The History of OS Migration

Operating system vendors face this problem once or twice a decade: They need to migrate their user base from their old operating system to their very different new one, or they need to switch from one CPU architecture to another one, and they want to enable users to run old applications unmodified, and help developers port their applications to the new OS. Let us look at how this has been done in the last 3 decades, looking at DOS/Windows, Macintosh, Amiga and Palm. read more

Bringup History of Mac OS X

The heritage of different operating systems has been discussed many times. Mac OS X includes code from Mach and BSD, AmigaOS is based on TRIPOS, MS-DOS is a CP/M-86 clone and Windows NT is modeled after VMS. But what machines and operating systems were used for cross-compilation and bringup of these systems? In order to find this out about Mac OS X, I talked to a few people working at NEXT and Apple, and people that worked on Mach and BSD. read more

Amiga/Lorraine Mugs

Every touristy place has them: Souvenirs with given names on them. If you have an uncommon name, or a friend with an uncommon name, you might look through the whole collection – and notice that they have generic ones like “#1 FRIEND” (i case you really don’t find your friend’s name), and, sometimes, generic ones in Spanish. read more