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How Mac OS X, 10 Today, Changed Apple's World
CWmike writes "Ten years ago today, Apple's first full public version of Mac OS X went on sale worldwide to a gleeful reception as thousands of Mac users attended special events at their local computer shops all across the planet. What we didn't know then was that Apple was preparing to open up its own chain of retail outlets, nor had we heard Steve Jobs use the phrase, 'iPod.' Windows was still a competitor, and Google was still a search engine. These were halcyon days, when being a Mac user meant belonging to the second team, writes Jonny Evans. We're looking at the eighth significant OS X release in the next few months, Lion, which should offer some elements of unification between the iOS and OS X. There's still some bugs to iron out though, particularly the problem with ACL's (Access Control Lists) inside the Finder. Hopefully departing ex-NeXT Mac OS chief, Bertrand Serlet, will be able to fix this before he leaves."
Seriously, you think the use of some BSD code is what made the difference?
You do understand that their kernel, Darwin, uses XNU at its core, which is largely composed of the Mach Microkernel and BSD. Leveraging these mature projects spared Apple (NeXT, at the time) from having to design, develop, and debug a kernel from scratch.
Yes, this is a hell of a leg-up.
The relevant visible parts of MacOS are pretty anti-unix actually.
Erm, no, Mac OS X is quite definitely 100% certified Unix. This has nothing to do with the "visible parts" (you mean the GUI I assume), this is all about the underlying kernel and other subsystems of the OS, as well as some of the userland tools.
Sapere aude!