Radsoft
 About | Buy | News | Products | Rants | Search | Security
Home » Resources » Red Hat Diaries

Red Hat Diaries/0060

Colour it Lucky

If Steve Jobs had never met and hired John Sculley the world of home computing might look very different today.

Sculley was president of Pepsico, and Jobs asked him 'Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?' Sculley decided he wanted a chance to change the world, and he ended up changing Jobs's world - and ours too.

In a boardroom manoeuvre Sculley ousted founder and major shareholder Jobs who then went on to his next project - NeXT Computer.

The NextStep operating system was years ahead of our time today already ten years ago, and the distance is growing all the time. But NeXT did not get a corner of the market, stopped selling its impressive hardware to concentrate on its operating system, found that even that did not work, flirted a while with Scotty McNealy, and ultimately ended up back where it all started - at Apple.

No one knows what Sculley is up to today, but everyone knows who and where Steve Jobs is. Steve Jobs brought the NextStep operating system back to the company he founded at a time when that company was desperate for a new operating system. A brief affair with Be never got off the ground, Copeland was in ruins, so was Rhapsody, Apple was in a panic.

Today we know how that story ends. Under the bonnet, OS X is NextStep all the way; from the user perspective, it is a generous blend of old Mac and futuristic NextStep. Coming from a Unix or Windows world, the interface can take some getting used to, and the last word has not been spoken on all the finesses this OS is to have, or how they are to work, but it is fairly obvious at this point that a lot of time - and thought - has gone into making it as sophisticated as it is.

David Pogue is the author of The OS X Missing Manual. You can reach David online here. Developers and geeks might scoff at the idea of reading this considerable tome, but there is ample information to satisfy the most curious user. Pogue just released an update for Jaguar (OS X version 10.2). You should be able to pick it up at Amazon for about $20.

60% of the information we cull from a GUI comes from just clicking around - or so say the statistics. But there are so many 'small' tricks built into OS X that having this book is worth it. At 624 pages, you're bound to find something you didn't know before and most likely would never have found out without it.

And no, we don't have a secret deal with David Pogue; we just think it's good advice to pick up this book if you're an OS X fanatic too.

Click here »

About | Buy | News | Products | Rants | Search | Security
Copyright © Radsoft. All rights reserved.