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Which was not always the case, up until Mac OS 9 there was no Unix. They delivered with Mac OS X. That’s not cheating, it’s pointing out that Microsoft failed i
by Longhanks 6y ago
Which was not always the case, up until Mac OS 9 there was no Unix. They delivered with Mac OS X. That’s not cheating, it’s pointing out that Microsoft failed in this regard.
- rbanffy 6y agoMacOS X is not a new version of MacOS 9 - it's renamed OPENSTEP with a MacOS X theme and some parts replaced. It's also very different from most Unixes in that it has a Mach microkernel with a BSD coat of paint. It almost has more in common with NT than it has with Linux. Before that, MacOS had (AFAIK - never seen it myself) the MPW environment that had a Unix-like shell. And A/UX.
- gpanders 6y agoIt is POSIX compatible, though, and IMO that is what is actually important for most people/use cases.
- rbanffy 6y agoTrue, but I wouldn't call it cheating except for having renamed it MacOS. It is officially a Unix.
- hapless 6y agoI don't think it's accurate to call it a "BSD coat of paint." Practically an entire BSD kernel is run as a single "server" in Mach. In Apple's open source release, a majority of the XNU kernel code lies in the "bsd" subdirectory -- Apple's heavily patched 4.3BSD / 4.4BSD / FreeBSD hybrid. Originally the idea was that having most of a BSD kernel running inside Mach would make it easy for researchers to run tools on their research kernel. One suspects NeXT had a simpler motive: They just wanted to avoid paying money to AT&T. I'm not sure they had any particular interest in Mach itself. (Although obviously Mach's strange multi-architecture binary format paid off for them big time, some years later!)
- rbanffy 6y agoFair enough. It's a load-bearing, rad-shielding, armored, and money-saving coat of paint ;-)