The final 'Garage' sale...

On Thu, 29 May 2003, TeoZ wrote: Nah. OS X's lineage comes /directly/ from NeXT's NEXTSTEP, which is about 14 years old at this point. After NeXT got out of the hardware business, NEXTSTEP begat OPENSTEP. Then Apple bought NeXT and used their OS to create OS X. The underpinnings of OS X are blantantly taken from NeXT's work (and I'm the happiest guy in the computing world for it.) One trivial example... nextstep% file /bin/ls /bin/ls: Mach-O executable (for architecture m68k) os-x% file /bin/ls /bin/ls: Mach-O executable ppc They even share some of the same gags, like this one hidden in the magic number they chose for Mach-O binaries: nextstep% od -h /bin/ls | head -1 0000000 feed face 0000 0006 0000 0001 0000 0002 os-x% od -h /bin/ls | head -1 0000000 feed face 0000 0012 0000 0000 0000 0002 Even silly things under OS X like the spinning cursor wheel (which they revamped in 10.2) and the system beep sounds are leftover from NEXTSTEP. Then there's Cocoa, all the interface and project development tools, netinfo, and Mach, and... The MacOS environment provided by OS X is, for all practical purposes, a throw-away solution meant to wean people off MacOS. Obviously Apple had to provide this; had they not, they'd have panicked a lot of their customers. But it's something that looks and feels like it's awkwardly bolted onto the otherwise smooth and well integrated OS X. NeXT really were more than a decade ahead of everyone else with their systems. It's a shame it took so long for their vision to become both accessible and acceptable to the masses. -brian.