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Apple Big Pink #3 (1990) [pdf]

by fizfaz on 9/23/22, 10:36 AM with 39 comments

  • by w10-1 on 9/25/22, 3:47 AM

    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.

  • by thewebcount on 9/25/22, 3:31 AM

    Reading through the first few pages, I’m impressed with their bluntness about the shortcomings of the original MacOS. While Pink itself failed, they actually managed to achieve a lot of the stuff they discuss in that document, even before the switch to OS X. I remember when they started moving low-memory globals into system calls. And, obviously, they did eventually get it working with other processors. This makes me think 2 things: 1) You can achieve something if you have a plan, and 2) What you plan won’t be what happens, but you may still achieve the same goals a different way.

  • by astrange on 9/25/22, 4:09 AM

    Pink eventually collapsed under the weight of bad choices like "using C++" and "inheritance-based OOP". You can more or less tell it was going to fail from this design document; it is just way too long and seems to have like 5 years of work pre-planned.

    The Unicode stuff did live on as ICU (https://icu.unicode.org) after being rewritten into Java and then back into C again.

  • by pavlov on 9/25/22, 6:58 AM

    Around this time there was also Apple project “Star Trek” which ported System 7 to x86:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

    It worked, but all the apps needed to be recompiled for x86, and it didn’t tick any of the advanced feature boxes like Pink/Taligent did. (Which notably ticked all the boxes and never shipped.)

    Still I think MacOS on x86 could have been a contender against Windows 3.1. Had Microsoft refused to port Mac Office to x86 or tried to pull their licensing shenanigans against Apple, it might have made a stronger and earlier antitrust case at least.

  • by AprilArcus on 9/25/22, 2:05 AM

    Oh, this is incredible! I've always wished I could have been a fly on the wall during this boondoggle.

    "Jaguar", mentioned early in this document, was a RISC platform based on the Motorola 88000, which was abandoned in favor of and/or rolled in to the PowerPC project that shipped in 1994, four years after the date on this document.

  • by lukeh on 9/25/22, 6:35 AM

  • by pjmlp on 9/25/22, 3:40 PM

    Love that the UNIX compatibility layer is called Don Quixote, and how the document reveals the way UNIX was always seen from Apple glasses.

    > Don Quixote is not intended to be a replacement for a standard full-featured UNIX system -- rather, it is a reduced-complexity UNIX for "the rest of us" who want some or all of the capabilities of UNIX but don't want the difficulties associated with a standard UNIX.

    > ...

    > Both NeXT and A/UX are using this approach to attempt to turn a relatively traditional UNIX workstation into a personal computer. The "wrapper" approach does not address the fundamental problem -- the complexity of UNIX.

    Taken from UNIX Adapter chapter

  • by starmftronajoll on 9/25/22, 3:32 AM

    Page 1.2-2:

    >Some day, the company might even want to run Pink on something really obscure, like an Intel processor ("bite your tongue!").

  • by classichasclass on 9/25/22, 2:19 AM

    You gotta love the mentality that calls the collabourative framework the "Donner Party." Yikes.

  • by fizfaz on 9/23/22, 10:36 AM

    Interesting historical document describing Pink which later evolved into Taligent. They even planned a toolkit for collaboration (page 345ff) :O

  • by Eduard on 9/25/22, 9:17 AM

    Background info on "Apple Pink" for everyone else out of the loop:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent#History

    TIL Apple Pink is where Google Fuchsia gets its name from.

  • by Reason077 on 9/25/22, 9:12 AM

    Pink, Valhalla, Thor, Pluto, Babel, Rainbow Warrior, RedEye … these guys sure must have spent a lot of time coming up with catchy code names for each and every subsystem.

    It’s almost as bad as my AWS bill!

  • by AlbertCory on 9/25/22, 3:28 PM

    Historical note: Big Pink is a house that's famous in rock history [1]. The Band called an album "Music from Big Pink."

    You can rent it on AirBNB now.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Pink

  • by cpeterso on 9/25/22, 6:39 AM

    This document is “Big Pink #3”. Is there a #1 and #2? I don’t see related docs on that server.

  • by exsf0859 on 9/25/22, 2:59 PM

    As an aside, this document was created with FrameMaker. That's why it's got such a fancy layout.

  • by smcleod on 9/25/22, 5:45 AM

    A PDF file from a server without HTTPS seems a little dodgy?