Upside.com: Is Mac OS X half-baked?

“It is perhaps not surprising then, that OS X is more than a
little retro: Jobs and Co. layered an admittedly new polish on top
of a late 1980s NeXT interface, which is built on the early ’80s
Mach microkernel, itself steeped heavily in early 1970s Berkeley
Unix. In other words, OS X’s ballyhooed Unix underpinning dates
back more than three decades.”

“As MIT Web ninja Philip Greenspun put it in his 1999 book
“Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing”: “Imagine if the
president of General Motors said, in 1997, ‘It has come to my
attention that our cars are kind of clunky and unreliable. Don’t
worry, though. We’re rectifying this problem by licensing the
blueprints to the 1985 Toyota Camry.'” (See Exhibit B,
“Envisioning a Site That Won’t Be Featured In suck.com.”)”

“To be fair, it is clear that Unix could bring the Macintosh
some much-needed stability, and that its chief operating system
competitor, Microsoft, could use some Unix in its clunky consumer
operating systems, like Windows ME and Windows 98.”

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