CLARIFICATIONS - The history of XNU is shrouded in quite a bit of mystery and I did my best to sort through it but here are some notes: 1. XNU was definitely being used by NeXTSTEP before 1997 - yes, Apple made some changes when they got it but the core of XNU was already there. They wanted NeXT just as bad as Steve Jobs for a reason. 2. There is much debate over whether XNU is a hybrid or monolithic kernel - BSD is mostly monolithic and Mach evolved to hybrid over time making XNU also hybrid - almost every single source on XNU refers to it as a hybrid kernel alongside Windows NT - I think the issue is more in the varying definitions of what a hybrid kernel actually is. 3. The evidence that the X in Mac OS X came from NeXTSTEP and XNU is a bit ambiguous but many believe it played a role. Even if it wasn't on purpose, the "X" did a good job of representing the legacy of XNU and NeXT and XNU is certainly still the X that has been in macOS since 2001. 4. Technically, Apple used the XNU kernel in a few OSes before OS X but none of them were mass-marketed or, at least, reached the average user (Rhapsody in 1997, Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999 and Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000) - those releases were essentially Apple's public testing grounds for XNU. 5. XNU borrowed a lot from Unix but it is most certainly not Unix - remember, it stands for "X is Not Unix". 6. The "Home" directory I mentioned also had earlier roots in Unix and most likely was carried over from there. 7. I wish I had covered XNU's use in iOS more but I was laser focused on macOS in this one - for another time... As I mentioned, I did my best to unveil the mysterious history of XNU and NeXTSTEP but am hoping this video can be a launching pad for more discussion and debate here in the comments - which many of you have already participated in. Thanks for that! I'll update this comment if anything else comes up.
XNU's name is a nod to Stallman's GNU-- which was publicly announced in 1983-- and, more broadly, to the spirit of continuing to flip the bird at AT&T for its attempt to monopolize/copy_fight all IP related to UNIX. Not a trivial addendum, imo.
When one is in the bash-like Mac OS command shell, the file system visible there follows a lot of Unix layout conventions. BSD muddies the picture - it provides a kind of Unix system call layer. Micro kernel architecture is predicated on trying to place device drivers and some low-level system services in user space processes that communicate via messaging with the microkernel. In practices this has caused performance issues. Mac OS being hybrid will have to do with the extent that microkernel messaging approach is retreated from and in how that is accomplished. Perhaps there are still portions that operate via the messaging substrate, while other critical drivers are once again executed in kernel address space.
@@TheSulross BSD-adjacent kernels are animals of their own unlike GNU derivatives. We know this, I'm sure. Correct me if I'm wrong here but the "hybid" you speak of is essentially (directly, at that) derivative of the Mach mircokernel, which uses different abstraction layers beyond the UNIX 'pipe' such that a port, a higher-order abstraction, acts as a processing queue for inter-process communication. Not sure what significance device drivers have here to the essence of the maths involved-- further reasoning is welcome! This stuff really hasn't changed since the late 80s. The 'performance' issues you are likely addressing AFAIK are mostly related to send/receive permissions inherent in Mach ports.
@ yes, NeXT Step used Mach microkernel which used messaging queues for kernel-level communication. Linux, a monolithic kernel, has loadable device drivers but they’re loaded into kernel address space, execute in kernel privilege, can interact directly with kernel variables and functions. The downside is if they have, say, a memory addressing bug, then they corrupt or crash the operating system. But if device drivers run in a user space process with user privilege, then if they are buggy then they can be terminated and cleaned up by the microkernel - so a microkernel would be safer and more secure. But the downside is that the messaging communication approach can impose too much latency, etc.
I've seen how some rendering Apple APIs were designed a while ago, and always wondered why everything was prefixed (e.g. the "CV" in CVDisplayLink). Apparently they have to do it because of _lack of namespacing_ in Obj-C, maybe that's why I thought it stood for that. Thankfully the newer Swift APIs don't need that anymore!
Couple of corrections here, NeXTStep was bought during OS7’s era, with some stability improvements for 7.6 and 7.6.1. OS8 was released to effectively kill off the clone market which was eating Apple’s market share, killing the goose that laid the golden egg and the first master stroke that Steve Jobs implemented. OS9 was the transitional OS to bridge the divide for both developers and users, and was a few years after the purchase of NeXT. The first use of the MACH Kernel wasn’t 2001, but 2000 as the server system first utilising the methods for using classic environment in OS X, but needed serious amounts of memory and processor power to run. Essentially it was the classic OS9 interface sat on top of NeXTStep. It ran poorly, but was enough to demonstrate the stability coming in future OS updates. Then we get Cheetah in 2001, alongside the later OS9 releases to improve crossover codebases, along with better and more efficient running in the classic environment within OS X itself. OS9.22 didn’t officially die until around 2004, when people often chose to boot into the new OS and more applications were now specifically written for it.
Agree, and thanks! I was one of those people “choosing to boot into the new system”, on several G4 machines already in 2002. It took some terminal shenanigans to adapt our core workflows, but that hacking also opened a door into using Linux CLI for server duties. I was 36 at that time - 20+ years later, our main solutions are still the same, just upgraded. Kernels last a lifetime, as the same three are still being used - Mach-BSD, Linux and… NT, to me just for silly gaming. 😅
the mach kernel was developed as part of his phd at carnegie mellon to create separation between kernel and user level stuff. avie tevanian spends about 4 hours talking about stuff like this in his interview with the computer history museum. he then used it as the basis for the nextstep kernel well before apple had a true multitask os. this video made it out to seem like the reason for the NeXT buyout was because of the XNU kernel, but the real reason was that NeXT spent many years developing one of the best application development environments. they focused on portability from the beginning, as the software started with motorolla CPUs and eventually moved to x86, then to PPC, then back to intel x86/64 and now on Arm/aarch64. this approach served very well with the app market. apple xcode is and always has been the software dev tools from NeXT. the kernel was very important, but the software dev stack they created was a huge thing that helped next win over beOS when apple did a bidding war for a new OS.
Out of literally hundreds of subscribed channels, this is one of a tiny handful that earn my respect and admiration all the way. Adult, no-nonsense, useful information without frivolity, sensationalism or infantilism. And every word clearly enunciated -- a big bonus for hearing-impaired viewers. Much appreciated -- every time.
This video puts a lot of focus on the kernel, sure, it wants to talk about X. But in fact, macOS could change the kernel tomorrow and you as a user would never even notice. The kernel is not what made MacOS X such a huge success. The really important features that MacOS X got from OpenStep were not the xnu kernel, but the application development framework known as Cocoa (which is actually two frameworks called Foundation and AppKit) and the Objective-C programming language. It's Cocoa that gave apps their new modern look and feel and made app development a breeze, and it's Objective-C that became the language in which pretty much all Mac apps were written to some degree until Swift came along, because it was so much simpler and more high level than C++, yet still closer to C than to Java performance. And even Swift still uses Foundation and AppKit under the hood. You can see this by the fact that while you can compile Swift code for Linux, Linux lacks those frameworks, and without those two frameworks, Swift development is nowhere near as easy and powerful as it is on macOS.
I'm appalled by the fact that I haven't found any computer science program in any university that teach computer history. How these new kids will understand he what, where, when, how and why everything is like it is now?? i want badly to create a curriculum for computer history to be taught in universities.
I wish that it was taught as well! It would be one of my favorite classes (I'm in CC). Many adults or kids however may get bored by it, since some of them grew up in the iPad Generation, and they never really had to go to a desktop computer to use the internet.
I’m the computer guy in my high school. We have a tech class and since about 6th grade I’ve told my teachers some fun facts about computer history and they’ll usually tell the class.
At the end you mention XNU/Darwin adapting as part of the transition to Apple Silicon, but actually XNU was already running on iPhones since the very first release which uses the same architecture as apple silicon
UC Berkeley was the innovator of most of the non-windows world. Jobs could not have done anything without BSD from Berkeley for it was they that made the foundation of modern servers and workstations and data.
Pretty sure making it the "home" folder is a reference to unix conventions, which is funny since macOS doesn't follow those conventions, choosing instead to put home folders in /Users
Windows NT is an interesting parallel. I'm not as familiar with how it handles things compared to XNU, but it also has been around for just about as long on the windows side.
My thoughts on the Windows NT/2000 vs MacOSX is that by the later 90s, both companies saw the need to adapt to server and multiple users, with basic security and logins. A dive into Dave Cutler (sp?) and his VMS inspiration in the development of NT, and how it parallels MacOSX would be fascinating.
@@cjc363636 I was a beta tester for Windows NT and Windows95 while working for Lotus. I had previously worked for DEC on VMS internals. I immediately noticed the API for NTFS access control was nearly identical to the VMS file system. I pondered whether perhaps Cutler had taken the VMS source code with him to Microsoft.
A few inaccuracies- the first fruits of the XNU kernel at Apple wasn't Mac OS X 10.0 - Cheetah, it was Mac OS X Server (Rhapsody) 1.0, which was a commercial product 2 full years before the client version of Mac OS X 10.0 - Cheetah - shipped. And Nextstep and Openstep were two different versions of the same OS. Nexstep ran on Next hardware, Openstep ran on x86 hardware.
NeXT 3.3 ran on intel; it ran on PA-RISC and 68k too. The difference between NeXT and OpenStep was that OpenStep separated the programming APIs from the OS, so that an OpenStep compliant app could be compiled as a FAT binary to run (OpensStep for) Solaris, (Openstep for) Windows, and (OpenStep for)Mach -- ie NeXT's hardware and OpenStep Intel.
Thank you for the wonderful post. The "Home" folder/directory was not exclusive to NextStep. It is present in all unix-like OSs, including all the Linux distros. Kudos!
I mean, arm support for XNU wasn't new when the M series came along, given that iOS and its derivatives use XNU, and it could also be said iOS is a macOS derivative as well 🙂
As a MacAddict since the 1992 when I first used a Macintosh LC back at elementary school (I was a 4th grader that year), and being a main system administrator of the macOS platform where I work today, this is the first video from you that I watched. It's impressive enough that you just earned my subscription, a like, and selected "All" in the bell icon. I'm looking forward to watch more of your videos. :)
5:40 While NextStep and MacOS was impressive theres a reason why it lost in the Unix wars to Linux (keep in mind Linux released in 1991). Linux was and to this day is more extendable due to its open source nature, you can simply do more with it and developers have done a lot more with it. Everything from optimizing it for enterprise and server usage to even using it to make gaming OSs (Apple cant get a hang of any of them).
@@UbuntuPersonNoMint Not really, MacOS isn't exclusive to Apple devices because of greed. Apple tried competing in the Unix wars as an OS anyone could install, that completely flopped leading to Apple basically leaving the general PC OS market and leaving Linux as the true Unix-based OS (or rather kernel).
@@kittenzrulz are you talking about A/Ux which is different from mac os? I'm a 90s baby but I don't remember the unix wars happening in 2001. I do have a hackintosh and mac os does run far better than Windows and Linux on it. It just works even though it shouldn't
@@UbuntuPersonNoMint Theres a reason why its called a hackintosh, because you have to use hacks. That doesn't mean Apple didn't drop out of the unix wars, their operating system is not viable on a mass scale for anything other than their specific proprietary hardware. Therefore factually speaking Linux is the dominant Unix based OS, it runs on computers and powers most servers.
Anson, Working in a major Madison Avenue ad agency, they bought me a NeXT computer at my request. I was at that time the type director for the agency. It had postscript display in some of the apps that were running at that time helped me to work on vector objects. Where is the Mac? Didn’t even have it that time. So I understand clearly what you’re talking about.
As far as remember, xnu was first used by apple in Mac OS 10 Server in the late 90s, at least before Mac OS X. The UI looked like Mac OS 9 back then. Correct me if I'm wrong.
So, XNU was first built for NextStep in the late 80s / early 90s (the exact dates are hard to find). As far as I can tell, it was named XNU at that time. When Apple bought Next, they made everything official. Here is the trail according to the Darwin wiki page: "After Apple bought NeXT in 1996, it announced it would base its next operating system on OPENSTEP. This was developed into Rhapsody in 1997, Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999, Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000, and Mac OS X 10.0 in 2001." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
I still have a NeXT Workstation (similar to the one Job's was using in the video), matching mouse, keyboard, monitor etc... as you note NeXT is based upon BSD which split off from AT&T's System V.
@@Egilhelmson Started to split but I thought the version used for NeXT was the BSD release that was around the time of System 5... I could be wrong though, that was a long time ago!
Congratulation! It’s good to see the truth! I was an early adopter of Macintosh forty years ago exactly. And when NeXT was created I knew that Steve Jobs who was the Genie behind the Mac was building for the future! I still have a NeXTstation and a NeXTprinter and they still work!
What's funny is that even though XNU is supposed to mean "X is not Unix", Apple submitted 10.5 Leopard and every subsequent release for certification against the Single UNIX Specification, a certification they have all received (Sequoia received its certification on 12 September 2024). Therefore, in the eyes of the owners of the UNIX trademark, XNU can legally call itself ...UNIX.
NextStep used Mach 2.7 which was a monolithic kernel. Mac OS X used Mach 3.0 wrapped in kFreeBSD to form the hybrid kernel XNU which essentially runs as a monolithic kernel. NT is similarly also a hybrid kernel. Hybrid kernel's essentially runs as a monolithic kernel despite having a micro kernel inside and is no better than a linux kernel. They could have very well used a linux kernel also. Would have made no difference to the end users. MacOSX has an userland of a mix of open source BSD distro such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. I think NestStep was using BSD 4.3 which was not open source.
For the person who created the link in the description can you put in custom if the device is unsupported with the macOS you are running you are about to do in it. You should send a message that it is unsupported warning.
NeXTStep’s kernel wasn’t called XNU they named it XNU after Mac OS X, it literally means X is not UNIX(suggesting Mac OS X is not Unix) which was a joke about it not being certified as UNIX(it was Unix but they didn’t originally have it certified until they faced legal trouble for using the term in their promotional material).
It's mostly Unix for sure but they basically put Unix (FreeBSD) on top of Mach which adds some aspects not seen in a lot of Unix systems - resulting in the XNU kernel which ended up being a very powerful combination. Do you have a source on it being named after Apple acquired it?
@@AnsonAlexander in Rhapsody, which later became Mac OS X the kernel identifies itself as `Rhapsody Operating System Release 5.1: Fri Apr 17 13:07:52 PDT 1998; root(rbuilder): Objects/kernel-105.6. obj~2/RELEASE_1386 Copyright (c) 1988-1995,1997 Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved.` when you run `uname -v` whereas on macOS 14 I get `Darwin Kernel Version 23.6.0: Mon Jul 29 21:13:00 PDT 2024; root:xnu-10063.141.2~1/RELEASE_X86_64` and even on the very first release of Mac OS X you would probably find similar info. I doubt they even had a name for the kernel until they were preparing to release the Darwin source code as OSS and they realized they couldn't call their kernel "Objects/kernel". I had a lot more info typed out but I was typing my reply from the notifications thing in the corner of the youtube side and it literally cleared my comment after I misclicked outside of that box. Also iOS for somereason changed UNIX to "Unix" in my first comment, so I went ahead and edited it on my Mac to fix that. Also OpenStep 4.2 identifies itself as using MACH not XNU.
The kernel in Mac OS X Server 1.0 and Openstep for Mach/Nextstep based on 4.3BSD was just named “kernel” and normally referred to as the Mach kernel. The 4.4BSD based kernel with IOKit named xnu was developed after Apple bought NeXT, as far as I recall from that time. I worked in Core OS for 12 years and never saw or heard anything that contradicted this understanding. But I’d be interested to see clear evidence to the contrary if it exists.
@@timmcintosh8828 to my knowledge XNU was built off the previously in use Mach kernel with BSD bits from FreeBSD being implemented and such. Also my original comment that I had wrote before RUclips straight up cleared it, I had shown that in Mac OS X Server 1.0 it doesn’t identify itself as anything
Isn't it mindboggling how Apple- a company of the walled garden that likes to keep things indoors- have their OS Kernel Open Source while Microsoft's Windows NT Kernel is all closed source proprietary garbage.
This was a great video on the history of macOS! Many of the reasons in this video is why I got one. I mean, Mac is older than Windows for one. There are many carryovers from NeXTSTEP, if something is loading in macOS, it will display a beach ball, which was also in NeXTSTEP! (Was a spinning CD in the NeXT era). Also, Chess was in NeXTSTEP as well. There is a video talking about all of these carryovers on RUclips.
All of it..... MacOSX and Next are also 100% derived from old school BSD Unix. Literally, Next licensed that (as many many companies have) and then built up the new os. It is still Unix at it's core.
„X is Not Unix” wasn’t supposed to mean that „XNU is better than UNIX”. Acronyms like that are used to emphasize that some OS is UNIX-like but not directly based on UNIX.
Just cool history not a lot of people know about. A lot of people seem to think macOS is a lot different than Mac OS X as well so I thought it was important to show how long the kernel has been used and where it came from. Not many people know about NeXT, etc.
While macOS is the latest naming of what descended from NeXTSTEP via Mac OS X, Mac OS is something very different. It preceded Apple’s acquisition of NeXT, and was the OS on the original Macintosh hardware. It ultimately finished its life as the Classic environment for Mac OS X. Perhaps that is the difference that people are thinking of?
Haha, you should've emphasized "NEXT" at the end in order to capitalize on what you were just talking about: "And I'll see you in the... *NeXT* ... one!"
OS X is amazing. My first ever Mac was the 2008 MacBook in white plastic. We also had an HP laptop, grey heavy and ugly, running Vista. It was painfully slow. I remember being shocked at how fast my Mac booted up on Leopard. I was logged in and using applications before the Vista pc got to its login screen! After that the PC collected dust 😂. Amazing that it also powers everything from iPhone to iPad to Watch and TV. That's a great legacy from Next.
Hey man, good video, been enjoying your channel! Question - Are you a doctor, is that surgery scrubs your wearing? If not what do you do outside of youtube for a living.
Even though it seems not early, it was. The 50s-80s were just building the foundational stuff, like UNIX, the internet, Windows, and macOS. The 1990s-2000s was a time when computers started to become what they are today (HTML browser, Win 95), but even in THAT time period, they still HAD MUCH WORK TO DO. Basically, everything was done by the 2010s, with the introductions of Raspberry Pi and Swift. Fact-if it wasn’t for NeXT, we wouldn’t have stuff like Safari, Chrome or Firefox, and we wouldn’t have Doom as well.
@@JesseJones-nv3vd Yeah it just makes me feeling old, in the 90ies I was already into computers for a while :). I don’t agree with the ‘without x we wouldn’t have y’. though. Progress doesn’t depend on a single person or a single company. Maybe things would be different, sure. And I also don’t think things are more ‘done’ now than they were in the 90ies. We’re still progressing.
@@EVPaddy You’re right. When the HTML browser (or HTML itself) was being developed, they probably didn’t just use NeXT computers, they also used Windows as well. Doom may be the only thing exclusively developed with a NeXT computer.
@@JesseJones-nv3vd Yeah but my point being, doom ran on PCs just fine, we would have gotten something like that even without NeXT. Hopefully. Anyways I always find the 1984 Elite more impressive anyways :)
I honest to God just thought it came from the X Window System, and I do recognize that's silly as it was an entirely optional component during installation
I vaguely knew this history, but I missed the news that the X has been dropped from the OS name. I thought people were just being colloquial when not using it.
Does anyone know, if those MacOS Servers one or two decades ago were "Unix-Certified" (which was for some reason very important for some companies those days, a reason not to just use Linux but buy expensive propriety Unix OS's ) or was it still more XNU-like?
I’m sad that you failed to mention that Apple actually didn’t drop the X even now. The macOS 15 Seqouia we see now is actually still macOS 10.20 internally
isnt the MacOS kernel, Darwin. The same as all the others apple kernels like the ones in Iphones and Ipads etc? I think. Also Isnt Xnu just like GNU, just the core utilties. Maybe I have no idea
It really comes down to how you define an OS kernel but XNU is actually the kernel within Darwin, so they're both technically kernels (although some would say neither are). This is from the wikipedia page on Darwin: "The kernel of Darwin is XNU, a hybrid kernel which uses OSFMK 7.3" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
@@AnsonAlexander Darwin is more than a kernel. It’s a full OS, which includes the Unix userland utilities, and other open source parts like the CUPS printing subsystem. (IIRC)
@@memetech- I’ve been a Mac guy since ‘85, and lived through “the dark times.” Every OS project that went in the dumpster is still etched in my mind. Copland, Gershwin, Pink, Taligent… and then the rumours of Apple being saved by buying BeOS… I breathed a sigh of relief when Apple bought NeXT.
Excellent presentation! Thank you for explaining the reasoning behind the X in Mac OSX all these years. Sadly, it's been dropped now but, as you point out, it still lives on underneath the hood. Can you cover why iOS hasn't been rebranded (yet) to phoneOS? And maybe iCloud to cloudOS? Thank you!
iOS was originally called iPhone OS until the iPad came along. I suspect it’s keeping the iOS name simply because it’s such a well known brand at this point. That, and it already has the (lowercase variant)(uppercase “OS”) name format that Apple is using across all their operating system branding. iCloud is not going to be rebranded cloudOS because it’s not an operating system, but rather a set of services.
0:30 Ehh. I think this is a BIG stretch. Steve's never even hinted at this. Not to metnion this tenuous connection could also reference the X in "UNIX". Given that Apple has also used X now in iPhone and a few other places, I am pretty sure it was *never* a reference to NextStep explicitly.
The iteration of MacOS 9? NeXT? X11? In MacOS X using xQuartz you could run anything linux over TCP/IP: ssh -Y linuxbox, then launch firefox& or xeyes&
Stone Age...HA!!! Gimme an IMSAI 8080 running BASIC from a cassette deck, using a Teletype 33 as an interface. Been there, done that. Now that's Stone Age! Oh, and NeXT didn't create BSD nor the Mach kernel. They just appropriated them and bodged them together. Typical of Mr Jobs to do this then take all the credit...
I didn't say they created BSD or Mach, just that they combined them to create XNU which was used to create what has been the 2nd most popular operating system for 2+ decades.
There is a lot of evidence that the "X" was a purposeful shout to Next, NeXTSTEP and XNU but, regardless, this was a historical overview about the "X" that has never left macOS - the XNU kernel - and it's importance to macOS, iOS and Apple. I hope you enjoyed.
A ye olde UNIX guy it's all UNIX... in fact the OSX "DOC" is a CDE, Common Desktop Envi. Ripoff.. which I used on SUN, HP, AIX, and tried it on SGI... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment
BSD and Mach both came out of UNIX but, together, many consider them a hybrid kernel. First two "hybrid" kernels mentioned are Windows NT and Apple XNU: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel
CLARIFICATIONS - The history of XNU is shrouded in quite a bit of mystery and I did my best to sort through it but here are some notes:
1. XNU was definitely being used by NeXTSTEP before 1997 - yes, Apple made some changes when they got it but the core of XNU was already there. They wanted NeXT just as bad as Steve Jobs for a reason.
2. There is much debate over whether XNU is a hybrid or monolithic kernel - BSD is mostly monolithic and Mach evolved to hybrid over time making XNU also hybrid - almost every single source on XNU refers to it as a hybrid kernel alongside Windows NT - I think the issue is more in the varying definitions of what a hybrid kernel actually is.
3. The evidence that the X in Mac OS X came from NeXTSTEP and XNU is a bit ambiguous but many believe it played a role. Even if it wasn't on purpose, the "X" did a good job of representing the legacy of XNU and NeXT and XNU is certainly still the X that has been in macOS since 2001.
4. Technically, Apple used the XNU kernel in a few OSes before OS X but none of them were mass-marketed or, at least, reached the average user (Rhapsody in 1997, Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999 and Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000) - those releases were essentially Apple's public testing grounds for XNU.
5. XNU borrowed a lot from Unix but it is most certainly not Unix - remember, it stands for "X is Not Unix".
6. The "Home" directory I mentioned also had earlier roots in Unix and most likely was carried over from there.
7. I wish I had covered XNU's use in iOS more but I was laser focused on macOS in this one - for another time...
As I mentioned, I did my best to unveil the mysterious history of XNU and NeXTSTEP but am hoping this video can be a launching pad for more discussion and debate here in the comments - which many of you have already participated in. Thanks for that! I'll update this comment if anything else comes up.
XNU's name is a nod to Stallman's GNU-- which was publicly announced in 1983-- and, more broadly, to the spirit of continuing to flip the bird at AT&T for its attempt to monopolize/copy_fight all IP related to UNIX. Not a trivial addendum, imo.
When one is in the bash-like Mac OS command shell, the file system visible there follows a lot of Unix layout conventions. BSD muddies the picture - it provides a kind of Unix system call layer. Micro kernel architecture is predicated on trying to place device drivers and some low-level system services in user space processes that communicate via messaging with the microkernel. In practices this has caused performance issues.
Mac OS being hybrid will have to do with the extent that microkernel messaging approach is retreated from and in how that is accomplished. Perhaps there are still portions that operate via the messaging substrate, while other critical drivers are once again executed in kernel address space.
@@TheSulross BSD-adjacent kernels are animals of their own unlike GNU derivatives. We know this, I'm sure.
Correct me if I'm wrong here but the "hybid" you speak of is essentially (directly, at that) derivative of the Mach mircokernel, which uses different abstraction layers beyond the UNIX 'pipe' such that a port, a higher-order abstraction, acts as a processing queue for inter-process communication. Not sure what significance device drivers have here to the essence of the maths involved-- further reasoning is welcome!
This stuff really hasn't changed since the late 80s. The 'performance' issues you are likely addressing AFAIK are mostly related to send/receive permissions inherent in Mach ports.
@ yes, NeXT Step used Mach microkernel which used messaging queues for kernel-level communication.
Linux, a monolithic kernel, has loadable device drivers but they’re loaded into kernel address space, execute in kernel privilege, can interact directly with kernel variables and functions. The downside is if they have, say, a memory addressing bug, then they corrupt or crash the operating system.
But if device drivers run in a user space process with user privilege, then if they are buggy then they can be terminated and cleaned up by the microkernel - so a microkernel would be safer and more secure. But the downside is that the messaging communication approach can impose too much latency, etc.
@@TheSulross Are you by any chance neurodivergent? You points are correct on an _a priori_ basis but your 'focus' is very scattered and inelegant.
For those of you developing for iOS or macOS, the NS in the names of some frameworks like NSUserDefaults stands for NextStep.
4:46 - /home/ was already a common directory in UNIX systems.
overall, great video :)
Yeah, so, uh, bump
Exactly, same in Linux. The house icon was often referenced before NeXT.
Even in macOS programming functions start with the prefix "NS" which I believe stands for NextStep
Sûre!
I thought that stood for "Namespace" because of some Objective-C design detail, but I'm not sure about that either.
@@HoussamElbadissi
Your comment made me doubt it indeed, a quick Google search confirmed that it does stand for NextStep
@@EyadBarany Crazy, the fact that it still lives on is pretty cool!
I've seen how some rendering Apple APIs were designed a while ago, and always wondered why everything was prefixed (e.g. the "CV" in CVDisplayLink).
Apparently they have to do it because of _lack of namespacing_ in Obj-C, maybe that's why I thought it stood for that. Thankfully the newer Swift APIs don't need that anymore!
Couple of corrections here, NeXTStep was bought during OS7’s era, with some stability improvements for 7.6 and 7.6.1. OS8 was released to effectively kill off the clone market which was eating Apple’s market share, killing the goose that laid the golden egg and the first master stroke that Steve Jobs implemented. OS9 was the transitional OS to bridge the divide for both developers and users, and was a few years after the purchase of NeXT.
The first use of the MACH Kernel wasn’t 2001, but 2000 as the server system first utilising the methods for using classic environment in OS X, but needed serious amounts of memory and processor power to run. Essentially it was the classic OS9 interface sat on top of NeXTStep. It ran poorly, but was enough to demonstrate the stability coming in future OS updates.
Then we get Cheetah in 2001, alongside the later OS9 releases to improve crossover codebases, along with better and more efficient running in the classic environment within OS X itself. OS9.22 didn’t officially die until around 2004, when people often chose to boot into the new OS and more applications were now specifically written for it.
Agree, and thanks!
I was one of those people “choosing to boot into the new system”, on several G4 machines already in 2002. It took some terminal shenanigans to adapt our core workflows, but that hacking also opened a door into using Linux CLI for server duties.
I was 36 at that time - 20+ years later, our main solutions are still the same, just upgraded. Kernels last a lifetime, as the same three are still being used - Mach-BSD, Linux and… NT, to me just for silly gaming. 😅
Server came out in 1999
the mach kernel was developed as part of his phd at carnegie mellon to create separation between kernel and user level stuff. avie tevanian spends about 4 hours talking about stuff like this in his interview with the computer history museum. he then used it as the basis for the nextstep kernel well before apple had a true multitask os.
this video made it out to seem like the reason for the NeXT buyout was because of the XNU kernel, but the real reason was that NeXT spent many years developing one of the best application development environments. they focused on portability from the beginning, as the software started with motorolla CPUs and eventually moved to x86, then to PPC, then back to intel x86/64 and now on Arm/aarch64. this approach served very well with the app market. apple xcode is and always has been the software dev tools from NeXT.
the kernel was very important, but the software dev stack they created was a huge thing that helped next win over beOS when apple did a bidding war for a new OS.
Know what else was part of NextStep? The Spinning Beachball of Death
Out of literally hundreds of subscribed channels, this is one of a tiny handful that earn my respect and admiration all the way. Adult, no-nonsense, useful information without frivolity, sensationalism or infantilism. And every word clearly enunciated -- a big bonus for hearing-impaired viewers. Much appreciated -- every time.
Thank you for the kind words. I'm glad you hear you're enjoying my videos and my direct style! I'll try to keep it up! Thanks for watching!
Yes, keep it up!
Naming their attempt at a new kernel Copeland is poetic.
They probably used copium thermal paste on those devices
Wow, millennial idiots missing the point. How poetic.
Copland was a US composer. A lot of codenames from Apple at the time were musically-themed.
@@MaddTheSane that’s what I said - naming their attempt at a new kernel Copeland is poetic 😊
And Gershwin was a planned follow up after Copland.
And mixed in there that never saw the light of day was Pink and Taligent…
This video puts a lot of focus on the kernel, sure, it wants to talk about X. But in fact, macOS could change the kernel tomorrow and you as a user would never even notice. The kernel is not what made MacOS X such a huge success. The really important features that MacOS X got from OpenStep were not the xnu kernel, but the application development framework known as Cocoa (which is actually two frameworks called Foundation and AppKit) and the Objective-C programming language. It's Cocoa that gave apps their new modern look and feel and made app development a breeze, and it's Objective-C that became the language in which pretty much all Mac apps were written to some degree until Swift came along, because it was so much simpler and more high level than C++, yet still closer to C than to Java performance. And even Swift still uses Foundation and AppKit under the hood. You can see this by the fact that while you can compile Swift code for Linux, Linux lacks those frameworks, and without those two frameworks, Swift development is nowhere near as easy and powerful as it is on macOS.
In the early 90s, our university library had some of those NeXT machines and people would wait in line to use those over the PCs and the Macs
I'm appalled by the fact that I haven't found any computer science program in any university that teach computer history. How these new kids will understand he what, where, when, how and why everything is like it is now?? i want badly to create a curriculum for computer history to be taught in universities.
I had somewhat of computer history at the RWTH Aachen University. With the Zuse Z3 to so called Von Neumann Machines up to parallel computing.
@@vanCaldenborgh well, that’s awesome!
It'll sadly just be results coming out of the AI black-box.
I wish that it was taught as well! It would be one of my favorite classes (I'm in CC). Many adults or kids however may get bored by it, since some of them grew up in the iPad Generation, and they never really had to go to a desktop computer to use the internet.
I’m the computer guy in my high school. We have a tech class and since about 6th grade I’ve told my teachers some fun facts about computer history and they’ll usually tell the class.
At the end you mention XNU/Darwin adapting as part of the transition to Apple Silicon, but actually XNU was already running on iPhones since the very first release which uses the same architecture as apple silicon
XNU isn't the only bit that's shared with Mac OS. iOS apps are also built with Cocoa.
UC Berkeley was the innovator of most of the non-windows world. Jobs could not have done anything without BSD from Berkeley for it was they that made the foundation of modern servers and workstations and data.
Pretty sure making it the "home" folder is a reference to unix conventions, which is funny since macOS doesn't follow those conventions, choosing instead to put home folders in /Users
Windows NT is an interesting parallel. I'm not as familiar with how it handles things compared to XNU, but it also has been around for just about as long on the windows side.
Yes, that one definitely deserves a deep-dive. From what I know already, it was almost like a Cold War with XNU.
I would be very eager at see that video, I was thinking about that near the end.
It’s like how Windows 11 still has the Windows Classic and Windows Basic theme.
My thoughts on the Windows NT/2000 vs MacOSX is that by the later 90s, both companies saw the need to adapt to server and multiple users, with basic security and logins. A dive into Dave Cutler (sp?) and his VMS inspiration in the development of NT, and how it parallels MacOSX would be fascinating.
@@cjc363636 I was a beta tester for Windows NT and Windows95 while working for Lotus. I had previously worked for DEC on VMS internals. I immediately noticed the API for NTFS access control was nearly identical to the VMS file system. I pondered whether perhaps Cutler had taken the VMS source code with him to Microsoft.
A few inaccuracies- the first fruits of the XNU kernel at Apple wasn't Mac OS X 10.0 - Cheetah, it was Mac OS X Server (Rhapsody) 1.0, which was a commercial product 2 full years before the client version of Mac OS X 10.0 - Cheetah - shipped. And Nextstep and Openstep were two different versions of the same OS. Nexstep ran on Next hardware, Openstep ran on x86 hardware.
I mostly think that OpenStep worked. On both platforms. Exactly as OS X did the same about ten years after!
NeXT 3.3 ran on intel; it ran on PA-RISC and 68k too. The difference between NeXT and OpenStep was that OpenStep separated the programming APIs from the OS, so that an OpenStep compliant app could be compiled as a FAT binary to run (OpensStep for) Solaris, (Openstep for) Windows, and (OpenStep for)Mach -- ie NeXT's hardware and OpenStep Intel.
My favourite fact about NeXT is that it's the platform Tim used to build the very first webserver. The World Wide Web was born on a NeXT computer.
Thank you for the wonderful post. The "Home" folder/directory was not exclusive to NextStep. It is present in all unix-like OSs, including all the Linux distros. Kudos!
I think that didn’t exist in the 1980s
I remember using a NeXT workstation when I was a kid. It looked pretty futuristic compared to Windows and Mac of 1995.
I mean, arm support for XNU wasn't new when the M series came along, given that iOS and its derivatives use XNU, and it could also be said iOS is a macOS derivative as well 🙂
I really liked the aqua UI. I wish you could still use it.
NeXTStep is mentioned in the anime Serial Experiments Lain, with the tagline: Close the world, open the NeXT.
As a MacAddict since the 1992 when I first used a Macintosh LC back at elementary school (I was a 4th grader that year), and being a main system administrator of the macOS platform where I work today, this is the first video from you that I watched. It's impressive enough that you just earned my subscription, a like, and selected "All" in the bell icon. I'm looking forward to watch more of your videos. :)
5:40 While NextStep and MacOS was impressive theres a reason why it lost in the Unix wars to Linux (keep in mind Linux released in 1991). Linux was and to this day is more extendable due to its open source nature, you can simply do more with it and developers have done a lot more with it. Everything from optimizing it for enterprise and server usage to even using it to make gaming OSs (Apple cant get a hang of any of them).
As a linux fan this might hurt to say but mac os beat linux in the desktop space though
@@UbuntuPersonNoMint Not really, MacOS isn't exclusive to Apple devices because of greed. Apple tried competing in the Unix wars as an OS anyone could install, that completely flopped leading to Apple basically leaving the general PC OS market and leaving Linux as the true Unix-based OS (or rather kernel).
@@kittenzrulz are you talking about A/Ux which is different from mac os? I'm a 90s baby but I don't remember the unix wars happening in 2001. I do have a hackintosh and mac os does run far better than Windows and Linux on it. It just works even though it shouldn't
@@UbuntuPersonNoMint Theres a reason why its called a hackintosh, because you have to use hacks. That doesn't mean Apple didn't drop out of the unix wars, their operating system is not viable on a mass scale for anything other than their specific proprietary hardware. Therefore factually speaking Linux is the dominant Unix based OS, it runs on computers and powers most servers.
@@kittenzrulztechnically speaking, iOS is the dominant Unix platform…
But I get what you mean.
I believe System 8.6-9.1 was worked on, and released, under Steve’s watch.
Anson, Working in a major Madison Avenue ad agency, they bought me a NeXT computer at my request. I was at that time the type director for the agency. It had postscript display in some of the apps that were running at that time helped me to work on vector objects. Where is the Mac? Didn’t even have it that time. So I understand clearly what you’re talking about.
As far as remember, xnu was first used by apple in Mac OS 10 Server in the late 90s, at least before Mac OS X. The UI looked like Mac OS 9 back then. Correct me if I'm wrong.
So, XNU was first built for NextStep in the late 80s / early 90s (the exact dates are hard to find). As far as I can tell, it was named XNU at that time. When Apple bought Next, they made everything official. Here is the trail according to the Darwin wiki page:
"After Apple bought NeXT in 1996, it announced it would base its next operating system on OPENSTEP. This was developed into Rhapsody in 1997, Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999, Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000, and Mac OS X 10.0 in 2001."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
I still have a NeXT Workstation (similar to the one Job's was using in the video), matching mouse, keyboard, monitor etc... as you note NeXT is based upon BSD which split off from AT&T's System V.
Wow, that is amazing! I would hold on to that, that is a really unique piece of computing history to have.
Me too ;)
BSD Unix split off from AT&T Unix about in System III, well before System V.
@@Egilhelmson Started to split but I thought the version used for NeXT was the BSD release that was around the time of System 5... I could be wrong though, that was a long time ago!
BSD is much more like Research Unix than System V. That's part of the reason why BSD uses different names for everything.
Great video. Well done!👍🏽
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed!
It feels as though the importance of the Mach contribution was minimized.
Congratulation! It’s good to see the truth!
I was an early adopter of Macintosh forty years ago exactly. And when NeXT was created I knew that Steve Jobs who was the Genie behind the Mac was building for the future!
I still have a NeXTstation and a NeXTprinter and they still work!
2:39 Mach Microkernel*
Overall, great video!
Thanks!
What's funny is that even though XNU is supposed to mean "X is not Unix", Apple submitted 10.5 Leopard and every subsequent release for certification against the Single UNIX Specification, a certification they have all received (Sequoia received its certification on 12 September 2024). Therefore, in the eyes of the owners of the UNIX trademark, XNU can legally call itself ...UNIX.
NextStep used Mach 2.7 which was a monolithic kernel. Mac OS X used Mach 3.0 wrapped in kFreeBSD to form the hybrid kernel XNU which essentially runs as a monolithic kernel. NT is similarly also a hybrid kernel. Hybrid kernel's essentially runs as a monolithic kernel despite having a micro kernel inside and is no better than a linux kernel. They could have very well used a linux kernel also. Would have made no difference to the end users. MacOSX has an userland of a mix of open source BSD distro such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. I think NestStep was using BSD 4.3 which was not open source.
It’s the same thing with iPadOS, which is basically still core iOS powered by XNU.
For the person who created the link in the description can you put in custom if the device is unsupported with the macOS you are running you are about to do in it. You should send a message that it is unsupported warning.
That’s a great video man, thanks a lot!
You’re welcome, I’m glad you enjoyed!
NeXTStep’s kernel wasn’t called XNU they named it XNU after Mac OS X, it literally means X is not UNIX(suggesting Mac OS X is not Unix) which was a joke about it not being certified as UNIX(it was Unix but they didn’t originally have it certified until they faced legal trouble for using the term in their promotional material).
It's mostly Unix for sure but they basically put Unix (FreeBSD) on top of Mach which adds some aspects not seen in a lot of Unix systems - resulting in the XNU kernel which ended up being a very powerful combination. Do you have a source on it being named after Apple acquired it?
@@AnsonAlexander in Rhapsody, which later became Mac OS X the kernel identifies itself as `Rhapsody Operating System Release 5.1: Fri Apr 17 13:07:52 PDT 1998; root(rbuilder): Objects/kernel-105.6. obj~2/RELEASE_1386 Copyright (c) 1988-1995,1997 Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved.` when you run `uname -v` whereas on macOS 14 I get `Darwin Kernel Version 23.6.0: Mon Jul 29 21:13:00 PDT 2024; root:xnu-10063.141.2~1/RELEASE_X86_64` and even on the very first release of Mac OS X you would probably find similar info. I doubt they even had a name for the kernel until they were preparing to release the Darwin source code as OSS and they realized they couldn't call their kernel "Objects/kernel".
I had a lot more info typed out but I was typing my reply from the notifications thing in the corner of the youtube side and it literally cleared my comment after I misclicked outside of that box. Also iOS for somereason changed UNIX to "Unix" in my first comment, so I went ahead and edited it on my Mac to fix that.
Also OpenStep 4.2 identifies itself as using MACH not XNU.
The kernel in Mac OS X Server 1.0 and Openstep for Mach/Nextstep based on 4.3BSD was just named “kernel” and normally referred to as the Mach kernel. The 4.4BSD based kernel with IOKit named xnu was developed after Apple bought NeXT, as far as I recall from that time. I worked in Core OS for 12 years and never saw or heard anything that contradicted this understanding. But I’d be interested to see clear evidence to the contrary if it exists.
@@timmcintosh8828 to my knowledge XNU was built off the previously in use Mach kernel with BSD bits from FreeBSD being implemented and such.
Also my original comment that I had wrote before RUclips straight up cleared it, I had shown that in Mac OS X Server 1.0 it doesn’t identify itself as anything
Wow, I’m a computer systems expert and I’ve never seen a video explaining this better.. I learnt a thing or two, and subscribed ;)
Finally somebody does a video on this! Thank you!
Anson , another great video ! Flying with my unsupported Mac mini , with Firefox .
Sounds like a nice flight! Glad you enjoyed!
Isn't it mindboggling how Apple- a company of the walled garden that likes to keep things indoors- have their OS Kernel Open Source while Microsoft's Windows NT Kernel is all closed source proprietary garbage.
It first showed up in OS X Server in March 1999, not OS X proper in 2001
Yeah, check the pinned comment. I was focused on the general public version of macOS in this video so I should have been more clear about that.
@@AnsonAlexander my bad. Great video!
Thanks!
The X is still in the internal files of macOS. For example, DSMOSX (Don't steal Mac OS X)
This was a great video on the history of macOS! Many of the reasons in this video is why I got one. I mean, Mac is older than Windows for one.
There are many carryovers from NeXTSTEP, if something is loading in macOS, it will display a beach ball, which was also in NeXTSTEP! (Was a spinning CD in the NeXT era).
Also, Chess was in NeXTSTEP as well. There is a video talking about all of these carryovers on RUclips.
I think the "beach ball" in NeXTStep was supposed to represent the Magneto-optical drive seeking, not a CD.
@@MaddTheSane I see. I remember something like that. It looked like a CD.
@@MaddTheSane which is what the original NeXT cube had instead of a hard drive.
So basically the Apple equivalent of the NT kernel, very interesting
Yes, exactly. NT and XNU are both legendary and at the core of the Apple vs. Microsoft comparison.
Steve Jobs recognized that UNIX was a huge deal. He even tried to hire Linus Torvalds to join them.
This was extremely interesting! Thank you!
All of it..... MacOSX and Next are also 100% derived from old school BSD Unix. Literally, Next licensed that (as many many companies have) and then built up the new os.
It is still Unix at it's core.
„X is Not Unix” wasn’t supposed to mean that „XNU is better than UNIX”. Acronyms like that are used to emphasize that some OS is UNIX-like but not directly based on UNIX.
For me Mac OS (X) has always been the latest iteration of NeXTstep!
I'm not sure what the big deal is. The Windows NT kernel is even older. The Linux kernel used in Android is just a bit younger.
Just cool history not a lot of people know about. A lot of people seem to think macOS is a lot different than Mac OS X as well so I thought it was important to show how long the kernel has been used and where it came from. Not many people know about NeXT, etc.
While macOS is the latest naming of what descended from NeXTSTEP via Mac OS X, Mac OS is something very different.
It preceded Apple’s acquisition of NeXT, and was the OS on the original Macintosh hardware. It ultimately finished its life as the Classic environment for Mac OS X.
Perhaps that is the difference that people are thinking of?
Haha, you should've emphasized "NEXT" at the end in order to capitalize on what you were just talking about: "And I'll see you in the... *NeXT* ... one!"
That would have been catchy haha!
@@AnsonAlexander: Haha, agreed!
OS X is amazing. My first ever Mac was the 2008 MacBook in white plastic.
We also had an HP laptop, grey heavy and ugly, running Vista. It was painfully slow.
I remember being shocked at how fast my Mac booted up on Leopard. I was logged in and using applications before the Vista pc got to its login screen!
After that the PC collected dust 😂.
Amazing that it also powers everything from iPhone to iPad to Watch and TV.
That's a great legacy from Next.
the falloff is crazy
Hey man, good video, been enjoying your channel! Question - Are you a doctor, is that surgery scrubs your wearing? If not what do you do outside of youtube for a living.
Yaay infinitemac mentioned, NeXTStep mentioned. I still own a Cube!
X-pensive 😂. Nice video
Haha, that too! Thanks!
It's *kernel,* not *kernal;* lol, Also- there's no "e" in copland, lol.
Thanks for the corrections :) Hopefully the story was still clear!
I enjoyed this video. Thank you.
never considered the 90ies to be early in computer history...
Even though it seems not early, it was. The 50s-80s were just building the foundational stuff, like UNIX, the internet, Windows, and macOS. The 1990s-2000s was a time when computers started to become what they are today (HTML browser, Win 95), but even in THAT time period, they still HAD MUCH WORK TO DO. Basically, everything was done by the 2010s, with the introductions of Raspberry Pi and Swift.
Fact-if it wasn’t for NeXT, we wouldn’t have stuff like Safari, Chrome or Firefox, and we wouldn’t have Doom as well.
@@JesseJones-nv3vd Yeah it just makes me feeling old, in the 90ies I was already into computers for a while :). I don’t agree with the ‘without x we wouldn’t have y’. though. Progress doesn’t depend on a single person or a single company. Maybe things would be different, sure. And I also don’t think things are more ‘done’ now than they were in the 90ies. We’re still progressing.
@@EVPaddy You’re right. When the HTML browser (or HTML itself) was being developed, they probably didn’t just use NeXT computers, they also used Windows as well. Doom may be the only thing exclusively developed with a NeXT computer.
@@JesseJones-nv3vd Yeah but my point being, doom ran on PCs just fine, we would have gotten something like that even without NeXT. Hopefully. Anyways I always find the 1984 Elite more impressive anyways :)
The web was invented on a NeXT computer!
I honest to God just thought it came from the X Window System, and I do recognize that's silly as it was an entirely optional component during installation
I vaguely knew this history, but I missed the news that the X has been dropped from the OS name. I thought people were just being colloquial when not using it.
Does anyone know, if those MacOS Servers one or two decades ago were "Unix-Certified" (which was for some reason very important for some companies those days, a reason not to just use Linux but buy expensive propriety Unix OS's ) or was it still more XNU-like?
nice video
I’m sad that you failed to mention that Apple actually didn’t drop the X even now. The macOS 15 Seqouia we see now is actually still macOS 10.20 internally
What do you mean? My whole point was that the X is still there… I show XNU in Terminal on Sequoia…
You just earned your 700th Like from me!
XNU is running secretly on Risc-V for testing purposes.
Guess it’s not a secret any more. 🤷🏻♂️
Hello guys hope y´all are doing fine. God Bless
You too. Thanks for watching!
isnt the MacOS kernel, Darwin. The same as all the others apple kernels like the ones in Iphones and Ipads etc? I think. Also Isnt Xnu just like GNU, just the core utilties. Maybe I have no idea
It really comes down to how you define an OS kernel but XNU is actually the kernel within Darwin, so they're both technically kernels (although some would say neither are). This is from the wikipedia page on Darwin:
"The kernel of Darwin is XNU, a hybrid kernel which uses OSFMK 7.3"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
@@AnsonAlexander I am intrigued. Thank you fir the explanation & artice!
@@AnsonAlexander Darwin is more than a kernel. It’s a full OS, which includes the Unix userland utilities, and other open source parts like the CUPS printing subsystem. (IIRC)
I head doom was made on next
so the kernel is XNU
the OS is Darwin
the fork is Mac OS
It wasn't Steve, it was Avi Tevanian
I made sure to mention him - he did the software side. Steve put the team together though and gave them high level direction.
X gonn give it you!
haha, should have been playing when i introduced XNU...
3:33 "cope land" really?
Yes, as in the composer, Aaron Copland. And it was to be followed by Gershwin, as in the composer George Gershwin.
@@williamp6800 I didn't know that
@@memetech- I’ve been a Mac guy since ‘85, and lived through “the dark times.” Every OS project that went in the dumpster is still etched in my mind. Copland, Gershwin, Pink, Taligent… and then the rumours of Apple being saved by buying BeOS…
I breathed a sigh of relief when Apple bought NeXT.
Correct, Copland. Not Copeland. That is indeed a lazy typo.
‼️3:32 dude snitching on himself having no knowledge of classical composers 😂 who TF is Copeland?
Excellent presentation! Thank you for explaining the reasoning behind the X in Mac OSX all these years. Sadly, it's been dropped now but, as you point out, it still lives on underneath the hood.
Can you cover why iOS hasn't been rebranded (yet) to phoneOS? And maybe iCloud to cloudOS?
Thank you!
Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it. Good thoughts on the other OS names. Your ideas make sense - I'll have to look into it!
iOS was originally called iPhone OS until the iPad came along. I suspect it’s keeping the iOS name simply because it’s such a well known brand at this point.
That, and it already has the (lowercase variant)(uppercase “OS”) name format that Apple is using across all their operating system branding.
iCloud is not going to be rebranded cloudOS because it’s not an operating system, but rather a set of services.
0:30 Ehh. I think this is a BIG stretch. Steve's never even hinted at this. Not to metnion this tenuous connection could also reference the X in "UNIX".
Given that Apple has also used X now in iPhone and a few other places, I am pretty sure it was *never* a reference to NextStep explicitly.
The iteration of MacOS 9? NeXT? X11? In MacOS X using xQuartz you could run anything linux over TCP/IP: ssh -Y linuxbox, then launch firefox& or xeyes&
The X is just invisible.
"XNU is not Unix." Except it is. macOS is Unix 03 certified.
It’s certified and macOS is mostly Unix but it all started with that Mach + BSD Unix kernel
Stone Age...HA!!! Gimme an IMSAI 8080 running BASIC from a cassette deck, using a Teletype 33 as an interface. Been there, done that. Now that's Stone Age! Oh, and NeXT didn't create BSD nor the Mach kernel. They just appropriated them and bodged them together. Typical of Mr Jobs to do this then take all the credit...
I didn't say they created BSD or Mach, just that they combined them to create XNU which was used to create what has been the 2nd most popular operating system for 2+ decades.
But Jobs did hire the creator of the Mach kernel to work for him at Next.
Not quite right Apple did not want next nor did it want XNU Steve forced them to buy it if they wanted him to come and fix Apple
The fix was using the XNU kernel and the dev tools of OpenStep.
mid kernel, literally stole the name of GNU, proprietary software, not really all that interesting
The simple reason as to why they did not replace XNU after renaming OS X to macOS: if it ain't broke, don't fix it
Also i think the X actually was used to symbolise that the possibilities are endless and that anything could happen in the future.
GNU ?
W vid can I have a pin
Pins are tough... go for heart first! Thanks for watching!
I’m sorry bro, but you’re wrong. The X never meant to represent the XNU kernel.
There is a lot of evidence that the "X" was a purposeful shout to Next, NeXTSTEP and XNU but, regardless, this was a historical overview about the "X" that has never left macOS - the XNU kernel - and it's importance to macOS, iOS and Apple. I hope you enjoyed.
"Everything you use today"?
Yeah, right. NOT.
I meant any Apple product. iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, etc.
If only they could ditch the vestigial menu bar. They've had multitasking for two decades, it's time to move on.
Of course I know it never left with the amount of __MACOSX folders I still see in zips that I get sent REGULARLY!!!
A ye olde UNIX guy it's all UNIX... in fact the OSX "DOC" is a CDE, Common Desktop Envi. Ripoff.. which I used on SUN, HP, AIX, and tried it on SGI...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment
BSD and Mach both came out of UNIX but, together, many consider them a hybrid kernel. First two "hybrid" kernels mentioned are Windows NT and Apple XNU: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel
Did you mean "dock"? CDE came out in 1993. The NextStep design exists since 1988, so no. CDE ripped off Workspace seven years after the fact.