HN Reader

Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)

101

I wonder what he'd say today, if he were to give his updated opinions on modern operating systems. I didn't even exist when this was written, but as far I know, OSes are extremely different today. This was still before MS was even hinting at having NT take over as the mainline Windows OS. And then, the macOS of today probably has a lot more in common with NeXTSTEP than classic MacOS, so I'm curious if he changed his opinion on it after OS X came out.

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

3 months agoby tavavex

> It has an achingly elegent internal structure, but a user interface that has been asleep for the past decade. [...] I was writing a civilized window manager for it in my spare time

Brutal, but the window manager is probably one of the three big things hurting plan9 adoption (along with the lack of common editors like emacs/vim, and the lack of modern web browsers)

3 months agoby tom_alexander

hah! i forgot all about quake c.

in 1997 i had a windows nt 4.0 machine (might have been a beta) on my desk and a next turbo mono slab. visual studio wasn't terrible for development (and was a great place to get good at c++ and multithreaded), and they managed to bring all the directx stuff over. it was like windows 95, but serious and stable.

it replaced a slackware machine and a sgi indy. the indy was cool because it played a little song when you started it up and it had a novel ui with lots of cool color gradients, but otherwise it was kinda buggy. (the "objectserver" would frequently crash inexplicably. what objects did it serve? i have no idea.)

3 months agoby a-dub

This makes me wonder if Carmack's feelings on NeXTSTEP had anything to do with the decision to release the first publicly available release of Quake 3 on OS X only at first.

See https://web.archive.org/web/20000229083216/http://macweek.zd... .

At the time, I remember the ATI Rage128 chipset being the big deal and reason for why Q3's beta came out first on Mac... but gosh now I wonder if it was the feelings for NeXTSTEP.

3 months agoby b0rbb

That must be the first “essay” I read by him. I just recall tweets and interviews

Sounds like the weighs and considers everything very carefully

3 months agoby Havoc

Has his opinion changed on Mac at all over the years?

3 months agoby cactusplant7374

[stub for offtopicness]

(but yes, year added above!)

3 months agoby dang