
Speaker 1: was demanding for their PCs. And thus IBM had shot
Speaker 1: themselves in the foot, and we got all these other
Speaker 1: companies that came out as a result of that, many
Speaker 1: of which are no longer around, but some of them
Speaker 1: still are anyway. That's a look at just a small
Speaker 1: number of discontinued operating systems. Like I said, there are
Speaker 1: tons more of these. I haven't really scratched the surface, honestly.
Speaker 1: I just chose some very high profile, famous ones. So
Speaker 1: I'll likely do lots more episodes with retrospectives on these
Speaker 1: older operating systems in the future. Like I said, I
Speaker 1: need to do one that's just on smartphones or cell phones,
Speaker 1: because there are quite a few of those as well.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, I hope that all of you are
Speaker 1: doing really well. Thank you very much for listening, and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
Speaker 1: an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.