1 Welcome to Mac OS X

In This Chapter

The Heritage of Mac OS X: UNIX

The Open Source Connection

The Mach Kernel

The GNU Project

The BSD UNIX System

Darwin

Standards

Mac OS X (The “X” is pronounced “ten”) is the descendant of two operating systems: the classic Mac OS and the NeXTSTEP operating system. Mac OS X is much more closely related to NeXTSTEP, even though the application environment and user interface are more familiar to Macintosh users. This chapter begins by providing a brief history of Mac OS X; the rest of the chapter fills in some of the details.

The Mac OS debuted in 1984 as a single-tasking system. The first multitasking support appeared in Mac OS 7 (called System 7, not related to UNIX Version 7), released in 1990. By the time ...

Get A Practical Guide to UNIX for Mac OS X Users now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.