> It is incredible how much wasted effort went into Pink, Taligent, and Copland...
Indeed. I remember reading Robert X. Cringely's book "Accidental Empires" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires) back at that time, and in one chapter he looked over the Pink/Taligent/Copland debacle and predicted that no company would ever write a general-purpose operating system from scratch again, because doing so had just become too complicated.
That seemed pretty far-fetched to me at the time, but it turned out he was more or less right. OS X is NeXTSTEP is Mach/BSD; Windows is NT; Android is Linux/Java. Every major OS project these days starts by picking up some earlier project and using it as a base. And those who tried to defy the prediction (cough Be cough) found out that it was true the hard way.
Indeed. I remember reading Robert X. Cringely's book "Accidental Empires" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires) back at that time, and in one chapter he looked over the Pink/Taligent/Copland debacle and predicted that no company would ever write a general-purpose operating system from scratch again, because doing so had just become too complicated.
That seemed pretty far-fetched to me at the time, but it turned out he was more or less right. OS X is NeXTSTEP is Mach/BSD; Windows is NT; Android is Linux/Java. Every major OS project these days starts by picking up some earlier project and using it as a base. And those who tried to defy the prediction (cough Be cough) found out that it was true the hard way.