[blakeyrat]

The problem is that *nix tools only support technology that existed in 1972. Anything newer than that is screwed.

Mac Classic's death knell was the increasing popularity of the Internet. Run by servers that couldn't possibly store Mac Classic files correctly, because guess what? Resource forks/alternative data streams/whatever didn't exist back in 1972.

And yes I am still bitter about this.

[coldtea]

That's an important point. I think however elegant for its time the 70s/early 80s UNIX design, it holds us back in many ways.

It's amazing that we still widely use a language without a string type and memory safety like C for example, instead of something like Rust, Swift and co -- with occasional excursions to unsafety maybe for speed/interoperability with older libs, but not as the default for the whole goddamn codebase. And don't get me started in stdlib and co.

Other stuff too. A common "file resources" standard. X11. All the way to Makefiles and permissions (with stuff bolted on, like ACL). Oh, and the horrible conventions of file paths (dumping everything in /usr/bin and co, splitting an installed app into 5+ different directories for man files, resources, etc).

It's amazing how even a simple improvement like systemd gets tons of negativity from admin types and people who think 70s designs should be set in stone.

[digi_owl]

> It's amazing how even a simple improvement like systemd gets tons of negativity from admin types and people who think 70s designs should be set in stone.

That is misrepresenting (perhaps to the point of straw man) the systemd complaints.

[coldtea]

>That is misrepresenting (perhaps to the point of straw man) the systemd complaints.

Maybe, but not the one's I've seen. Can you point to some collection of systemd complaints that go beyond "this is not how things used to be done"?

[digi_owl]

http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_...

[coldtea]

Most of these are either of the "it's not how it used to be done variety", bug complaints (which can and do get fixed), and "straying of the unix way" (as if that is a technical argument.

Sometimes you DO need to stray off the UNIX way to improve things, namely any time "does one thing well" comes to the detriment of "needs overall overview and cooperation instead of a disparate set of things that can't be glued properly for the task based on a motto meant for simple text-based input/output programs".

There are some valid concerns too, but nothing that's a show-stopper -- which also explains why the show didn't stop.

[digi_owl]

OVerview and cooperation, sure. But everything in one ball of code because of "APIs"?!

[makomk]

No, the problem is that there were all kinds of interesting non-Unixy implementations of files out there and they were all incompatible with each other. For example, VMS supported file versioning and record-based files, neither of which Macs supported, but in turn had no way of supporting resource forks. Similarly, NTFS supports alternate data streams which can store a resource fork, but Mac Classic had no way of storing other alternate data streams. The Internet forced everyone to use Unix's idea of files because it's the only subset of functionality that actually worked between more than one platform.

[fzn]

On one hand, it was easy to overlook this issue, and you'd end up with catastrophic data loss (been there, done that).

On the other hand:

1. it's the sort of mistake you tend to learn quickly not to redo ;(

2. a variety of encoding schemes were pretty common, and usually integrated in Mac browsers, mail clients, ftp clients. See for example this page from the Fetch website (http://fetchsoftworks.com/fetch/help/Contents/Concepts/Uploa...), or the hexbin(1) man page.

My personal take on what killed MacOS is this.

The MacOS was, for the start, a clever pile of kludges, for 68K series CPUs. Hot patching of routines was how you fixed bugs, introduced support for new hardware, etc. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Toolbox#Advent_and_i...) (Btw, a System 7.1 source code archive leaked years ago.)

I can imagine debugging and extending it became more and more painful. And core data structure choices (16-bit-friendly) might have been becoming wasteful as architectures came and went...

So Apple had people grinding at Copland (apparently didn't quite make it), and then NeXT was bought, .

TL;DR: IMHO, that's not the main point (not either a notable one, once you're educated about it). MacOS grew to a point where it became a fragile, quite complex, house of cards.