Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)

If anything the "highest hacker to user ratio" has diminished since then.

Hardware compatibility was a major issue. Even if hardware was compatible with Linux it often wouldn't work out of the box. Most homes had only a single internet connected device so if you borked your system you had to have friends that would know how to guide you to fix it over the phone or you had to travel to someone else house to check the internet then come back and try what you wrote down. Users who had no patience for this would get filtered out of the userbase.

> The most timeless thing here is Linux retaining its "highest hacker to user ratio".

More so than BSD? Or still more than just the OSs Carmack listed?

He mentions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) in the NeXTSTEP section, which was a stepping stone to OS X.

Windows stuck as the id tooling platform. I'm guessing by the time OS X was relevant, id Software had grown and all the tooling that would've benefited from Interface Builder was maintained by different folks. And Carmack was focused on getting the most out of various graphics cards, where Win32 drivers were both the cutting edge and what consumers had.

Knowing Carmack, and the market, not much would change about this.

Windows still rules the roost, though it wouldn’t be referred to as Win32 today for various reasons. Linux is even more important today, given the Steam Deck and Proton; but still a smaller market than Windows. And macOS is even more of the third-option today given their antagonistic support to OpenGL/Vulkan and non-Apple-first developers (in general).

If anything, Linux would probably be switched to first since Carmack was always a hardline supporter and it seems to have the most capture velocity; but that’s still quite unlikely. And obviously all the other platforms would be missing from the list altogether given the triopoly/triculture that the modern desktop OS sphere has evolved into.

There's Lola: https://shithub.us/aap/lola/HEAD/info.html

Here's a few screenshots:

https://old.reddit.com/r/plan9/comments/1f9c50n/lola_screens...

The Plan9/9Front folks must like the look or rio, sam, acme. Otherwise somebody would have written a more modern looking desktop for it.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he brought NextStep with him. The new version of the OS was basically FreeBSD core with a NextStep inspired desktop. The same could have been done for Plan9.

the hardware support was pretty bad. it ran on x86 with only the most basic of hardware with a vga graphics adapter in some basic vesa mode.

it never felt serious, just more like a technology demo. it was also hard to really see the beauty of the 9pfs on a single host... i always assumed it needed to be on some bell labs network with a bunch of other plan9 stuff to really shine.

I remember trying out Plan 9 a few years ago. I like its underpinnings; I like how the designers pushed the Unix notion of "everything is a file" to its limits, with various services being presented to the operating system as file servers implemented using a protocol named 9P. It's a cool research operating system with a lot of very interesting ideas, but ultimately it's not my daily driver due to a lack of hardware and software support, though I am working on a research project (but for conventional *nix operating systems) that takes advantage of 9P.

Carmack's description of the rio GUI is apt; rio is heavily based on Xerox PARC's Cedar environment from the mid-1980s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4). I had a hard time getting used to rio, though eventually I learned it. I even purchased an old Sun three-button mouse (with no click-wheel) since Plan 9 didn't like my click-wheel mouse. rio does not adopt a lot of the conventions that were introduced by the Apple Lisa, Apple Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows, resulting in a completely foreign experience for most new Plan 9 users. There is a misconception that Apple and Microsoft simply stole the idea of GUIs from Xerox PARC without further innovating on it. This misconception is false; the Apple Lisa and the Apple Macintosh introduced many GUI conventions that were not present in Xerox PARC's GUIs (this video comparing the Apple Lisa to the Xerox Star highlights the differences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiWtJJN5zk), and Windows introduced additional innovations. Back to Plan 9, the result is a GUI that has many conventions that were explored by Xerox PARC but were not adopted by the Mac or Windows, such as mouse chording (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_chording). Hence, there's a learning curve for those accustomed to conventional GUIs.

Even so, the ideas behind rio seem to do a good job with exploiting Plan 9's architecture and showing how it could support a more tools-oriented design. Moreover, it was borrowed from Xerox PARC's Cedar. It would have been quite a research effort to create a Mac- or Windows-like GUI for Plan 9 that made full advantage of Plan 9's "everything is a file" architecture. Merely implementing a Mac- or Windows-like GUI to Plan 9 might not have taken full advantage of Plan 9's architecture, which I think is the key difference between Plan 9 versus other operating systems.

Perhaps in some alternate universe where Apple and AT&T merged in the 1990s and Apple built their successor to the classic Mac OS on top of Plan 9 with Apple people like Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Alan Kay joining forces with Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Rob Pike....come to think of it, it's quite interesting to think about that possibility, though I don't think Apple would have made its post-1997 comeback without Steve Jobs, no matter how good "Mac OS Plan 9" would've been.

My favorite is his email on inlining code: https://cbarrete.com/carmack.html

He wrote tons of them. I find them great reads.

Here is an archive for anyone interested. I think the most interesting stuff is when accelerated GPUs started becoming available to consumers and he talks about the developments in that area. From what I recall that is in the 1997 - 1998 era.

* https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan

EDIT: I found one...

* https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan/blob/master...

This was pre OSX so it is a safe assumption.

OSX is sortof nextstep for the masses, but the differences might be things he cares about.

MacOS is NEXTStep.

He presented a quake 3 port on Mac at one of the Apple events with Steve Jobs on stage.

At that time was he talking about 68k or Intel Mac?

I had a Power Mac.

Why does this matter to you at all? It's funny to see all the Mac apologizer comments having to clarify that "oh no, but that Mac was so different". As if the modern incantation is any better; we just had a thread two days ago of how absolutely botched it is from a UI/UX perspective, and the hardware is the most anti-hacker, anti-consumer, DRM-riddled thing in existence if you watch any of that Ross boy's channel.

> If I can convince apple to do a good hardware accelerated OpenGL in rhapsody

Yeah, that comment aged well. Mac users are still waiting for full OpenGL 4.6 compliance and that spec is already ten years old.

Edit: of course, I will get down-voted despite laying out very basic facts. Happens every time you poke the dogma bee's nest.

Edit edit: I am still genuinely curious why the man's opinion from 30 years ago apparently matters to you that much. I'd like to understand the psychology behind it if you would care to write a response.

I feel like this needs a (1997) on the title.

(1997)