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An Introduction To And History of Darwin

Posted by timothy on from the evolving dept.

proclus writes "Roberto Donhert of Aqua icon theme fame (screenshot) has written a concise review of Darwin OS. The article covers the origin and evolution of Darwin OS, as well as the various Darwin distributions that are available for PowerPC and x86 architectures. OSnews has the story. The only thing that I would add is the contributions of Torrey Lyons of XonX, who created the XDarwin Xserver that made so much of this possible. BTW, Roberto also has a commentary about the SCO situation running at OSnews."

1 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Ugh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    Um......here are the mistakes just on the first page (not including the odd description of microkernel modules):
    The differences between a Microkernel ... and a Monolithic Kernel ... is that a Monolithic Kernel is a large chunk of code, where a Microkernel consists of small message passing cores or Modules, with several different Daemons...
    The difference between a microkernel and a monolithic kernel is that a microkernel has offloaded most system services to outside the protected boundary.
    The Open Step Develpment Environment ...
    History, Mach, BSD, OpenSTEP ...
    It's ONE word. Capitalized as "OpenStep" or as "OPENSTEP", the former being the standard (the latter being NeXT's later marketspeak).
    [OpenStep] is a true object oriented programming environment developed by Avie Tevanian and others at CMU.
    Avie Tevanian worked on Mach at CMU. It is an operating system kernel. OpenStep was developed much later by developers at NeXT. Had nothing to do with CMU. It is a development library built on top of Objective-C and Display PostScript, and ran on top of several operating systems (Solaris, NT, Mach/BSD). I do not think that Avie worked on OpenStep significantly while he was a NeXT, but I'm not sure.