[geeks] Hmmm.. food for thought...

[Andrew Weiss]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Mike Nicewonger wrote:

> >
> Maybe I am waaaay off base here but isn't OS X based on FreeBSD? If that is the
> case then the rest should be trivial right?
>
> Mike N

Waay off base.  It's based on a version of BSD that runs on Mach that was
the basis for NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP.  It was and is highly customized, and
I believe the original was BSD 4.3.  OS X Is based on BSD 4.4-Lite
according to the docs.  The BSD portion is only important for stability
and the ability to port existing software, and improve the internal
workings.  It isn't what makes OS X great by itself, nor is it a huge part
of what makes OS X great business/customerwize.

OS X doesn't use X, but rather a Display PDF Windowing environment that
was originally a Display Postscript environment in the NeXT days.  The
magic is Classic mode and Carbon which are what makes the OS viable.
Cocoa is the OPENSTEP API.  There is so much that is NOT currently
implemented in any other BSD that it would not be trivial.  All along in
development before they switched to Mach 3.0, they had an Intel Port.  It
was canned before OS X Server 1.0 shipped.  It is totally a different
system... being OPENSTEP 5.0 roughly or Rhapsody.  It was Mach 2.5 and had
no Carbon API, and no BlueBox (Classic) mode on the Intel version.
Netinfo is used for Nameservices/etc.

Andrew J. Weiss
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