“At its World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), Apple
announced that Mac OS X – its upgrade for OS 9 – won’t ship until
after the first of next year, slightly later than originally
planned. The company distributed a Developer Preview 4 CD during
the conference with the latest version of the OS, and also plans to
make a public beta available this summer, which will definitely
take the sting out of the delay for Mac users. More important than
the release date, however, is the method of distribution: OS X will
be the first UNIX-based operating system available to be pre-loaded
on Macs since the Network Servers.”
“OS X is the first major departure for Apple since the Apple
II. It is as radical a break from OS 9 as the Mac Finder was from
the C prompt. It still has a Desktop and a Finder, but the
names are about the only similarity with their namesakes. Though
the eye-candy of the Aqua interface may be more appealing than fvwm
or gnome to some, the most interesting features of OS X are found
beyond the interface.”
“At the core of OS X is Darwin, a modern operating system based
on Mach 3.0 and 4.4 BSD. The Mach kernel manages processor
resources for the system and brings protected memory and preemptive
multitasking to the Macintosh. The customized version of the BSD
operating system that ships with Darwin includes many of the POSIX
APIs. It is the basis for the multiple integrated file system and
networking facilities. It supports HFS, HFS+, UFS, UDF, and ISO
9660. It also supports NFS and the Apple File Protocol used for
file sharing on the Mac. Apple’s addition of Network Kernel
Extensions provides a way to create networking modules and protocol
stacks and to dynamically load and unload them from the kernel. The
BSD operating system also provides all of the standard services and
utilities that users expect from UNIX.”