Let me frame my comments with a quote from a little jewel of a book titled _The_unix_philosophy_ by Mike Gancarz (ISBN1-55558-123-4). To indicate when it was written, it's copyright 1995.
In the intro Gancarz writes:
While the commercial world was busy building barriers to UNIX, the academic world was welcoming UNIX with open arms. A generation of young people raised in houses with color TV's, microwaves ovens, and video games was entering universities that had obtained UNIX for the cost of the magnetic media on which it was distributed....
Today UNIX is rapidly gaining acceptance in situations where it once would have been considered unthinkable....
I have been telling people for years that it is only a matter of time before UNIX is the world's operating system.
So here's 3 reasons why you care about MacOS X:
First, MacOS X is the last big step in the NeXT stealth takeover of Apple. As you already know NeXT was BSD with a snazy GUI and a still killer development environment.
Second, the marketing machine inside Apple will bring commercial, shrink-wrap applications to BSD as no company has before. Think about the GUI example. Apple didn't invent the GUI, but they popularized it. Same thing with LaserPrinters and desktop publishing. Same thing with USB. (USB was a nice standard, but there weren't many products out there until Apple marketed USB with their iMac media blitz. Now USB is everywhere. If Apple is good at anything it's popularizing technologies.
Third, and most importantly, with MacOS X, Apple will be spreading unix into the hands of another generation of open, and curious minds. Those parents who know squat about anything more complex than a word processor will buy those safe, comfortable, good-brand-name, candy-colored boxes. Heck, they might even be easy enough for the parents to use. But when those kids start digging into the innards they'll find unix.
"MacOS X is vaporware," you say. Not so. MacOS X Server is already out. MacOS X will be out soon enough. Even if it's not out this Spring as promised, even if it's not out until next Fall, it'll still be out. And it'll still have a unix foundation which will probably be preferable to Win2K. And the GUI will be easy to use.
While I have faith that KDE and GNOME may well produce a better GUI in the long run, I'll bet Apple will beat 'em to market.
As Mike Gancarz said "it's only a matter of time before UNIX is the world's operating system." In a few years you'll either be running a Microsoft product or some flavor of unix be it Linux, *BSD, Darwin, MacOS X, Solaris or some other (and maybe BeOS 8^).
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Let me frame my comments with a quote from a little jewel of a book titled _The_unix_philosophy_ by Mike Gancarz (ISBN1-55558-123-4). To indicate when it was written, it's copyright 1995.
In the intro Gancarz writes:
While the commercial world was busy building barriers to UNIX, the academic world was welcoming UNIX with open arms. A generation of young people raised in houses with color TV's, microwaves ovens, and video games was entering universities that had obtained UNIX for the cost of the magnetic media on which it was distributed....
Today UNIX is rapidly gaining acceptance in situations where it once would have been considered unthinkable....
I have been telling people for years that it is only a matter of time before UNIX is the world's operating system.
So here's 3 reasons why you care about MacOS X:
First, MacOS X is the last big step in the NeXT stealth takeover of Apple. As you already know NeXT was BSD with a snazy GUI and a still killer development environment.
Second, the marketing machine inside Apple will bring commercial, shrink-wrap applications to BSD as no company has before. Think about the GUI example. Apple didn't invent the GUI, but they popularized it. Same thing with LaserPrinters and desktop publishing. Same thing with USB. (USB was a nice standard, but there weren't many products out there until Apple marketed USB with their iMac media blitz. Now USB is everywhere. If Apple is good at anything it's popularizing technologies.
Third, and most importantly, with MacOS X, Apple will be spreading unix into the hands of another generation of open, and curious minds. Those parents who know squat about anything more complex than a word processor will buy those safe, comfortable, good-brand-name, candy-colored boxes. Heck, they might even be easy enough for the parents to use. But when those kids start digging into the innards they'll find unix.
"MacOS X is vaporware," you say. Not so. MacOS X Server is already out. MacOS X will be out soon enough. Even if it's not out this Spring as promised, even if it's not out until next Fall, it'll still be out. And it'll still have a unix foundation which will probably be preferable to Win2K. And the GUI will be easy to use.
While I have faith that KDE and GNOME may well produce a better GUI in the long run, I'll bet Apple will beat 'em to market.
As Mike Gancarz said "it's only a matter of time before UNIX is the world's operating system." In a few years you'll either be running a Microsoft product or some flavor of unix be it Linux, *BSD, Darwin, MacOS X, Solaris or some other (and maybe BeOS 8^).