[w10-1]

Pink did get rolled into Taligent, the Apple/IBM JV to overcome Windows NT.

Remember that mac 68K system calls were via ("A-line") opcodes, and their only extension/fix mechanism was head- and tail-patching those entry points. 1990 was only about 2 years after quickdraw was re-written in C instead of assembler. Also, application developers made assumptions, e.g. sending F-line opcodes thinking any 68020 machine has an FPU (sorry!). So OO looked like the way out from that tangle.

Leaking tech docs were a big problem as Apple sought buy-in from partners. The "56" watermark might have overtly supported traceability back to the recipient. In ~1993 at Taligent we would also covertly vary variable names and such in sample code we delivered to different partners, after we found the code being shared anonymously.

Due to the OO scaffolding, the simplest application required implementing ~35 classes (yuck!), but the promise of modular intermixed code/edit/data (opendoc) was largely realized (yay!) before HTML and MIME types made complex data/display trivial (oh well).

As the length of the document shows, both Taligent and Copland were ... bedeviled with a million mid-level tyrants producing huge volumes of technical blabbage. Tremendous waste of brains, while a few sharp people were poking around Mach and finessing hardware abstraction layers.

Hoops (dev-env) and i18n seemed to be the only things that came out of that, and IBM pushed i18n into Java.

[Taniwha]

Yeah my impression of Apple at the time was that they leaked like a sieve - yet at the same time Steve was a petty tyrant who would jump on anyone who was caught.

I worked on A/UX at UniSoft, we got half of the first dev run of MacII boards (I got to find hardware bugs), I stopped attending BMUG and we chose our own internal code name (Pigs in Space), when the project finally leaked it was as "Eagle" Apple's code name (whew!)

[KerrAvon]

Steve was long gone by the time Pink existed. Apple leaked (mostly from the top!) until Steve became CEO in 1997, and he clamped down on leaks pretty hard.

[Taniwha]

Yeah but he was around while we were working on A/UX, I remember visiting Apple and people hiding from him (or rather keeping their heads and voices down in a cube farm when he passed by "shhh Steve's coming")

[Maursault]

Steve Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985 and returned in 1997. Steve Wozniak also left about around the same time, sold most of his Apple stock, and founded CL 9 in 1985. I'm not sure when Apple contracted Unisoft initially, but A/UX wasn't announced until early 1988, and there was at least a year of development underway already.

Apparently Jobs sold most of his interest in Apple immediately in 1985 in order to finance founding NeXT the same year. Jobs took a number of Apple employees with him to NeXT, but I'm not sure how long he was speculating who he wanted with him. Yada yada yada, Apple and NeXT were in negotiations by 1996. I have heard that A/UX was the first thing Jobs killed when he returned in 1997, but the final release of A/UX was version 3.1.1 in 1995, and Apple abandoned it a year later.

So if it was Steve Jobs they were hiding from, it would have either been very early in the development of A/UX (if that occurred by January 1985) or Jobs somehow started killing A/UX during early NeXT negotiations with Apple in 1996. Or Jobs had some reason to be at Apple during that period due to Pixar(?)

And if it wasn't Steve Jobs, then there was another Steve at Apple that was menacing employees between 1985 and 1996. Steve is a relatively common name, and it would be pretty interesting to learn who that was.

I am a fan of A/UX, though I didn't appreciate being forced to buy a license for it in 1989 by my university's CS department. Though the price dropped by about half by then, along with the MacII hardware, it was a very expensive purchase for a 17yo, about as much as a midrange car at the time.

[duskwuff]

> Yeah my impression of Apple at the time was that they leaked like a sieve

And yet there's still only one partial source code leak (for System 7.1) publicly available. Microsoft still has them beat on this. ;)

[captainmuon]

Why was leaking tech docs considered such a problem? I could imagine any competitor large enough to copy implementation from docs and unscrupulous enough to do so would be able to get their hands on all your docs anyway (say, a Microsoft exec hiring a PI, ...). But what's the harm if anybody else gets their hands on the docs? Is it some abstract legal "we must not accidentially make any forward-looking statements", or is it just not wanting to make anything public just in case?

If anything, I would think you'd want to have technical documentation circulated as widely as possible, so application developers don't have to reverse engineer your interfaces (which would take longer and be more error prone).

[bombcar]

All computer companies at the time were deathly afraid of Osborning themselves, which may be part of it.

Also feature parity between systems didn’t exist so they were still trying to one up each other.

[KerrAvon]

I don’t think the length of the document indicates anything in itself. This is an entire operating system written from scratch. There should a lot of design documentation.