An Apple by any other name…
Posted by Nick DeLorenzo ndelorenzo@timesleader.com
In my column today, I noted that Apple’s OSX is based on a Unix kernel (core).
I argued that this invalidated a longstanding philosophical position held by Apple that placed them
at odds with manufacturers of other PCs and software. My column is limited by available space in the newspaper,
so I wasn’t able to outline what Apple’s philosophy has been in the past.
Originally, all computer transactions were conducted by punch cards. With advancing technology,
the command line and keyboard replaced the punch card. The computer still performed much the same operations,
only the user interface was more flexible. Still, the user was typically connected to a mainframe CPU, a much larger computer
in a remote location, sometimes miles away.
Apple’s innovation was a user interface that spoke directly to the CPU. The hardware was all self-contained,
everything was unitized.
Historically speaking, Apple has preferred an all-in-one approach to their computers.
That’s because historically, as I noted in the column, Apple has been a computer hardware manufacturer.
Enter Microsoft and IBM. Microsoft basically did the same thing as Apple, but they did it on a different level.
Microsoft and IBM had a rocky and contentious relationship, but it was one that continues to shape the market to this day.
IBM has always made computers. They wanted to appeal to the mass market, and Microsoft’s MS-DOS proved the initial ticket.
The PC was born. Microsoft, however, didn’t make their software specific to IBM. They’d sell it to anyone. So the operating system
and hardware were unrelated. Compaq, Gateway, any number of other providers could duplicate IBM’s architecture and Microsoft’s DOS would hum away, blissfully unaware.
Apple and Microsoft continued to compete for market share; Apple released it’s Graphical User Interface (your desktop, with it’s iconic icons) called
Mac OS, and Microsoft followed suit with Windows, in various iterations.
The philosophical gap deepened. Microsoft’s software was not tuned for all of the hardware it might encounter; issues could occur. Anyone looking for a driver CD to this day knows what I’m talking about…although with the advent of omnipresent Internet connections, this seldom happens with modern hardware. Apple on the other hand, was designed to work with any hardware it might encounter. Driver problems were unheard of. But at the same time, there was a limited repertoire of hardware available, and so PCs potential market was far larger.
Meanwhile, Unix (mainframe) developers had been coding away in blissful…well, ignorance is the wrong word. They were aware of the conflagrations occurring in
the personal computer market. They just didn’t care. They were the big boys, running servers, mainframes, driving corporations.
That is, until a university student named Linus Torvalds came along.
He set out to develop a «Unix-like» operating system that would run on a PC. It seems it proved more easy than he had realized, and Linux was born.
Linux is, for all intents and purposes, a «flavor» of Unix. It will operate on PC architecture, it will respond to Unix command line and execute Unix code.
It’s extremely robust, extremely flexible, and very hard to break. Linux is generally free, and it’s open source, so whomever wants to modify the code may do so so at their leisure, and distribute it as they will.
Linux, being open source, attracts many software engineers. Microsoft and Apple have a history of releasing «system updates» or «Windows Updates» to correct bugs in their software…but they never call them «bugs», and they always try to downplay the issue until it’s resolved. You never know that a security update will be released ahead of time, do you? Linux coders a different philosophy. They say «HEY, EVERYONE!!! LOOK!!! I found a bug! WHO CAN FIX IT?!?!». This usually means that a solution is quickly found and distributed.
Back to Microsoft and Apple.
Microsoft had been running on what was called the «NT» environment for businesses for years. It made systems fairly resilient to attacks and user error.
They had a separate branch, «9x» (as in Windows 95, Windows 98, ME) for home users, that was more open. This made them far more susceptible to attack if the user didn’t know what they were doing.
Apple, on the other hand, was progressing in revisions of it’s Mac OS. Due to low market share and it’s user ’sandbox’, Mac OS was safer, but more limiting. You could never really get at the hardware to tweak things. It also restricted Apple’s market share, since everything needed to be designed from day one to run on a Mac.
In essence, a Mac was a computer with training wheels, a PC was a computer that would let you fall and hurt yourself…but if you knew how, you could do all sorts of stunts and tricks with it.
Linux users were off in their own corner, having the best of both worlds, trying to attract attention. The Linux philosophy is «If it’s information, it should be free». Mac users have a habit of scoffing at anything that’s not a Mac, and PC users were largely too frightened to convert.
PC market share continued to grow, and Mac’s continued to dwindle.
Microsoft switched ALL users to it’s «NT» platform with Windows XP. They were still fine tuning how much control users had over their machines. 2000 was a little too restrictive, and it wouldn’t run enough popular hardware…XP was too open, Vista was way too restrictive, and eventually Windows 7 was released, which most critics agree, is the best Windows yet.
Mac decided to pursue a completely different strategy. They took their focus on design and rebuilt their operating system from the ground up, using Unix.
They switched to more conventional hardware. Their computers became cheaper to build, and more flexible. They began a massive marketing campaign, which began to drive Apple’s market share back up. As noted in the column: Mac OS will run on PC architecture. Windows will run on current Mac hardware.
Linux became more friendly too. The biggest gripe with most Linux users was that it was rather difficult to install programs in some cases.
For most versions of Linux, packagers were developed that made installation of common programs a very simple task.
The advent of net books, which were able to take advantage of Linux’s small footprint, and came with it preinstalled from the factory, gave the operating system a much needed legitimacy.
And so after that arduous trek, we arrive at the present day:
Computer users have choices. They can more or less customize any operating system any way they want and they’ve got a huge variety of software available,
as long as they know where to get it. And the frontier continues to expand.
Source: