To give credit where credit is due, the first thing Jony Ive did upon joining Apple was to kill the screen clogging, pathetic, idiotic and horrifically dreadful skeuomorphic design, returning Mac OS to simplicity and clarity:
https://www.fastcompany.com/1672780/why-jony-ive-is-flattening-ios-7
I was always told that the PS screen font was a fast rendering vector. It is necessary because even today it would take waaay to long for the actual PS font to scale and display on screen.
The vast majority of professional imagesetters still require PS fonts, and they wonât even accept TrueType that was converted to vectors. No matter what font sellers tell you, the very big percentage of professional imagesetters will only accept true PostScript fonts.
Thatâs not what I remember. Adobe and Microsoft teamed up to develop TrueType and later OpenType. At the time MS was pressuring companies to abandon development for Macs, and Windows couldnât properly display and print PostScript fonts, at least until a much later version of Windows. But Windows still canât handle PS well, and though it might run OK on home and small office printers, to this day most high end professional printers will only accept PS fonts. Itâs a big reason why Macs still rule in the printing and media industries.
Display PS is designed to render and display quickly to be viewed on screen. It might be possible print documents set in 10,12,14,16 and 18 inch type on a home or small office printer, wonât scale or print properly in much larger or smaller sizes. And the vast majority of professional imagesetters will only accept PS fonts, no matter what the size, because the quality will be unacceptable.
All of that is true. At the same time was NeXT who licensed Postscript and invented Display Postscript. The first real WYSIWYG solution. But when Apple bought NeXT they were unable to relicense PostScript for Mac OS X for whatever reason. Either Adobe refused to license it or they asked for too high a price. Regardless the Apple / NeXTStep engineers rebuilt it using PDF Display instead as PDF was open source.
Youâre misremember the history of TrueType and OpenType. Apple developed TrueType and then licensed for free it to Microsoft. Microsoft developed OpenType after it failed to license GX Typography (now Apple Advanced Typography) from Apple.
Thanks for the memory lane!
When Mac OS X (now simply called macOS) debuted in 2001, it felt like something from the future
Not to me. It felt like something out of X Windows (Unix). And by missing many Mac features, it felt like something from the past.
The real key here was not the dock and terminal. It was the kernel.
Windows 3.1 was huge, but people waited a lot for that hourglass. At that time, IBM released OS/2 which supported preemptive multitasking. THAT was the magic. And it performed way better than Windows 3.1.
But then Microsoft came out with Windows 95, and they pretty much nailed preemptive multitasking. OS/2 sadly died after that.
Mac still struggled. As you mentioned, Copeland, and especially Gershwin, were their vision of implementing preemptive multitasking. But retooling was less work than jumping ship.
NeXT borrowed from Unix technology in their kernel, and that was the magic. The UI was basically a minimalist skin to the real deal under the hood. The icons were nice, but so were the ones in X Windows. Kind of hard to believe Forestall thinks there was anything magic about Jobs marking X on the wall. Seems more like plagiarism.
Anyway, so we were late to the game. But Windows never revamped their memory model, in order to maintain backwards compatibility. That has hindered their OS progress. Apple really started over, and that has paid off.
Not really. While the icons used by NeXTStep were nothing that special, the âreal dealâ was the object-oriented API. The massive (and original) API based on Objective-C was completely new to the Unix world (it borrowed many concepts from SmallTalk, but SmallTalk was never popular outside of Xeroxâs research labs). Thatâs the thing that made it more than just another generic X11 desktop skin.
This API, ported to the Mac platform, formed the basis of the Cocoa API. This is why, for instance, most of the Cocoa classes all begin with âNSâ - itâs short for NeXTStep.
As with so many innovations in computer science, the part users can see on their desktop is almost irrelevant compared to all of the truly unique work implemented under the covers.
I had a B&W G3 to use in grad school, and one day after OS X had became usable, it struck me what a wonderful position Apple managed to get itself into. OS X was a Unix system, and it fit right in with all the other Unix-based systems in the department. I could NFS mount disks from my advisorâs computer, run X Window apps, develop software, etc. It was also a Mac, so I could run my favorite Mac apps for email, web browsing, etc. It was the best of both worlds.
MSâs pricing/licensing monopoly power was a big reason OS/2 failed, along with an army of PC hardware manufacturers entering the market that was owned by IBM. It was one of the big reasons why MS lost the antitrust lawsuit that was brought to the US Supreme Court by Netscape:
Interestingly, OS/2 was initially developed via a partnership between IBM and Microsoft at the time when IBM was the biggest and most respected PC manufacturer in the globe, around when 1984 became not like 1984.
Yes, I was talking about the UI, not the APIs, which are effectively middleware between the UI and the kernel. 
Yea. I didnât mean to suggest that Windows 95âs multi-tasking made Windows as good as OS/2. But it was good enough such that, combined with MSâs massive entrenched base, nailed OS/2âs coffin shut.
Reminds me of a huge contract I worked on for McCormick (spices) down in Baltimore back in the 90s. They were an all-IBM shop: IBM-brand PCs, OS/2, Token-ring network interfaces⌠Curious what theyâre using now!
As a former OS/2 developer I will say that OS/2âs biggest failure was that IBM could not (and still can not) market a consumer-oriented product whatsoever. Theyâre great at selling multi-million dollar systems to other mega-corporations, but that have absolutely zero clue how to sell anything to small businesses and individual users. They couldnât do it then and they canât do it today.
It wasnât much of a partnership. Most of the work, it seems, was done by Microsoft. IBM only really took over after Microsoft abandoned the project (and its users).
I still have a box of VHS tapes from Microsoft containing videos from Bill Gates and others telling the developer community how OS/2 was the cornerstone of Microsoftâs vision of the future and how everybody must support it in order to be successful. Then, when they finally managed to ship all the features they promised, they bailed out and didnât even give the developers a refund for their (very expensive) OS/2 2.0 pre-release development kits. Fortunately, IBM stepped forward and granted them all licenses for the IBM version.
Microsoft made a lot of enemies that year and Iâm still upset at how they flat-out broke every promise they made to their users and developers. Their claim that Windows 95 was somehow superior was false in every possible understanding of the term - the only thing it had going for it was that it looked prettier.
Microsoft leveraged monopoly power and vastly superior marketing in order to convince the world that a thin GUI wrapper around MS-DOS (which is all Windows 95 was) was somehow superior to a proper multitasking/multithreading/protected operating system like OS/2.
Microsoft didnât have a real technological competitor until Windows NT shipped and that was pretty much a business-only OS. It wasnât until Windows XP, where the DOS-based Windows platform was abandoned once and for all, that their consumer product had anything technologically close to OS/2 version 1.1.
Flashback recently had an episode on OS/2 which is a great 40-minute jaunt through the twists and turns of IBMâs OS strategy and the crazy ride that was OS/2.
I worked in ad sales on the IBM account for many years, and this is 100% true. It was especially evident in the release of the PCjr (pronounced PC Junior), which was released when cheapo PC clones began flooding the market, when â1984 would not be like 1984.â
The product development and marketing strategy was the dumbest everâŚa dumbed down product with almost no storage space or memory that could not do very much at all, a lot less than Macs and cheapo PCs. And they insisted on marketing it stressing had an independently designed keyboard that barely resembled a regular keyboard; even worse than even Appleâs butterfly disaster. And they insisted on marketing it as NOT being fully featured at a time when cheapo PC desktops cost a lot less than PCjr, were fully featured and could run MS and Lotus Office stuff.
They had a great ad campaign featuring a Charlie Chaplin impersonator and spent gazillions of dollars in media across the board. Unknowingly, IBM bought airtime, I think more than one commercial, during the 1984 Super Bowl, only to have been totally blown away by â1984â before their already overexposed Chaplain ad ran for a dumbed down product.
I always liked working with the ad agency and the people at IBM, but my mind still boggles when I think about PCjr.
Our printer of many years, and our new printer, has no problem with OTF TT fonts. We publish a city magazine and use other printers for smaller jobs. Never a complaint about TT fonts. We rarely get ads with Multimaster fonts and those wonât print. And there is an abomination of a font from Microsoft that also wonât print, we get an ad with that font once a year and convert it to outlines.