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MacOS from versions 1 to 9 were very different to Mac OSX. If you want to stretch the truth and say OSX has a lineage going back to the 70s, Windows 10 also ha

MacOS from versions 1 to 9 were very different to Mac OSX. If you want to stretch the truth and say OSX has a lineage going back to the 70s, Windows 10 also has a lineage going back to the 70s: http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-re...

new299 9y ago
In regard to "1970s code lineage" I think the parent is referring to the fact that the original XNU codebase incorporated parts of the BSD kernel, which was released in the 70s. The same can be said of the code lineage of FreeBSD and I guess some other UNIXs I think. Windows NT on the other hand, while having similarities to VMS I don't believe at any point shared actual code.
lobster_johnson 9y ago
Well, he did say OS X (today named macOS), which is built on top of Darwin. Darwin itself is a combination of two things: XNU and BSD. The BSD parts originally came from 4.3BSD, and were later upgraded with code from FreeBSD, with many userland tools from NetBSD. So by that token, the macOS lineage goes back to 1977, the year BSD was first released. FreeBSD is based on the original BSD distribution. While FreeBSD got rid of all the AT&T code, you could also make a good case that since it derives from AT&T UNIX, its lineage goes all the way back to 1973. XNU is not that old; it was developed at NeXT in the 1990s, and is based around Mach, a kernel first released in 1985.
simonh 9y ago
Stretching the truth is pretending modern OSX/MacOS has any significant legacy in the old Mac OS 1-9. It doesn't. Youre talking about the lineage of the brand, while I'm talking about the lineage of the source code. As I explained in my post it's a reskin of NextSTEP. That's why all the Objective C libraries are called NSTextField and such - NS stands for NextSTEP. In fact it's why OSX is largely written in ObjectiveC at all as that was the NS development language. The legacy Mac OS compatibility layer was a user level subsystem that was dumped years ago.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "As I explained in my post it's a reskin of NextSTEP." I'm aware of that. My gripe was with painting OSX as something with heritage stretching back to the 70s whilst suggesting that Microsoft's OSes have a far shallower legacy. If you acknowledge an old version of BSD as the forefather of OSX, I'd expect similar treatment for the forefathers of Windows.

new299 9y ago

In regard to "1970s code lineage" I think the parent is referring to the fact that the original XNU codebase incorporated parts of the BSD kernel, which was released in the 70s. The same can be said of the code lineage of FreeBSD and I guess some other UNIXs I think. Windows NT on the other hand, while having similarities to VMS I don't believe at any point shared actual code.

lobster_johnson 9y ago

Well, he did say OS X (today named macOS), which is built on top of Darwin. Darwin itself is a combination of two things: XNU and BSD. The BSD parts originally came from 4.3BSD, and were later upgraded with code from FreeBSD, with many userland tools from NetBSD. So by that token, the macOS lineage goes back to 1977, the year BSD was first released. FreeBSD is based on the original BSD distribution. While FreeBSD got rid of all the AT&T code, you could also make a good case that since it derives from AT&T UNIX, its lineage goes all the way back to 1973. XNU is not that old; it was developed at NeXT in the 1990s, and is based around Mach, a kernel first released in 1985.

simonh 9y ago

Stretching the truth is pretending modern OSX/MacOS has any significant legacy in the old Mac OS 1-9. It doesn't. Youre talking about the lineage of the brand, while I'm talking about the lineage of the source code. As I explained in my post it's a reskin of NextSTEP. That's why all the Objective C libraries are called NSTextField and such - NS stands for NextSTEP. In fact it's why OSX is largely written in ObjectiveC at all as that was the NS development language. The legacy Mac OS compatibility layer was a user level subsystem that was dumped years ago.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "As I explained in my post it's a reskin of NextSTEP." I'm aware of that. My gripe was with painting OSX as something with heritage stretching back to the 70s whilst suggesting that Microsoft's OSes have a far shallower legacy. If you acknowledge an old version of BSD as the forefather of OSX, I'd expect similar treatment for the forefathers of Windows.