Interview with Hansen Hsu, engineer at Apple during transition from OS 9 to OS X

Something I learned from interaction with apple engineers at IETF is a weird big&#x2F;little thing.<p>Big: they can&#x27;t speak to some things without legal review because FAANG have IPR. This causes a lot of friction. You may simply never know really why apple dropped ZFS. You can ask over beers. Sometimes hints is as good as it gets.<p>Little: there might be a team of 4 people on tcp&#x2F;ip and only 2 of them have something like &quot;commit&quot; rights. You sort of expect its 20 phd and a bank vault of gold, and it&#x27;s two guys. Smart guys, good guys, but if they both come to IETF then you know the tcp&#x2F;ip buglist isn&#x27;t moving and there&#x27;s a &quot;fall under a bus&quot; risk, England 1966 football squad on one airplane risk..<p>Apple invents stuff which surfaces later. Appletalk over twisted pair had device discovery almost perfect. Printers shouted &quot;I&#x27;m here&quot; and everyone heard. It&#x27;s taken years to get zeroconf and auto discovery out into the world of gigabit networks.<p>Apple does things other people don&#x27;t do. They did some stuff in parallel path fetching, using mobile and WiFi to maintain the upper layer fetch in agile ways which was beautiful. The spec was there.<p>I kinda still hate OS9 and like OSX because UNIX but I also have gears grinding on the apple filestore and resource&#x2F;data fork mapping into Unix .dotfiles which seeds were laid in the old OS world.

I&#x27;m the host. AMA.<p>Hansen&#x27;s research into developer cultures is super interesting.<p>Here is a story of his time at Apple I can identify with:<p><pre><code> It’s like being a cast member at Disneyland, right? If you actually see the back lot of Disneyland, the magic is pulled away, right? It’s not the same, right? You don’t always want to know how the sausage is made. Being smack in the middle like OS 9 at a time when the winds were clearly shifting in OS X’s direction, it was like, the politics of the higher ups, it was definitely being felt. I was looking on the file system team and three months in, they said, “Okay, well, we’re not doing any new features in the file system. We’re going to reassign you to help them work on the multiprocessing API’s with this other guy” I was doing some unit testing for that for like a couple of months. Then, it was announced, “Oh, we’re not doing any new features for that either.” Okay, so then now what I’m going to do? Then, my boss assigned me to write this app showing these two bars for the dual processors. That didn’t go anywhere. He kept telling me, “No. Keep working on it. This is not busy work. This is not busy work.” It turned out to be busy work. </code></pre> ---<p>Edit: bedtime, but will check-in and answer questions in the morning if anyone has any. (Feedback and Guest suggestions welcome)

Thank you so much for posting a transcript.<p>I ignore so many podcasts with clearly brilliant, interesting, valuable content in them because I just can&#x27;t tolerate the tedium of having to listen to audio.

I&#x27;m kinda curious what the direction they intended to go in to add more modern operating system features to OS 9.<p>Is there a paper design for a preemptive multitasking OS 9 that someone thought about?

I always like the covers of Big Nerd Ranch books. I can’t quite describe it but there’s something very aesthetically pleasing about them which stood out from all the other tech books at the time. It almost made me want to become an iOS developer because it was so cool.