I'm writing this opinion piece on the eve of perhaps Apple's most hyped MacWorld Expo ever. TIME Canada has already pre-released an article about the next-generation flat-panel iMac machines, complete with
pictures of the it, its industrial designer and Apple CEO Steve Jobs. While the complete picture has yet to be painted (and will be in the morning when Jobs reveals the specifications during his keynote speech), I'm starting to believe that Apple feels that "innovation" and "revolution" are a matter of hardware and user interface aesthetics. Where Apple used to pave the way for new technologies, programming methodologies and user interfaces, they remain stuck in a rut of their own creation, bound to re-create a lot of the same mistakes that caused them to lose the majority of their market share and relevance to Microsoft in the 1990's. E-I-C's note: The article was written before the actual MacWorld Keynote took place.
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...the Amiga personal computer was endowed with protected memory and preemptive multitasking capabilities in 1986.
AmigaOS never got protected memory. When it comes to preemptive multitasking this is only true to the kernel level - not userland.
Good points, and a few facts and views that a person like me, with no experience of apple products, hadn't shared before.
Although as most articles/comments here on OSN I found this one a bit BeOS-biased, with comments like:
Linux operating system still do not even begin to approach the level of performance, elegance, simplicity and power of BeOS. This is a distressing
reality.
and
Simpler, faster and more powerful kernels have been developed than MACH, UNIX or Linux. Be did an excellent job of designing and implementing the lower
levels of a modern operating system, leaving the aforementioned runtime and user-level technologies ripe for exploration and implementation.
...anyway, thanx once again steve for a nice article - I look forward to next one 
Hey folks,
just wait and see the full spec's of the machine.
If this is true, what I read at this moment (the keynote is already running),
the new iMac is really a blow-away machine.
Is it "way beyond the rumour sites"?
Revolutionary does not mean "refined PowerPC version of an x86 PC designed in 1999."
- chrish
It seems to me that the guy has a problem with Be becoming irrelevant, Apple not rounding up all the employees that has left it over the years, and Apple remaining profitable. That last point especially. Apple is profitable right now and probably wishes to remain that way. If so they can't possibly follow this guy's suggestions.
it was possible to have memory protected on amiga with "enforcer" or something called close to this.
Are you sure this "enforcerer" thing added memory protection at OS level?
I have a hard time imaging this, since AmigaOS isn't an open OS.
I recall reading something about this as well back in the early 90's in a swedish amiga magazine.
My guess is that "enforcerer" placed itself in between kernel and userland apps and did something memory-protective-like as an memory managing abstraction layer. This way kernel could deal with memory for enforcerer, which in it's turn was seen as the kernel memory management system by the apps on top of it.. but this is just speculations.
I can almost ensure you though that it didn't provide "real" memory protection, since this is something the AmigaOS hackers still have plans for in future releases (the OS isn't dead yet you know).
And to cite the FAQ at <a href="http://www.aros.org">AROS (Amiga Research OS):
Several hundred Amiga experts (or at least what they thought of themselves) tried for three years to find a way to implement MP (memory protection) into the AmigaOS. They failed. You should take it as a fact that the normal AmigaOS will never have something like Unix or WindowsNT.
Enforcer on the Amiga merely told you when illegal memory was being accessed, it didn't prevent the access from occuring. It was a debugging tool, nothing more.
It is all well and good to wish for the bleeding edge. However running a company is not a matter of just identifying what would be cool and going for it. Apple lived that life in the 1980s and nearly died from it. Others like BeOS, Amiga and Netscape also lived that life and are no longer with us, or are shadow of their former selves.
We can argue back and forth about what killed these companies and who's fault it is, but what we should care about is surviving. Today Apple is surviving because they learned how to play the game. The game is to play to your strengths, avoid your weakness, know who your competitors are, know their strengths, know their weaknesses, know which fights to pick, and know which fights to avoid.
For example, here is my take on directory systems. Apple's engineers are well aware of metadata-based directories. When it was revised to HFS+ the Mac directory system was one of the best systems on the planet. But what did it get them,...exclusion. Macintoshes became difficult to integrate with other computer systemsm, because they had directory requirement that Novell and Unix didn't provide natively. (Note, this is before NT became a player.) Adopting a BeOS style directory in OS X would not buy Apple any more market share, it may hurt them by making it harder to integrate with other directories. The prudent rout is to build/adopt a directory system that plays well others. That is what Apple has done.
On the other hand, the digital lifestyle applications can get Apple more market share. So Apple is innovating in those areas.
It would be nice to also see a HyperCard like development environment. But limited resources is another lesson Apple has learned. I think Apple will have such an environment in the future. However it will be on their time table not mine.
