After four decades, the future of the operating system is clouded, but its legacy will endure.

Regardless of the ultimate fate of Unix, the operating system born at Bell Labs 40 years ago has established a legacy likely to endure for decades more. It can claim parentage of a long list of popular software, including the Unix offerings of IBM, HP and Sun, Apple’s Mac OS X and Linux. It has also influenced systems with few direct roots in Unix, such as Microsoft’s Windows NT and the IBM and Microsoft versions of DOS.

The [Association for Computing Machinery] may have said it best in its 1983 Turing award citation in honor of Thompson and Ritchie’s Unix work: “The genius of the Unix system is its framework, which enables programmers to stand on the work of others.”

As interest mounts in the upcoming launch of Apple’s highly anticipated yet still completely speculative iTablet/iSlate/iNextBigThing, the industrial designers at long-time Apple partner Frog Design, have opened their archives to present some proposals for an early Apple tablet (code-named Bashful).

Concepts for this early pre-touch tablet included one with an attached keyboard and one with a floppy disk drive and convenient handle for maximum portability. An attached stylus helped the user interact with the screen. One Frog/Apple tablet concept also included an attached phone.

When a web-site has been running since 1996¹ you would expect it to have enjoyed some evolution, with the odd redesign thrown in along the way. The web-site at apple.com is one such site. Flickr user Kernel Panic maintains a gallery of screen captures of Apple’s home page and it represents an interesting journey through the history of the company. It’s amazing to me that the basic design of apple.com as it stands today is the same as it was in 1998 — how’s that for consistency?

But what would Apple’s home page have looked like in the years prior to 1996? Sadly we never got to see an apple.com home page for the launch of the Apple I, Apple II, Lisa, Macintosh or MessagePad… until today! Dave Lawrence of Newton Poetry fame posted a couple of mock-up apple.com home pages for the Lisa and MessagePad machines on his weblog and Matt Pearce answered Lawrence’s call for others to add to the meme. Between them, they’ve come up with a few beautifully crafted and clever images of the home pages that might have been.
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The Impossible Project inspires Polaroid to relaunch instant cameras (but, my God, they’re expensive).

SheepShaver is a PowerPC emulator that runs under Mac OS X. It started life over 10 years ago as a commercial application for BeOS, but it is now open source and free. SheepShaver is a universal binary, so it runs natively on an Intel machine. SheepShaver lets you run any older system between Mac OS 8.5 and Mac OS 9.0.4.

Spacewar! was one of the first video games and in 1972, Rolling Stone magazine sent Stewart Brand — 33 years old at the time — to document the early days of computing as entertainment. The photographs were taken by a young Annie Leibovitz (23). Play the original 1962 game code running on a PDP-1 emulator in your Java-enabled browser. [via]

I’m stuck in computing’s yesteryear. I’m using a recently-obsoleted Macintosh as my primary computer, a Power Mac G5. This once cutting-edge computer was to be the last of Apple’s PowerPC machines. Furthermore, Apple’s latest OS, Snow Leopard, doesn’t run on PowerPC-based computers, so I can’t upgrade my G5 beyond Leopard. As a consequence of this, my operating system can now be considered antediluvian too.

It seems only fitting then that I’ve used a couple of software hacks to add a few retro touches to my aging Macintosh.

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Original Bboard Thread in which :-) was proposed.

Watch the history of computers. [via]