operating systems from the heyday of the PC

In this post we will talk about three operating systems for personal computers from the 1980s and early 1990s – AmigaOS, LisaOS and NeXTSTEP. Some of them today can still be found somewhere in legacy form, some are supported by enthusiasts or even companies, but all of them, perhaps, are already resting in the dustbin of history, leaving behind a legacy of various sizes.

Let's start with the operating system launched in 1985 when Apple introduced the Macintosh. At that time, Commodore International was still more famous. These guys started out repairing and reselling typewriters, but over time they retrained. Commodore's fame was brought primarily by the Commodore 64 personal computer, three years after the release of which Commodore introduced a new promising PC – the Amiga.

It was created by a team of former Atari employees, and high hopes were placed on the Amiga. It provided excellent graphics and sound for its age, and games on the Amiga looked much better than those on competing PCs. According to the manufacturer's plan, the Amiga should subsequently undermine Apple's position as a creator of computers for creative people.

Amiga had its own operating system – AmigaOS. It implemented multitasking, a rather advanced feature for those times that not everyone had. At that time, starting a second application on a PC usually required closing the first. On AmigaOS this was not necessary: ​​the first application simply went into hibernation mode and waited for the user to return to continue working from the same place.

Amiga also had its own AmigaDOS (disk operating system), which already had a graphical interface and access to the file system, so in some cases it was not even possible to run AmigaOS.

However, some important functions were not implemented in AmigaOS. It lacked memory protection: any process could take and occupy any amount of memory it wanted. This provided enormous scope for malicious software, which could thus paralyze all work and damage the system.

This begs the horror story that AmigaOS was destroyed when it encountered sufficiently efficient attackers. The reality turned out to be more prosaic: Commodore began to fall behind in the PC race, relied on the unsuccessful Amiga CD32 console, and by 1993 faced a sales decline from which it simply could not recover. In 1994 the company began bankruptcy proceedings.

Commodore's successor in working on AmigaOS was Hyperion Entertainment, and judging by their website, the latest fix for AmigaOS was only released a year ago! Although it is somewhat strange that the fix affected AmigaOS 3.2.2, although the later version 4.1 even flaunts on a separate website. In addition to Hyperion Entertainment, there is still a small community of enthusiasts around the operating system.

The presence of memory protection did not save another project of those years from a much more sudden death. Let's return to Apple. By the late 1970s, it was positioned as a promising company that was clearly worth investing in. But investors were afraid to do this, since Apple was led by the very young Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Therefore, new, more experienced specialists began to appear at Apple, who gradually took power from Jobs. One of them was engineer Jeff Raskin, who proposed the concept of the Apple Macintosh. Although it was still a far cry from what Apple had released in 1984, it was enough for the company to change direction and abandon the Lisa project that Steve had led.

Lisa is a personal computer with a full-fledged WIMP (windows-icons-menu-pointer) graphical interface, which Jobs spotted in the Xerox Alto PC, created at Xerox PARC. By the way, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) is, in principle, one way or another responsible for many technologies, without which it is impossible to imagine modern technologies. Mouse, laser printer, OOP, Ethernet… but we are interested in the graphical interface.

The Lisa, unlike the Apple II, was aimed at the business segment and contained a powerful Motorola 68000 processor. It did not have built-in memory protection, and this module was additionally implemented by third-party developers. Larry Tesler, who later worked on the graphical interface of this OS, left PARC for the Lisa project. Here he also created an object-oriented version of the Pascal language – Clascal – which was used in the developer interface on the Lisa system. Clascal was subsequently developed into Object Pascal.

The developer interface was one of two interfaces available in Lisa. The GUI was used there only in a text editor; the main interaction was carried out the old fashioned way, through the keyboard. The second interface of Lisa OS was intended for end users and already used the GUI everywhere.

Lisa turned out to be a rather expensive computer: its price was then almost 10 thousand dollars, which negatively affected not only press reviews, but also final sales. The competitor, the IBM PC, did not offer such interface capabilities, but cost only $1,565, which made it more attractive than the Apple and Xerox counterparts (their Star, also with a GUI, sold for $16,595). With a cost of creation of more than $150 million, the final sales of the Lisa amounted to about $100 million. And the internal competition between the Macintosh and Lisa at Apple, where Jobs joined one or the other camp, ended with the victory of the Macintosh.

The failure of the Lisa was partly due to the high OS requirements, which even the Motorola 68000 could not keep up with. The Lisa came with its own suite of applications (LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaProject, LisaList and LisaTerminal), and although this later became the norm for Apple, then this scared third-party developers from creating software for Lisa – after all, it seemed to already have everything necessary.

Nevertheless, the Lisa project gave the Macintosh many features that successfully took root in Apple systems. For example, the columnar interface of the hierarchical directory structure, familiar to all users of Apple computers. The first Macintosh interface was very similar in principle to the Lisa interface.

Other Locally Integrated Software Architecture (LISA) features did not go further than this. For example, a “document-centric” approach to work. Each application in Lisa had its own “notepad”, which was located on the desktop separately from the application shortcut. To create a new document, users tore off a piece of paper from this virtual notepad. Thus, the user interacted not with shortcuts, but with notebooks. This approach was later partially revived in Apple OpenDoc and Microsoft OLE – technologies for linking and embedding objects into other documents and objects.

Without losing sight of Steve Jobs, let's remember another OS project of his – NeXTSTEP – which his company NeXT took up after failure in the hardware market. NeXTSTEP was based on a combination of Unix and BSD, Display PostScript was used to render graphics, runtime used the Objective-C language, and an additional layer for object-oriented programming was implemented.

NeXTSTEP made an even greater contribution than Lisa to the way modern operating systems look. The Dock was first introduced here, which later became one of the main components of the Mac OS interface. Here came the drag-n-drop standard, large and colorful application icons, real-time scrolling, and inspector windows with a list of object properties. It was for NeXTSTEP that the world's first browser, WorldWideWeb, was written, later renamed Nexus. In 1997, NeXT was purchased by Apple, and NeXTSTEP's developments formed the basis of the Cocoa API and the upcoming Mac OS X.