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Old 01-12-2005, 08:29 PM   #59
AKcrab
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Re: Re: You know Steve ...

Originally posted by feldon28
(Ben from Short Circuit faux Indian voice) You are not knowing your Mac history...

Apple decided NOT to acquire NextStep or the UNIX variant they developed and instead based OS X on FreeBSD.
Hmmm...
Apple then considered Windows NT, Solaris and even Pink OS. Then, Steve Jobs called Amelio, and advised him that Be was not a good fit for Apple's OS roadmap. NeXT contacted Apple to discuss possibilities of licensing OPENSTEP, which, unlike BeOS, had at least been proven in the market. Jobs pitched NeXT technology very strongly to Apple, and asserted that OPENSTEP was many years ahead of its time. All this worked out, and Apple acquired NeXT in February, 1997, for $427 million. Amelio later quipped that "We choose Plan A instead of Plan Be."

Apple named its upcoming NeXT-based system Rhapsody, while it continued to improve the existing Mac OS, often with technology that was supposed to go into Copland. Rhapsody saw two developer releases, in September, 1997, and May, 1998.

Jobs became the interim CEO of Apple on September 16, 1997.

Mac OS X was first mentioned in Apple's OS strategy announcement at the 1998 WWDC. Jobs said that OS X would ship in the fall of 1999, and would inherit from both Mac OS and Rhapsody. Moreover, backward compatibility would be maintained to ease customers into the transition.

Mac OS X did come out in 1999, as Mac OS X Server 1.0 (March 16, 1999), a developer preview of the desktop version, and as Darwin 0.1. Mac OS X beta was released on September 13, 2000.

At the time of this writing, Mac OS X has seen four major releases: 10.0 ("Cheetah", March 24, 2001), 10.1 ("Puma", September 29, 2001), 10.2 ("Jaguar", August 13, 2002), and 10.3 ("Panther", October 24, 2003).

It would be an understatement to say that OS X is derived from NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. In many respects, it's not just similar, it's the same. One can think of it as OpenStep 5 or 6, say. This is not a bad thing at all - rather than create an operating system from scratch, Apple tried to do the smart thing, and used what they already had to a great extent. However, the similarities should not mislead you: Mac OS X is evolved enough that what you can do with it is far above and beyond NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP.
http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/history.html
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