I quit

[Scott Bennett]

     On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 19:01:26 -0600 David Kelly <dkelly at HiWAAY.net>
wrote:
>On Jan 9, 2005, at 6:17 PM, Scott Bennett wrote:
>
>>      On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 08:54:55 -0600 Andrew L. Gould 
>> <algould at datawok.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Mac OSX is based upon FreeBSD and may have native versions of the
>>
>>      Mac OSX was--and unless something has changed drastically in the 
>> last
>> few weeks, still is--based upon NextStep, another proprietary UNIX 
>> that was
>> based upon a Mach 2.4-2.5 kernel and 4.3BSD above that.
>
>Thats a Linux fallacy, that the kernel makes the OS. Apple's collection 

     Fine.  So what?  I didn't make that claim.  The 4.3BSD team implicitly
did, though.  (See the kernel's program logic manual, _The_Design_and
_Implementation_of_the_4.3BSD_UNIX_Operating_System_.)

>of command line utilities we commonly think of as the Unix interface 
>come from FreeBSD. As for what I've seen of the Darwin kernel, in grand 

     That may be true.  I don't really know because I haven't looked at
Darwin source.  However, essentially everything in NextStep above the
kernel that was not part of the OOPS was taken directly from 4.3BSD.
Perhaps Apple has since replaced all that software with the FreeBSD version.
But even so, much of FreeBSD came directly from 4.[34]BSD anyway.  I've
glanced at a few of the header files in Mac OSX libraries, and they are
still chock full of labels beginning with "NS" or "NX". :-)

>BSD tradition Apple freely picked from here and there, whatever they 
>thought best, and made what can only be said to be their own.

     Keep in mind that Mach 2.x *was* a heavily modified 4.3BSD kernel.
Mach 3.x and later is not.
>
>>> applications you need.  I talked my 11 year old nephew through an
>>> operating system upgrade (clean installation) of his ibook over the
>>> phone -- including wireless networking with WEP.
>>>
>>      Unfortunately, Apple has not released a version for Intel 
>> processors,
>> so it won't help someone with a pee cee instead of a Mac.
>
>Wrong, its called Darwin. If you think FreeBSD is raw then go play with 
>Darwin for a bit. Darwin is used for both i386 and PowerPC. MacOS X is 
>Darwin plus the fantastic Apple GUI and other neat Apple stuff.
>
     I see.  So is it just the GUI that's missing in Darwin?  Or is the
entire OOPS missing?  I guess it's nice to know that the underlying system
is available for the pee cee architecture, but it couldn't be nearly as fun
without the OOPS. :-)


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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* Internet:       bennett at cs.niu.edu                              *
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