Comments on: Macintosh Application Environment (Failure pt 1)

By: piotr

piotr — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 09:06:06 +0000

MAE were supposed to run on SparcStation SS-5, SS-10 and SS-20 just fine. I can confirm running them on real hardware. Whatever kernel panic you’re seeing is a result of QEMU. I would bet on some unsupported instruction. If my memory serves me correctly Mathematica also triggered some kernel panics in QEMU emulated Sparcstations which I suspect were due to a combination of aggressive compilation optimization on the part of Wolfram, and unsupported or incorrect instructions on the emulated QEMU guests.

By: Stu

Stu — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 09:28:15 +0000

I wonder if any of the MAE code ended up in the Classic environment, it would make sense to take the emulation and the scaffolding for Cut + Paste support.

By: baka

baka — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 05:10:34 +0000

Fun fact, the company who did the IE unix port was the one who accidentally leaked the NT4 source code

By: bbslovag

bbslovag — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 07:10:17 +0000

Typo in at least one of your urls:

s(/install/)(/old/install/)

By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 23:35:07 +0000

The IE4 for Windows rendering engine was Trident, the Mac one was Tasman. Personally I always liked the Mac version for its network stack; at the time I was working on SOCKS, and the Mac version could do SOCKS4 or SOCKS5 with server side name resolution, whereas the Windows version was SOCKS4 only.

I doubt things would be much different if IE had existed on Linux. The nature of the Linux community at the time meant it would have had very little use. Seriously, I used Solaris a lot back in the day, but I never saw anybody use IE on Solaris. As far as I can tell, the need for a Linux web browser is really what drove Gecko/Firefox.

Along the same lines, if you haven’t seen it, I thought Kyle Rankin’s reflections on changes in the Linux community was pretty insightful (see https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/what-linux-journals-resurrection-taught-me-about-foss-community .) The basic point is that the community changed from a group of idealists who wanted control over their desktop platform to a group of corporate interests who wanted low cost server instances. Today the idea of running Microsoft software on Linux doesn’t seem all that crazy, but in 1999 it would have been heresy.

By: Peter Godwin

Peter Godwin — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 12:24:13 +0000

In reply to neozeed.

WASTE was a text engine used by various developers, including Microsoft for Internet Explorer and Netscape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE_text_engine

Britol Technology did IE port to Unix – https://web.archive.org/web/20071012220327/http://www.bristol.com/windu/

By: neozeed

neozeed — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 02:27:55 +0000

In reply to ender. I believe so. I remember something about WASTE engine or something on MACOS. IE on Solaris does have a lot of Windows sounding DLL names, so I'm sure it's one of those commercial winelib like things.

By: ender

ender — Sun, 25 Aug 2019 21:35:50 +0000

Wasn’t the MacOS IE a browser that had a very different rendering engine from the Windows version, while the HP UX and Solaris were pretty much direct ports (of the Windows one)?