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Apple delivers a solid system upgrade with Mac OS 8

The unthinkable is about to occur: Apple is about to deliver two major Mac OS releases — on schedule — within six months. As promised, Apple shipped Mac OS 7.6 in January 1997, and — also as promised — in July 1997, it will ship Mac OS 8, previously code-named Tempo. OS 7.6 was a bit of a dud on the features front, but not so OS 8: This new release is chock-full of goodies, including many features originally planned for the now defunct Copland. And it’s stable: The beta version of Mac OS 8 we tested crashed less frequently than the release version of Mac OS 7.6.

To date, OS 8 hasn’t attracted much interest. Rhapsody, Apple’s forthcoming next-generation operating system, has held most Apple watchers’ attention — that is, when they aren’t fixated on the company’s stock price. But although it’s exciting, Rhapsody has one major shortcoming: It doesn’t exist. Even when it does become available sometime in 1998, Rhapsody initially will appeal only to those with a flair for adventure. For most Mac users — the kind who like to get work done — Mac OS 8 will make a more sensible choice for some time to come.

MultiFinder Revisited

MultiFinder was Apple’s name for the now defunct system-software feature that let you keep the Finder active while you ran other applications. Although MultiFinder eventually mutated into the official Finder, the Finder itself could still do only one thing at a time, until now. If you copied a file, for example, you had to wait to empty the Trash. If you emptied the Trash, you had to wait to open a folder.

But the wait is over. In Mac OS 8, the Finder is multithreaded–that’s geek talk for being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. The OS 8 Finder can simultaneously initiate multiple copies, empty the Trash, and still let you cruise through folders on your desktop. And while we’re on the subject of file copying, the OS 8 Finder is PowerPC-native (read: fast).

New Finder’s a Fine File Minder

Multithreading is only one of the Finder’s new tricks. A host of navigational aids have also been added to improve your file-fiddling efficiency.

The most readily visible new feature is pop-up windows. If you drag a Finder window to the bottom of the desktop, the window turns into a folder tab. Click on the tab, and the window pops open. Click on it again (or on anything else in the Finder), and the window snaps back down out of the way.

Spring-loaded folders help you gain quick access to the obscure nooks and crannies of your hard disk’s folder hierarchy. With this feature active, when you drag an item onto a hard-disk or folder icon, the folder springs open into a window. You can burrow down as many levels deep as you like in this manner. To back up, you drag the cursor outside the window frame; the window closes, and its parent window reappears. Spring-loaded folders can be a bit disorienting at first, but once you get used to them, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them.

And while we’re on the subject of windows: You will notice that the top right corner of Mac OS 8 windows has a new resident. It’s the collapse control. Click on it, and the window collapses so that only its title bar remains visible — system-level WindowShade.

Two other handy innovations in the Mac OS 8 Finder are contextual menus and a new keystroke combo for making aliases. If you’re tired of going to the File menu to make an alias and then dragging it to the desired location, you’re in luck. In OS 8, if you hold down the Command and Option keys while you drag a file to a new location, you create an alias in that location. This works great in conjunction with spring-loaded folders.

You invoke a contextual menu for a file or folder in the Finder by holding down the Control key while you click on its icon. The menu presents a choice of several common actions you might want to perform on the item, such as copying it, moving it, or getting information about it.

Going Platinum

Well, you knew Apple marketing wasn’t going to let an OS out the door sporting a fresh new look that answered to the stale old name “Apple grayscale appearance.” So instead, OS 8 will display the “platinum” look, which is a more subtle 3-D appearance than the flat, boxy look we’ve grown accustomed to over the years. Of course, if you’ve been running Aaron (a system-extension/font combination that hangs a platinum facade on Mac OS 7.x), you’re going to wonder what all the fuss is about.

But the Mac OS 8 Finder’s new face goes several steps beyond Aaron. List views, for example, have been given a makeover designed to benefit the bifocal crowd. And you now have a new view alternative, button view. Button view presents files, folders, and applications as buttons, all of which can be activated with a single click. Formerly employed only in the Launcher, button view is now available for use in any Finder window.

Wired for the Web

A pair of icons placed on the desktop when you install OS 8 offers a hint of Apple’s efforts to integrate the Internet into its new OS. Both Claris Emailer Lite and Netscape Navigator are installed as part of Mac OS 8 and are readily accessible from the desktop. Other Internet-related software is also included on the OS 8 CD-ROM but requires manual installation.

In addition, Apple has built into Mac OS 8 the ability to share a folder on your hard disk as a Web site. Web sharing is similar to System 7′s file sharing, but in this case, the files being shared are HTML documents. Don’t plan to use OS 8 Web sharing to create a major Web presence for your company, though; this feature will be of interest primarily to those looking for a quick and easy way to share information within an office intranet.

File sharing has also gotten a face-lift (see Figure 2). If you’ve never managed to figure out how to use this handy feature of System 7 because it was just too confusing, you might want to give it a second look. The interface has been greatly simplified in Mac OS 8.

Apple has other ways of making life easier for its customers as well. New to Mac OS 8 will be two setup assistants, one for general Mac OS use and the other for getting you up to speed on the Internet (see Figure 3). Unfortunately, we can’t tell you very much about these new features: They’re still under construction–but we think first-time users will find them an especially valuable addition.

It’s Not Rhapsody, but It Rocks

Mac OS 8 promises to be one of the most exciting system-software upgrades from Apple in years. If you didn’t upgrade to Mac OS 7.6, you didn’t miss out on a whole lot. But odds are you’ll want to take the leap to Mac OS 8.

If you can, that is. There’s a bit of bad news mixed in with the good: Mac OS 8 will work only on 68040- and PowerPC-based Macs and clones. With this new release, Apple will discontinue ongoing OS support for 68030-based machines — yes, that includes even the venerable SE/30 and IIci, two of the greatest Macs of all time.

Pros: Multithreaded, PowerPC-native Finder. File- and window-management enhancements. Improved appearance. New Internet and intranet capabilities.

Cons: Retains cooperative-multitasking underpinnings of System 7.x. Won’t run on 68000-, 68020-, or 68030-based Macs.

For years, the American Red Cross‘ blood collection network was as complex as the human circulatory system.

But now, the nonprofit organization is well on its way toward streamlining its information systems operations, promising hospitals and patients the most reliable blood network possible.

“From a business standpoint and blood collection is a $1 billion business here we needed to standardize on one platform because the Red Cross operates [its blood collection] under only one license from the [Federal Drug Administration],” said Tom Woteki, chief information officer at the Red Cross.

The project will reap cost and management savings, but Woteki said the higher aim is to streamline the collection system and increase productivity.

DIFFERENT SYSTEMS

Just three years ago, the 38 different blood collection regions were operating on 28 different computer platforms, all with different procedures. That number today is down to eight and will be whittled to one by December 1998.

The Red Cross uses a second data center in Philadelphia as a disaster-recovery site for its primary Falls Church, Va., center. It uses data replication technology from EMC Corp. Three other data centers will be closed in the process.

“If we can’t recover from a disaster quickly, we could jeopardize someone waiting for a transfusion,” Woteki said.

Nearly 3,000 hospitals depend on the 6 million units of blood the Red Cross gathers and distributes annually nearly half the blood supply in the U.S.

The better tracking and tight coordination gained from the project will provide relief for patients concerned about the quality of blood supplies and the spread of disease. And soon, volunteers and hospitals could get better access to blood data.

Regions will standardize on the National Biomedical Computer System running on IBM RS/6000s. Those will be connected over a frame-relay network with Cisco Systems, Inc. routers and a Cabletron Systems, Inc. hub, with data stored on EMC Symmetrix disk arrays. So far, 14 regions have completely moved to the new system.

For a nonprofit organization, the idea of creating an entire new wide-area network, consolidating data centers and centralizing storage on high-performance and high-cost disk arrays can be daunting from a budget standpoint.

But the combination of strong management backing at the Red Cross and the potential costs savings and productivity gains from centralization made the move attractive, Wo-teki said.

For example, a central storage manager can cost half as much in total support costs as a storage manager in a distributed office, while managing seven and a half times as much data, according to research by International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass.

The move also could remove duplicate programming efforts and lower training costs across the Red Cross’ 15,000-strong blood collection organization.

And disaster recovery will be better organized than when each region was left to its own devices. The old practice could limit the chances for different regions with supplies of rare blood to get them to disaster locations quickly.

Now, the Red Cross is testing an optional tool on EMC’s disk arrays, called Symmetrix Remote Data Facility, which moves data to remote Symmetrix arrays in Philadelphia at data-channel speeds.

“This pushes the replication down to the hardware level, so we solve a problem that before we were trying to solve with software,” Woteki noted.

Although the Mac OS license is much more expensive than Microsoft’s Windows 95 license (two to four times as much, according to sources), IBM Microelectronics and Motorola Semiconductor have kept the prices of PowerPC CPUs sig- nificantly below those of Pentiums. According to several Mac makers, this means the overall cost is roughly a wash, even when you factor in the extra circuitry required on Macs for SCSI (an option on most PCs) and ADB.

Adding PC Technologies Motorola Computer Group and Umax Computer provided Macworld with two prototype CHRP motherboards that show the technologies in place–and the flexibility offered by an open architecture. Both companies’ prototypes have extended traditional Mac features with PC capabilities, as seen in the sidebar “Up Close: What Two Open Mac Designs Offer.”

For example, the Motorola system includes a parallel port that accommodates standard PC printers, while the Umax system has an ISA slot that lets you use a standard internal PC modem rather than a box hanging off the back of your Macintosh. Note that these are prototype systems, and what the companies actually ship to customers may differ.

The ROM Bottleneck Although CHRP systems are almost here, the effort is not over. In the longer term, Apple faces an unknown amount of work and time to make a Mac OS that removes all vestiges of the Mac ROM.

The ROM contains part of the Mac OS, and the various Mac models’ ROMs have always been written with specific hardware configurations in mind. That’s why OS up-dates are sometimes required to make the Mac OS run on new systems. (For example, a hardware dependency in the ROMs used in the Power Mac 7300, 8600, and 9600 this winter caused them not to run Mac OS 7.6, forcing Apple to develop Mac OS 7.6.1 after the new Power Macs were shipping.

Such dependencies could also cause a nightmare for CHRP designers and Apple OS engineers, since a CHRP system using components that the OS doesn’t know about could require an OS patch, just as happens in Apple’s proprietary Mac designs. But with CHRP, which is open to a variety of components–more than Apple uses now–the potential for incompatibilities is much greater.

This means that Mac makers will at first rely on tried-and-true components, and will need to introduce new components slowly so they have time to create patches that allow compatibility.

Even so, expect some compatibility issues to surface initially. For example, because of a flaw in the design of common IDE controller circuits, the first CHRP-enabled Mac OS (version 8.0, due out in late July), won’t support IDE drives. Mac makers say there are several other minor compatibility issues with various components in Mac OS 8. Because of these issues, Apple will release a Mac OS 8 update–varyingly called Mac OS 8 1.1 and CHRP OS 1.1–that will work around the IDE controllers’ flaw and fix the other compatibility issues. That update should be available in late August or September, and most Mac makers will delay their systems until it is available.

Jon Rubinstein, chief systems hardware engineer at Apple, says he’s not sure how long it will take to wean the Mac OS completely from hardware dependen- cies. Eighteen months was an off-the-top-of-the-head guess, he said.

Apple needs to create a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) that separates the hardware components from the operating system, eliminating the need for hardware-specific code in the OS. The HAL sits as an intermediary between the OS and the motherboard; the motherboard communicates with the HAL via software drivers that translate the peculiar needs of hardware components into standard descriptions for the OS. Rubinstein says Apple is taking a HAL approach for its Rhapsody OS.

Apple has completed the work to eliminate the ROM chip, but the “ROM in RAM” solution that should be available with Mac OS 8 1.1 merely moves the ROM into software. Still, ROM in RAM helps Mac makers in two ways:

*They don’t need to worry about availability of a physical part. The need for a physical ROM chip can slow down Mac makers’ ability to deliver CHRP systems when there are supply hiccups.

*They can reduce the number of patches in the Mac OS, since they can replace a problem in the ROM rather than load a patch. (With physical ROMs, the OS can’t remove bad code, so it has to load a patch from the Extensions folder.)

But until the need for a ROM is completely removed, Mac makers still have to be careful when they adopt new or modified components.

Conflicted Apple

Sources at several companies tell Macworld that some of the delay in CHRP is due to political issues–that Apple is concerned about releasing a floodgate of CHRP systems that could further erode sales of its profitable Macs. Apple denies this, refusing to discuss specifics.

With the ROM moved to RAM, Apple cannot control how many systems a Mac maker has by rationing the ROM chips. Within Apple, a faction was opposed to losing this control, according to sources, especially now when Apple has been late in shipping its profitable systems, such as the 8600/200, and has seen Mac licensees aggressively target the high-end market. However, the licensees also have helped keep the overall Mac market share from dropping precipitously even as Apple struggles with supply problems.

Another bone of contention has been licensing terms for Mac OS 8 (which includes CHRP systems). For several months, Mac licensees voiced frustration over what appeared to be delays in licensing Mac OS 8 and attempts by Apple to impose a certification process on CHRP-based systems that would give Apple some control over engineering choices (see “Apple Pins Hopes on Gossamer,” News, August 1997, and “Apple’s Clone Support in Question,” News, June 1997).

And Apple has resisted efforts to add notebook support to the CHRP specifica- tion as it has sought to prevent competing Mac notebooks. (Apple has also refused to license the Mac OS components required for notebooks.)

Mac makers have been a bit skittish about CHRP for the last several months since Apple officials said that the company will not entirely adopt CHRP itself. This raised fears that CHRP is a Trojan horse strategy that will make Mac OS support for CHRP a low priority, while forcing licensees to use only those technologies Apple has endorsed through its certification authority. Licensees fear that if these endorsed technologies are inferior to what Apple uses in its own systems, CHRP could become a vehicle for holding licenses back.

At press time, Apple seemed to have taken a more moderate stance, and the licensees were cautiously optimistic that an acceptable solution to all these issues would be in place by the time you read this. (See “Possible Hope in Licensing Fracas,” elsewhere in this section. To follow this ongoing story, see Macworld Daily at www.macworld.com/daily/.)

A Rocky Road CHRP has not had a smooth ride from concept to completion. It even had a rocky birth: Apple, IBM, and Motorola hammered out the CHRP specification–which was also known briefly as the PowerPC Platform (PPCP)–in spring 1995, about six months after the companies joined forces to create an industry-standard architecture around the PowerPC in November 1994. Until that decision, IBM had been promoting its PowerPC Reference Platform (PReP), which did not support Mac-specific technology.

Even once the CHRP specification was finalized in 1995, CHRP was delayed. Apple was supposed to have a version of the Mac OS that ran on the CHRP architecture in July 1996, but that was delayed along with the abortive Copland OS. Skirmishing over the CHRP specification helped slow down progress. Apple’s CHRP OS was also delayed this year.

Mac OS 7.6 for CHRP was completed this spring, but Apple decided not to release it because Mac OS 8 was imminent.

Although there’s still a chance for further delays, it appears that with the release of Mac OS 8 1.1 late this summer, Mac makers will be able to deliver on the promise of CHRP, taking the technology from their labs to your desk.