[Info-vax] OT: About Digital and divisions

[JF Mezei]

Neil Rieck wrote:

> You are correct (sort of). Woz was out (at Apple) because he was
> pushed out of the way by Jobs after Woz crashed his plane then ended
> up in hospital with amnesia. When Woz returned to Apple, he was pushed
> back into the 8-bit division.


According to the official bible, it wasnt quite like that. After his
crash, Woz wanted out of the business alltogether. He had always stayed
at Apple II because this is what he wanted and was against the closed
architecture of the Mac. He wanted to work on a machine for geeks, while
Jobs wanted a machine for the mass market.

Remember that at the time, Jobs was already in trouble with his own
company. The Macintosh happened because Jobs had been ousted from the
Lisa group and told to go work in a corner, which he did. The Mac was
not a successor to the Lisa, it was a competing project with both trying
to implement what they had obtained from Xerox Parc.

Woz did not want to be involved with all the infighting and did not
believe in a closed machine which is what Jobs wanted.


> In Steve Wu's book "The Master Switch" the author gives numerous
> examples of where "open" always (eventually) beats out "closed". Hell,
> Andy Hertzfield's original MacOS was custom and closed. It was so
> locked down that it was almost impossible to get it to multi-task.


That is definitely not true. I still have the "Inside Macintosh" manuals
which fully documented the system calls to allow people to program.
MacOS did not have multitasking. They did add a routine your app should
call which would voluntarily relinquish control to the system so the
system could pass control to someone else or update the clock on the
menubar (aka do system related stuff).

A few years alter, they improved the OS to allow multiple applications
to run at same time, using that same call to allow the system to switch
tasks. (the first implementation was MultiFinder, and this was later
integrated into the Finder).

The lack of true multi tasking was the result of the boring CEOS like
Sculley and his successors who were unable to stick to one project to
add pre-emptive multitasking and get it to completion.  Until Windows
95, MacOS wasn't too different from DOS/Windows in that respect. But by
1995, the lack of multi tasking started to really hurt Apple. But
remember that Jobs left in 1985.


> order to move forward, Apple had to (quietly) replace that paradigm
> with a UNIX implementation. This was the software Jobs brought over
> from NeXT. (IIRC)

This wasn't quiet ! It was amazing ! Extraordinary ! the Best OS ever
made on the best machines ever made etc etc.  It was quite public that
Apple had failed under Sculley some other dude and d'Amelio to come up
with a new OS and Apple got desperate and bought NeXT in order to use it
as a basis for the renewed Mac OS.