🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <40tu54$r06@starfruit.csd.sgi.com> Kevin Brown,
kcbrown@starfruit.csd.sgi.com writes:
>>OTOH, by waiting until the mid-1990's to do their design work, they've 
>>got 10 more years of experience from the computing industry to draw
>>on.
>
>This is true.  However, with respect to the important items I'm
>thinking of (the two PM's), the software technology has been around
>for a long time.
>
>I suppose, however, that the 10 years have been useful in highlighting
>which OS features really are useful.
>

How many commercial microkernel based OSs are there---those have not 
been around for ten years. How many OS's with SOM (or equivalent) tightly 
integrated? Also not for ten years.

Something the people in this thread don't seem to understand:
UNIX and NT are multi-user OS's. MacOS is (and will be for the 
foreseeable future)  a personal OS. This makes all the difference in the 
world if you actually think a second (which I know is a lot for most of 
the contributors to this thread). 
In a multi-user OS the focus is on 
* Security, even if that's a hassle to a specific user who want to run 
Norton Utils, or even to a group of trusting users who easily want to 
share data (eg when you log into your friends UNIX account and see he 
forgot to set group or world read permission for that file you want).
* "Fairness" in some sense, especially in utilization of CPU time, 
leading to preemptive multi-tasking with dynamic priorities.

However a personal system is a different sort of beast. When one is 
playing a game, or capturing video for example, one does NOT want other 
processes sneaking in and grabbing time. The user is the only person 
using the CPU and the user cares about other issues than "Fairness" in 
sharing time among processes. This means the OS is in many ways more like 
a realtime OS than a traditional timeshare OS like UNIX. But it's a 
realtime OS with a whole lot of extra stuff that realtime OSs usually 
don't have to deal with. It is simply airheaded to say that mac OS 
designers should be able to look at UNIX/NT/VMS and produce a new OS like 
that. They are not INTERESTED in producing yet another timesharing 
OS---if that's what you want, go buy NT, run LInux, whatever. 

As an example of the sorts of new issues that a future MacOS will have to 
deal with where UNIX/VMS/NT are no help whatsoever, how does one deal 
with screen access?
The UNIX/NT model is a screen server. The result is pathetically slow 
screen access. Sure, the network part of X is nice---if that's what you 
need. If you need a snappy screen more than networked graphics, X is not 
too exciting. How many DOS or Windows action games run well (if at all) 
under NT?
But if you don't have a screen server, how can you enforce at least some 
control over what happens on the screen? A single semaphore for the 
screen? But then what happens if the process that acquires the semaphore 
simply never gives it up?

These are the sorts of issues that have to be resolved, not bonehead 
issues like how to do VM or IPA or trivial things that any CS junior 
knows. For God sakes, give the company credit---workstation companies and 
MS do not have some monopoly on bright OS engineers.

Maynard Handley