Apple Mac OS X Unix History y2k

By Xah Lee. Date: .

The official logos of Apple. Apple Computer Inc is founded in 1976 by Steve Wozniak and Steven Jobs, buddies of college-drop-outs, in a garage. The Apple logo got chosen because Jobs loves apple. Around 1998 when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, the rainbow color is removed from the logo leaving just a outline.

The smiling square represents Mac OS's Finder. Finder is the essential program user uses to operate Macintosh computers, doing things as viewing folders and launching other programs. The operating system used in Macintosh computers are essentially known as the Finder, until around maybe 1995 is the name “Mac OS” came about, and the smiling square was introduced.

The stylized X represents Mac OS X — the new Mac OS based on unix and NeXT technologies, introduced around 2000. [see NeXT Computer Inc]

Apple O S X
one of those U nix
beauty and beasts
new Eunuchs' Complex

i love Apple O S
i hate all Eunuchs
now with O S X
love hate amiss

the sea of fanatics
unices 'n' Open Source
Beavises 'n' Buttheads
making all the noises

Think Differenter's voices
clamoring all over places
beauty and Eunuchs
marries in peace

in my dream O S
there is no unix
beauty and elegance
without fanatics

 —Xah Lee, 2002-04

Most unixers will have a hard time to articulate clearly what is unix. Sometimes you see email sign-offs that says “Linux is unix”, while other times “Linux is NOT unix”. They know little other than smugly aware that Unix is a trademark. The confusion lies in unix fanatics not understanding the logical analysis of naming and meanings.

The world unix should mean unixism, that is, the way things are done in unix platform, their culture, their hacking attitude, their social attitude, their preferences, their people, their tools, their languages, their ps grep config make shebang tartall gunzip README manifesto et cetera. Without special context, the world “unix” should not mean the Trademark, or a operating system core, or a particular version of Unix, because these interpretations are suitable in rather more specialized contexts.

[see Is Mac OS X Unix]

[see Mac OS X Resource Fork Tips]

If you want to learn Mac OS X, the best resource is on Apple's site: [ http://developer.apple.com/ ] (2012-01-12) . There are huge amounts of free introductions, tutorials, documentation for developers and sys admins alike. Beats vast majority of 3rd party commercial books.

The unix software archive heaven for Mac OS X is the Fink project, which contains pre-compiled binaries of unix programs.

fink site 2020-01-13 hznkb
[http://fink.sourceforge.net/] screenshot 2020-01-13 (site exist since at least 2004)
fink logo 7zv23
fink logo
Hexley the Platypus
Hexley the platypus, mascot of Darwin (operating system) Logo design by Jon Hooper.
final xdarwin
Hexley variation used by the Xdarwin project.

Mac OS X's core operating system is named Darwin. Darwin is based on BSD 4.4 and Mach 3.0 Micro kernel. Apple tried to suck the FreeSoftware programer's blood by releasing and advertising Darwin as Open Source. The unix morons, having nothing to do, as always, thus have projects that builds a entire OS with Darwin as base and their X-Windows crap as framework and GUIs. (what's wrong with Linux and the various BSDs?) Here's some of their logo. Noteworthy is the once-classification-controversial platypus, with a BSD daemon attire.

I have a advice for freedom-loving unix morons: If you want the unix freedom to survive meaningfully, join the GNU project and stick to it.

The Unix Pestilence