Their OS had design constraints built into it that anchored it to the 6800 chipset; and even after they graduated to the RISC chips, it was still oldfashioned about memory management -- allocation of heap space had to be set manually by application. Most important it did not thread processes separately, so that if one app crashed, it was almost sure to take the system with it. They compensated for this with lots of other pluses, but finally they had to step up to the fact that threaded processes and protected memory spaces were pretty much mandatory for the next generation. In the course of making that upgrade they leap[ed into the forefront by also adopting all the other advantages that UNIX offers. An old Mac hand would have choked at the thought of a command line intertfqace, unless he'd learned vi and grep in one of the high powered UNIX environments and realized how powerful the UNIX model could be.

A