On the subject of operating systems and desktop environments, what is it that captures people’s hearts and minds?
It comes down to two simple characteristics.
The first is true greatness. If you build something fantastic, someone will see it for the brilliant creation it is, and word will spread.
The second is familiarity. You don’t even have to be great. If people use something long enough to become accustomed to it and there aren’t any easy alternatives that don’t cost people anything, and by cost I mean effort, they’ll grow to love it.
For all intents and purposes the desktop environment was born when Apple launched the Macintosh in January of 1984. Apple didn’t invent the GUI, but they gave it to masses first, and it changed everything. Microsoft wasn’t even close to having a competing product. To put it in perspective it was six years later that Windows 3.0 was released, and another five before Windows 95 brought blue screens to computers all over the world.
The world of the desktop environment isn’t limited to just the Mac and Windows platforms however. Many of the things we take for granted today came from far more obscure systems, systems that spawned as much love, if in fewer numbers, as Apple’s and Microsoft’s flagship software have.
Here are some of the smaller players responsible for the most innovation:
- Amiga You can’t have this conversation without dragging in the Amiga. The Amiga 1000 launched in July of 1985. Like the Mac it sported a graphical interface. What was amazing for the time was the way Amigas multitasked. Competing systems were the MS-DOS command line and early Mac OS, which let an application take over your session until you closed it much like early versions of Windows did. Not the Amiga. Want to use a file browser, text editor, calculator and play chess, all at the same time? Sure, no big deal today, but back then no one else’s system could do it. The Amiga could, and in only 256k of RAM. Want another buzz word? Microkernel. Amiga. 1985. Yep.
By the late 80’s the Amiga was almost as important as a platform as the PC and the Mac. By the mid 90’s the parent company had imploded and they never recovered. The community still exists today, and there are lots of ways to run the old system, which holds up pretty well by the way. There are new systems devoted to becoming the spiritual successor of the old, and with the recent announcement that the legal struggle entangling the future of the platform is resolved, we may actually see someone exercise some common sense and drive the platform into the 21st century while they still have a following. I’d love it.
My Amiga OS 3.9 desktop running AmiKit
For those of you who never got to use an Amiga, go find out what you need to do to emulate it. We missed out. It was a great system.
- NeXT Steve Jobs had to be king somewhere, so when he left Apple in 1985 he founded NeXT Computer. By 1989 NeXT was making super sexy black magnesium cased cubes and slabs that ran a revolutionary new operating system: NeXTSTEP.
When I say revolutionary I mean it. If you got your hands on a copy of an early 90’s version of NeXTSTEP today and got to use it for a while, and then took into consideration that this system existed when Windows was still in the 3.x era, you would feel embarrassed.
1992 Windows 3.1
1992 NeXTSTEP 3.0 Watch this to understand just how ahead of its time NeXT was.
The underlying layer of the NeXT Mach OS was based on BSD, a free unix-like operating system developed by the University of California around 1980. Until then you just weren’t running unix on a desktop sized machine. This brought NeXT users protected memory, pre-emptive multitasking, and robust stability that desktop users had not enjoyed yet.
But it gets better.
The GUI was drawn by a proprietary windowing system called DPS, short for display postscript. Postscript was a predecessor to PDF, and was heavily used in printing. The attraction of that at the time was that when you saw something on the monitor of your NeXT workstation it looked exactly like the printed copy would appear, something that could not be said for other systems of the time.
In addition NeXTSTEP introduced the object-oriented concept to developers by using Obj-C for all of the interface and application programming code. This made it easier for NeXT developers to create applications for the system because there were libraries they could plug into that reduced the amount of coding from scratch that had to be done. We take that for granted now, but at the time it was a pretty new concept.
Doom was developed on NeXT boxes. You know, Doom, one of the most popular PC games of all time? NeXTSTEP introduced the three column file browser. The very first web browser debuted on NeXTSTEP.
1996 OPENSTEP 4.2
NeXTSTEP has been heavily mimicked by X window managers over the years, and GNUStep represents an attempt to recreate the system from scratch. The NeXT community on the web is not what it used to be. Why? Because we’re all using Macs now. When Apple bought the intellectual property of NeXT Computer in 1997, they set to work basing their new operating system on the technology.
It’s called Mac OS X.
- BeOS Former Apple engineer Jean-Louis Gassee left Apple in 1990 and formed Be Incorporated. While it would be eight years before we saw a release, BeOS was a system that was ahead of its time. You can’t talk about influential operating systems or desktop environments without including Be.
1998 BeOS R4
Symmetric multiprocessing. That is what allows an operating system to make use of multiple processors or cores. Yes, Sun and others were offering SMP servers. Be was putting it on your desktop. 64 bit journaled filesystem. 64 bit and journaled weren’t even buzz words yet. Modular design with the ability to add file type support by simply copying and pasting the appropriate translator into the directory of the app you want to receive that capability. Text editor doesn’t support jpeg? Now it does. Spatial file browser. Not just another annoying Finder clone. Be’s file browser actually remembered your window sizes, per directory.
The Be community had a troubled interim after the collapse of Be, but now that Haiku is in alpha there is hope for the future.
I love operating systems. I love rolling up my sleeves and seeing what the merits and downsides are to a particular system. I love finding out what it takes to get a system to do what I want it to do.
I feel the same way about the desktop environment, to a point. I love discovering a new system, but after that period of discovery is over, if it isn’t making my job easier it’s keeping me from doing my job. An elegant surface is no good if the blood and sinew underneath isn’t as elegant.
We love to argue whether A is better than B. We’ll even call each other names over it. We wouldn’t have A or B without the predecessors. Small systems that pioneered many of the things we take for granted in our operating system and on our desktop.
