The story of why A/UX existed is simple but also strangely sad, IMHO ( Read more... )

(Adapted from a Quora answer.)

OS/2 1.x was a clean-sweep, largely legacy-free OS with only limited backwards compatibility with DOS.

OS/2 2.x and later used VMs to do the hard stuff of DOS emulation, because they ran on a chip with hardware-assisted DOS VMs: the 80386’s Virtual86 mode.

NeXTstep was a Unix. It predated FreeBSD, but it was based off ( Read more... )

I recently read that a friend of mine claimed that "Both the iPhone and iPod were copied from other manufacturers, to a large extent."

This is a risible claim, AFAICS.

There were pocket MP3 jukeboxes before the iPod. I still own one. They were fairly tragic efforts.

There were smartphones before the iPhone. I still have at least one of them, too ( Read more... )