Microsoft-Paul Allen

Guy Sotomayor Jr ggs at shiresoft.com
Mon Oct 22 16:59:29 CDT 2018


Some corrections related to Mach and Apple.

TTFN - Guy

> On Oct 22, 2018, at 2:40 PM, Jim Manley via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> BTW, MacOS X is based on Mach, the version of Unix that was designed for
> multiple, closely-coupled processors, and it, too, uses X as a basis for
> its GUI.  

No.  Mach is a microkernel based system that split apart BSD into “kernel”
portions and Unix portions.  It really didn’t have anything to do with SMP as
the premise behind Mach (which was a furthering of Accent) was message
passing between tasks.  I can dig up the original papers if anyone is interested.  ;-)

OS X does *not* use X as the basis of its GUI.  It stems from NEXT which
used display postscript (modern OS X uses display PDF).  An (optional)
X server (and clients) can be added to the OS (I use them all the time) but
is not part of the base install which belies the comment of X as the basis of
the GUI.

BTW, the X server on OS X, interfaces not to the bit-map but instead to the
native OS X display rendering framework.

TTFN - Guy


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