Okay, I know NeXT was the baby of Steve Jobs, but what
exactly is it based
on? Is it an entirely new animal? If anyone can point me to some info, I'd
appreciate it.
68030- or 68040-based, running a variant of MACH UNIX called NeXTSTEP. At
Nonono. Mach bears a similar relationship to Unix to the one that
Linux has -- no AT&T or Berkley source code in the kernel. It was
an independent effort at what is now Posix by Carnegie-Mellon. It's
Mach, not "Mach Unix". A damned good effort at the time, actually.
Mach is a Micro Kernal. The version of Unix running on top of it is based
on BSD (version 4.3 IIRC). Instead of having X-Windows running on top of
UNIX, NeXTStep/OPENSTEP has it's own GUI that uses Display Postscript.
The original NeXT machines will run OPENSTEP 4.2, since the next version of
the OS after OPENSTEP 4.2 is Rhapsody, it's unlikely they'll be supported
by any further OS releases. You can also run the OS on Intel hardware and
at least some of the OPENSTEP environment will run on Sun's, HP's and WinNT.
Beware, if you're used to UNIX networking, you're likely to be lost trying
to set up a NeXT box. I know I was pretty much lost. Of course the great
documentation that I got with OPENSTEP 4.2 didn't help much with anything
except building a compatible system and installing.
Zane
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator |
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