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Infinite Possibilities (2/10/98)
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Tired of waiting for Rhapsody? Bummed that BeOS won't run on your Powermac G3? Finally come to your senses and joined the rest of the world in realizing that the COS is a big fat vaporous hoax? Fear not-- there's yet another OS being grown out there, and its possibilities are limitless. And no sooner does faithful viewer Paul Howard Langley point us to the InfiniteOS home page than Wired comes out with a feature story on the "alternative" operating system for the Macintosh.
InfiniteOS is Cache Computing's project to create its own preemptively-multitasking operating system with protected memory that runs on Macs. And unlike the COS, you can download the current super-early version of InfiniteOS right now, to try it on your PCI-based Powermac. Sure, it's only a command-line interface at this point, and you can't do much with it except reboot, shut down, eject floppies, and make the system beep at you-- but hey, what do you want with a three-month-old operating system put together by three guys out of love? The development team claims that in three weeks it'll have a real graphical interface and the other niceties Mac users have come to expect. (Oh yeah, right now it can also play audio CD's, which shows that these guys know what's important in this world.)
Apple isn't too thrilled with the idea of multiple OS choices for its customers (which explains why they won't work with Be to make BeOS G3-compatible). They're already threatening legal action if the InfiniteOS uses any Apple intellectual property. But the Cache Computing staff claims it's all their own work. That's one reason that InfiniteOS will never run any existing Mac software, though the team claims that developers can port their applications to InfiniteOS in a day. And since the InfiniteOS is free, well...
"But AtAT," you ask, "Does it really work?" What, you think we actually tried this thing? What do you think we are, crazy?! (Seriously, we're far too paranoid to run this little 115K download, but if any AtAT viewers care to try it and let us know how it goes, please drop us a line.)
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SceneLink (439)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 2/10/98 episode: February 10, 1998: "Hey, what's that tiny little smudge over there on the sidewalk," asks the media? Why, it's Apple's dwindling market share! Meanwhile, a maverick trio of merry programmers plans to usurp the Mac OS with their own upstart operating system, and the Man Who Pied Bill Gates speaks about his heinous act...
Other scenes from that episode: 438: Smaller and Smaller (2/10/98) Apple's just filed its latest Securities and Exchange Commission 10-Q report, and you know what that means: here comes the latest rash of doom and gloom stories! The first one out of the gate is the continuing saga of Apple's dwindling market share, which Apple estimates to be a teensy-weensy 2.6% worldwide, according to the L... 440: The Pieman Speaks (2/10/98) Those of us who are old enough may never forget where we were when we heard that Kennedy was shot, but do you remember what you were doing when somebody told you that Bill Gates had just been hit in the face with a cream pie?...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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