Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)

At that time was he talking about 68k or Intel Mac?

I had a Power Mac.

MacOS is NEXTStep.

Why does this matter to you at all? It's funny to see all the Mac apologizer comments having to clarify that "oh no, but that Mac was so different". As if the modern incantation is any better; we just had a thread two days ago of how absolutely botched it is from a UI/UX perspective, and the hardware is the most anti-hacker, anti-consumer, DRM-riddled thing in existence if you watch any of that Ross boy's channel.

> If I can convince apple to do a good hardware accelerated OpenGL in rhapsody

Yeah, that comment aged well. Mac users are still waiting for full OpenGL 4.6 compliance and that spec is already ten years old.

Edit: of course, I will get down-voted despite laying out very basic facts. Happens every time you poke the dogma bee's nest.

Edit edit: I am still genuinely curious why the man's opinion from 30 years ago apparently matters to you that much. I'd like to understand the psychology behind it if you would care to write a response.

He presented a quake 3 port on Mac at one of the Apple events with Steve Jobs on stage.

This was pre OSX so it is a safe assumption.

OSX is sortof nextstep for the masses, but the differences might be things he cares about.

Knowing Carmack, and the market, not much would change about this.

Windows still rules the roost, though it wouldn’t be referred to as Win32 today for various reasons. Linux is even more important today, given the Steam Deck and Proton; but still a smaller market than Windows. And macOS is even more of the third-option today given their antagonistic support to OpenGL/Vulkan and non-Apple-first developers (in general).

If anything, Linux would probably be switched to first since Carmack was always a hardline supporter and it seems to have the most capture velocity; but that’s still quite unlikely. And obviously all the other platforms would be missing from the list altogether given the triopoly/triculture that the modern desktop OS sphere has evolved into.

> The most timeless thing here is Linux retaining its "highest hacker to user ratio".

More so than BSD? Or still more than just the OSs Carmack listed?

If anything the "highest hacker to user ratio" has diminished since then.

Hardware compatibility was a major issue. Even if hardware was compatible with Linux it often wouldn't work out of the box. Most homes had only a single internet connected device so if you borked your system you had to have friends that would know how to guide you to fix it over the phone or you had to travel to someone else house to check the internet then come back and try what you wrote down. Users who had no patience for this would get filtered out of the userbase.

> OSes are extremely different today.

Are they though? Except for Windows everything else has become a UNIX (even on game consoles, Xbox runs a Windows derivate and PlayStation runs on a BSD kernel, only Nintendo is still doing their own thing).

The OS diversity in the 90s was much bigger than today, AmigaOS, RiscOS, AtariTOS, BeOS and the original MacOS were all siginificantly different from each other, much more different than Linux vs macOS vs Android vs iOS.

He mentions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) in the NeXTSTEP section, which was a stepping stone to OS X.

Windows stuck as the id tooling platform. I'm guessing by the time OS X was relevant, id Software had grown and all the tooling that would've benefited from Interface Builder was maintained by different folks. And Carmack was focused on getting the most out of various graphics cards, where Win32 drivers were both the cutting edge and what consumers had.

I feel like this needs a (1997) on the title.

(1997)

My favorite is his email on inlining code: https://cbarrete.com/carmack.html

He wrote tons of them. I find them great reads.

Here is an archive for anyone interested. I think the most interesting stuff is when accelerated GPUs started becoming available to consumers and he talks about the developments in that area. From what I recall that is in the 1997 - 1998 era.

* https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan

EDIT: I found one...

* https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan/blob/master...

Carmack also used to have some really insightful articles on AltDevBlog. I recently read his one on functional programming and thought it was very well thought out.

This site had nice re-uploads for the some of the articles. You can maybe google around and find more

[0] http://sevangelatos.com/tag/john-carmack/

The Plan9/9Front folks must like the look or rio, sam, acme. Otherwise somebody would have written a more modern looking desktop for it.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he brought NextStep with him. The new version of the OS was basically FreeBSD core with a NextStep inspired desktop. The same could have been done for Plan9.

There's Lola: https://shithub.us/aap/lola/HEAD/info.html

Here's a few screenshots:

https://old.reddit.com/r/plan9/comments/1f9c50n/lola_screens...

I would have said the biggest thing hurting plan 9 adoption is that there is no C++ compiler. And this sort of slots into the next biggest thing, it's not posix, Yes posix is several sorts of terrible and a large part of the plan 9 ethos is to break from it's unix past and do things right. But posix keeps everybody on the same page so things tend to be easy to port. It is very hard to port software to plan 9. There is that posix layer APE but it does not appear to help for any moderately complicated program. I think this is because there is no C++ compiler.

Every couple of years I resolve to try plan9 again, because I love the idea of it. and every time I sort of lose interest, I am mot a good enough programmer to make the pieces I want from scratch, it is too hard to port existing software, every thing is too different from any unix system. So I struggle for a day or two then go back to my obsd. As shallow as it is I think having a good web browser would solve 90% of my issues. and we loop back to the no C++ compiler again.

I remember trying out Plan 9 a few years ago. I like its underpinnings; I like how the designers pushed the Unix notion of "everything is a file" to its limits, with various services being presented to the operating system as file servers implemented using a protocol named 9P. It's a cool research operating system with a lot of very interesting ideas, but ultimately it's not my daily driver due to a lack of hardware and software support, though I am working on a research project (but for conventional *nix operating systems) that takes advantage of 9P.

Carmack's description of the rio GUI is apt; rio is heavily based on Xerox PARC's Cedar environment from the mid-1980s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4). I had a hard time getting used to rio, though eventually I learned it. I even purchased an old Sun three-button mouse (with no click-wheel) since Plan 9 didn't like my click-wheel mouse. rio does not adopt a lot of the conventions that were introduced by the Apple Lisa, Apple Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows, resulting in a completely foreign experience for most new Plan 9 users. There is a misconception that Apple and Microsoft simply stole the idea of GUIs from Xerox PARC without further innovating on it. This misconception is false; the Apple Lisa and the Apple Macintosh introduced many GUI conventions that were not present in Xerox PARC's GUIs (this video comparing the Apple Lisa to the Xerox Star highlights the differences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiWtJJN5zk), and Windows introduced additional innovations. Back to Plan 9, the result is a GUI that has many conventions that were explored by Xerox PARC but were not adopted by the Mac or Windows, such as mouse chording (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_chording). Hence, there's a learning curve for those accustomed to conventional GUIs.

Even so, the ideas behind rio seem to do a good job with exploiting Plan 9's architecture and showing how it could support a more tools-oriented design. Moreover, it was borrowed from Xerox PARC's Cedar. It would have been quite a research effort to create a Mac- or Windows-like GUI for Plan 9 that made full advantage of Plan 9's "everything is a file" architecture. Merely implementing a Mac- or Windows-like GUI to Plan 9 might not have taken full advantage of Plan 9's architecture, which I think is the key difference between Plan 9 versus other operating systems.

Perhaps in some alternate universe where Apple and AT&T merged in the 1990s and Apple built their successor to the classic Mac OS on top of Plan 9 with Apple people like Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Alan Kay joining forces with Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Rob Pike....come to think of it, it's quite interesting to think about that possibility, though I don't think Apple would have made its post-1997 comeback without Steve Jobs, no matter how good "Mac OS Plan 9" would've been.

the hardware support was pretty bad. it ran on x86 with only the most basic of hardware with a vga graphics adapter in some basic vesa mode.

it never felt serious, just more like a technology demo. it was also hard to really see the beauty of the 9pfs on a single host... i always assumed it needed to be on some bell labs network with a bunch of other plan9 stuff to really shine.

objectserver (cadmin) was part of the account management system suite. The desktop would use it to mount disks, route speakers/audio, create/manage users, connect things over the network, and all sorts of other stuff. It would crash because the code was garbage.

> the indy was cool because it played a little song when you started it up

I've half an idea that the "guitar" like sound it played it on was done with Karplus-Strong synthesis on-the-fly, as it was playing out.

Q3test came out in 1999 - on the classic Mac OS he despised, even a bit before its final OS 9 incarnation. This was to get the biggest bugs ironed out on the most restricted hardware scope available as they were going HW accelerated only during a bit of a wild west period when it comes to that. We were all only reading about OSX in the press at the time - and when Q3 first made it to OSX proper, it was through a third-party (Omni Group).

JC did however switch to OSX as his primary development environment for some time when Apple was the first to ship the Geforce 3 in 2001, which was really the generation of hardware needed to do Doom 3 justice. A year later, it was all about ATI's new flagship card which pushed things further for his needs - back to windows, and I can't rembember from his .plan files whether he moved back before getting access to that hardware.