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Sun and Apple Could Have Merged
Firmafest writes "The Register is running a story about Sun and Apple almost merging on three separate occasions. The information was revealed at a Computer History Museum event, where Sun's four co-founders spoke about the history of the Sun company. Bill Joy said that the two comp anies almost teamed on three different projects, including sharing a user interface and the SPARC architecture." From the article: "'As far as I know we also almost bought Apple once,' Joy said. 'We almost merged with Apple two other times.' Many Silicon Valley observers have long seen links between Sun and Apple. Both companies make slick, pricey hardware and are counter-punchers in their respective markets. They also have charismatic CEO figures and strong anti-Microsoft streaks"
I'll say it one more time, and make sure you pay attention:
Dollar for dollar, Apple hardware is a bargain. It's not "pricey"... calling something pricey implies it costs more than it's worth. Apple hardware is worth every penny, and I'd say you'd have a really difficult time building comparable equipment for significantly less cost. And when I say comparable, I mean comparable. For example, you can't compare XServe RAID to the cheapass RAID card and 10 drives you coddled together from crap you bought at ComputersRNeat.com.
Low End Mac has more information about the Apple/Sun dealings here (yes, I'm well aware that this article was featured on /. a few weeks back) and here.
way back when Sun's market cap (now about 11 B) was bigger than Apple's (now about 72B), just two years ago the market caps were about the same
Lets get something correct, MacOS X is NOT Open Source. Never has been, never will be. Yes, Darwin may be, but MacOS X is not totally Darwin.
Not to mention Apple DID NOT invent WebObjects, they BOUGHT WebObjects.
You mean like this?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
While computer power and storage can be seen to double every 18 months, the same cannot be said for RF spectrum. There are hard limits to how much data can be packed into a given wireless network. Using the cellular network as a personalized radio station with iPod-level audio fidelity is more than a few years off. Voice calls only need ~8kbps, and carriers already have capacity problems.
Yes, the Unix part of OS X is open source, which is what the GP was saying:
http://www.opendarwin.org/
And it's been running on x86 for quite some time.
It's GUI is not.
But I can see your confusion.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Not to mention Apple DID NOT invent WebObjects, they BOUGHT WebObjects.
They invented WO in the same way they got their OS. They bought NeXT.
OpenStep [wikipedia.org] was the result of a collaboration of NeXT and Sun to create an object oriented API based on NeXTSTEP. It ran on NeXTs Mach/BSD OS and Solaris. After the NeXT takeover by Apple in 1996 OpenStep became what today is known as MacOS X, still running on Mach/BSD.
It is worth noting that OpenStep also ran on windows. In the Apple era, this was briefly known as "Yellow Box".
OS X certainly "uses" a microkernel, Mach, but it's not used as a microkernel.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353