When Apple copied AmigaOS and called it AROS...

[Gorf]

No, it is not April 1st yet and no, this is not a joke.
This is true:

In the late 1980s a small team in Cupertino created a very efficient OS, that got finally released in 88 on a custom board. And how this OS works internally should sound very very familiar to you.
Let's have a look at the specs:

• 68000
• 32-Bit
• small microkernel-like very efficient core
• preemtive multitasking
• round-robin scheduler with discrete priority levels
• very fast (realtime-like) reaction time to interrupts
• fast message-passing by pointers to task’s memory
• no memory protection

Every item in this list could describe our exec.library, but it also is the description of Apple Computer's AROS A/ROSE

While it is no secret that the early Workbench was heavily inspired by Apple's Lisa and Mac, this time Apple engineers obviously would let themselves inspire by Amiga's Exec-core.

What was it for?
As we all know, none of this cool features made its way to System 4 (or 5 or 6 ...).
It was meant to kickstart the development of boards for the than new "NuBus"-slot in the recently released Mac II.
To make development of such cards easier, Apple though it might be a good idea to put an extra 68k on such a board and run A/ROSE on it, since the MacOS running on the mainboard was originally not designed with an expansion bus in mind.
Developers would now add more and more components to such a board as well as necessary glue logic and implement the drivers in A/ROSE while communicating with MacOS via a standard API.

This was of course no cheap way of doing things and only a few cards where implemented this way (mostly by Apple itself) and so A/ROSE drifted into oblivion...

[kolla]

Could it be because Carl Sassenrath was involved in this project?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_S...Apple_Computer

[demoniac]

Originally Posted by Gorf

While it is no secret that the early Workbench was heavily inspired by Apple's Lisa and Mac

This isn't accurate either.

From Brian Bagnall's Commodore: The Amiga Years:

In late January, RJ Mical began single-handedly coding a GUI for the Amiga. At the time, many computer companies were beginning to embrace the GUI paradigm originated at Xerox. “The Mac would have influenced the decision, but less so than some of the more sophisticated machines that we were using at the time,” says Mical. “We were using Sun Workstations and they had very powerful user interfaces that were much more powerful than what the Mac had.”

[idrougge]

Yeah, as if. http://toastytech.com/guis/sv352.html

[Jope]

Nevertheless, it's important to realise that many people were developing GUIs in parallel. The fact, that Apple was one of the winners has erased much of that early 80s computing history.. It's like there was only little Apple and huge Microsoft and no-one else ever made any computing device.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Yeah, as if. http://toastytech.com/guis/sv352.html

Which is even predated by:
http://toastytech.com/guis/perq.html

And all that goes back to the Xerox Alto.

Yes WB was colour and Apple Mac or Lisa was not, but there are a couple of visual similarities, that are certainly not there by accident. Like the "change window size gadget" in the right down corner, the stripes in the window title bar, global menue on top of the screen and so on.

Intuition uses very different techniques to produce this output, but the output was meant to look familiar

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by kolla

Could it be because Carl Sassenrath was involved in this project?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_S...Apple_Computer

I could not find any hints, suggesting his direct involvement, but yes: Carl "Exec" Sassenrath was working at Apple at the right time....

[kolla]

Originally Posted by Gorf

I could not find any hints, suggesting his direct involvement, but yes: Carl "Exec" Sassenrath was working at Apple at the right time....

Yes, exactly - and he isn't the kind of person who can keep away from cool stuff going on around him, I think There was a time he was active on IRC (around the launch of Rebol), and he had plenty of stories about awesome work going at Apple, stuff that never left the labs because of marketing/management reasons.