“Some of you may have heard that the new Macintosh operating
system, known as Mac OS X (as in 10), is based on BSD in some way
or another. I know I have heard this many times, and I have been
curious as to exactly how related they are.”
“The Macintosh site for Mac OS X claims that it is “Built on
core-open technologies like Mach, BSD and 100 percent pure Java.”
This seems funny to me, partly because there is a black NeXT
machine sitting on the floor behind me (serving its only real
useful purpose now – that of a paper weight) which also features a
Mach kernel and a BSD environment. More importantly though, it was
also created by the genius of Steve Jobs, much like this new
innovation.”
“Only today could a company like Apple, which prides itself
on ease of use, create a new operating system based on UNIX. Yes,
UNIX has always been very network oriented, and with the success of
Linux, perhaps the world is ready for an everyday BSD system.
It really doesn’t matter who makes a BSD- or UNIX-like system easy
to use, but it will take an already successful company like Apple
to get people to buy it.”