Philip Machanick For almost as long as anyone can remember Apple has been promising to deliver a great new operating system. An operating system is the software that controls basic functions of a computer: allowing multiple programs to run without bumping into each other, organising information on a disk into documents and applications … in general, hiding the gory details of the computer’s innards. Apple in the past has been great at the outer layers of the user experience: a user interface that set the standard for the industry, plug-and-play hardware upgrades long before Microsoft added “TM” to the term, and a high level of integration between applications.
The problem is that the underpinnings are creaky. The Mac OS does not manage dividing the machine between applications very well. A badly behaved program can take out the entire system. Fixing these problems is not really rocket science: the basic principles have been known since the 1960s. The big problem was to maintain enough backward compatibility to allow all the old applications to run, while phasing a newer, better infrastructure in.
Certainly, this is no easy task. Microsoft too has attempted to do the same thing. Windows NT was meant to replace Windows. In practice, Microsoft has battled to make NT small enough for the average user, though in the form of Windows 2000, it is being marketed more strongly as an option for the desktop.
Meanwhile, after several false starts, Apple finally looks on track – if a tad late – to deliver its smart new solution. Their new operating system, called Mac OS X (X as in the Roman numeral) is due to be available for public testing in September, and to go on sale “early next year”. OS X has had a long history. The underpinnings are from the operating system developed for NeXT, Steve Jobs’s abortive attempt at recreating the personal computer when he was turfed from Apple in the late 1980s. On top of that, there is a new outer later, a jelly-bean looking variant on the old Mac interface, with a bunch of new ideas. The details of the look and feel will change by the time OS X goes public and a lot has been written about that already. Let’s instead focus on some of the reliability enhancements.
Many of the interesting features of OS X require a pretty technical explanation to appreciate them, so I’ll just go with a few. First, OS X is essentially UNIX underneath. UNIX, while long in the tooth, is pretty well tried and tested, and provides a very good base for Internet services. The version of UNIX underneath Mac OS X has a lot of modernisations in the detail, for example, the way it manages memory. Unlike the current Mac OS, the new version has strong features to protect you against wayward applications. Next, I have heard of PC users who have ended up with an unusable machine as a result of installing or uninstalling software – a problem Apple hopes to fix by better management of shared libraries. A shared library is section of a program that is shared with other programs. The notion is that you only need one copy of this shared portion, saving disk space. OS X has a new way of keeping track of versions of shared libraries, to solve this problem. Many of the innovations will only work for new programs; old programs will run together in one environment. They will still be able to take each other out if they misbehave, but not the whole system. New programs, written specifically for OS X, on the other hand, will be able to take advantage of the new features – and will be protected from each other.
Apple claims that hundreds of developers are working on new programs to take advantage of OS X’s new features. For the most users the key questions will be: l Can I run my old programs? l Will I soon see benefits from new programs? l Will the outer-layer user experience be as good as before? l Will the promised crash-proofing be real? Apple has until September, on its current schedule, to produce something. But if it gets it right, it will be something to look forward to: UNIX robustness and Internet friendliness combined with Mac usability. I for one will be keen to check it out.