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During US v Microsoft, I was in the middle of writing a brief to the court arguing that the solution to Microsoft’s monopoly was not to split the OS from the application groups, but rather to disallow Microsoft from publishing its own compilers anymore. Because, you see, then they would be forced to have fully documented OS calling structures, because they would have to communicate them to the compiler vendors. In spite of their weakened state at the time, IBM would have gladly bought Microsoft’s dev tools groups, dooming them thoroughly as they attempted to merge them into the VisualAge group (née CSet). I always believed the net effect of this would be that Microsoft would suddenly have to do an about face and support one of the OSS compiler chains, probably GCC. At the time, they had a current Mach-compiled version of Windows that was still being maintained, and odds are Windows—not MacOS—would have been the ascendant Mach-based OS, because MS would have lost a lot of its ability to fix its problems by losing control of its dev chain. They’d need more radical abstraction than the NT kernel was giving them at the time. Because it was still a branch from OS/2 1.2 which was… special and half-baked. (It’s important to remember that Linux was still considered a toy by most—the “serious” OSS OS was still BSD. And if you had real workloads you ran Solaris, even though you knew Sun was somehow going to doom themselves. The world then looks nothing like the world now.) This really would have obviated the need for Apple to sell to Sun. Instead, MS would never have made the rescue investment, Sun would continue to skitter off the rails, and Apple would have sold to… I dunno, probably someone weird like Sony. Remember them? Because MS going to Mach would have poisoned the shift from Copeland to NeXTStep… the world barely wanted one Mach-based OS, much less two. One neat side effect, though, is we would have probably seen something a lot like WSL back in 2000 or so. Because the Mach Win build took much more advantage of the OS “personalities” features than MacOS did. Back then, all of this mattered a lot, because things were far less elegant than they are now. It’s hard to imagine how far we came in the intervening 25 years. So very far. But in the middle of writing that brief, Judge Jackson shot his stupid mouth off, and I was like, “Welp, nobody’s getting split up now.” And I put it in my archive of good ideas that aren’t gonna happen. So no, I don’t think there was ever a real scenario where Sun bought Apple. |