Comment by mattl
10 months ago
macOS was originally based on OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP was based on NeXTSTEP which was based on 4.3 and later 4.4.
BSD stuff has a complicated history due to the lawsuits in the 1990s.
NetBSD and FreeBSD were based on 386BSD. OpenBSD was a fork of NetBSD by one of the NetBSD founders (Theo deRaadt)...
It’s not even as clear cut as that because there’s FreeBSD and NetBSD code in XNU too.
Also OpenStep is an API rather than an OS. So macOS contains both NextStep and OpenStep code.
I'm pretty sure I've even read about FreeBSD code in the Windows networking stack. Is Windows now based on BSD? Open source code, especially when it's permissively licensed, ends up absolutely everywhere.
Windows is very much based on NT, which has its influences from a few different OS, most notably being VMS.
AFAIK there isn’t any BSD code in Windows however the original TCP/IP stack in Windows was a port from BSD. But we are talking about the early 90s here and it’s long since been rewritten by Microsoft (or so they say, but I have no reason to disbelieve Microsoft)
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OPENSTEP is the OS, OpenStep is the framework.
After NeXTSTEP 3.3 there was OPENSTEP 4.0.
OPENSTEP 4.2 is the last operating system release prior to Rhapsody.
Yes it’s confusing.
True. The capitalisation rules for releases kills me every time too. Not just with OpenStep but with Next too. I now don’t even bother trying to get the capitalisation correct.
Considering how obsessed with UX that Jobs was, I don’t get how he thought the naming conventions were a good idea.
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