Comment by mrjin
4 years ago
MacOS was really just FreeBSD with a fancier UI. Not sure what is the behavior now, but I'm pretty sure FreeBSD behaved almost exactly the same as a power loss rendered my system unbootable over 10 years ago.
4 years ago
MacOS was really just FreeBSD with a fancier UI. Not sure what is the behavior now, but I'm pretty sure FreeBSD behaved almost exactly the same as a power loss rendered my system unbootable over 10 years ago.
>MacOS was really just FreeBSD with a fancier UI.
I'm sorry but this is incorrect. NeXTSTEP was the primary foundation for Mac OS X, and the XNU kernel was derived from Mach and IIRC 4.4BSD. FreeBSD source was certainly an important sync jumping off point for a number of Unix components of the kernel and CLI userland, there was some code sharing going on for a while (still?), but large components of the kernel and core frameworks were unique (for better or worse).
> and IIRC 4.4BSD
4.3, only Rhapsody incorporated elements from 4.4, but that was the tail end of nextstep, essentially the initial preview of macos (it was released as osx server 1.0, then forked to darwin from which the actual OSX 10.0 would be built, two major pieces missing from rhapody were Classic and Carbon, so it really was nextstep with an OS9 skin).
Thanks for the correction, man has it been a long, long time. I had the Public Beta and than got on the OS X train pretty fast on a good old B&W G3. Even with the slowness the multitasking still allowed getting around it and having all Unix right there with a big rush to initial porting was really interesting, good times. I remember calling Apple for help getting Apache compiled and got forwarded right out of the regular call system to some dev whose name I sadly forget and we worked through it.
Everything is a million times more refined and overall better now but I do have a bit of nostalgia for the community and really getting your hands dirty back then while still having a fairly decent fallback. I haven't actually needed to mess with kernel stuff since 10.5 or so but thinking back makes me wonder about paths not taken.
> so it [Rhapsody] really was nextstep with an OS9 skin
Sorry to be pedantic, but Rhapsody's user interface is modeled after the Mac OS 8 "Platinum" design language. Though 9 also was modeled on Platinum, Rhapsody's interface appears nearly identical to Mac OS 8's except for the Workspace Manager which doesn't exist in 8.
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There was an article talking abut histories of Mac OS X and BSDs.
It has been over a decade, so I'm really not sure how much is left ATM.