580: Twenty Years of OS X

The Unix heritage, in particular, makes the Mac a joy to work with for techies like me. I think that might have helped some developers along - which is good for the ecosystem.

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I also bought my first Mac 7 years ago. Itā€™s still my main machine. Speaks volumes that that is possible. See myself as newcomer as well, even though at work Iā€™m known as the ļ£æguy, haha.

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Oh I agree. The Unix bones, X Window System, etc. probably gave OS X a familiarity, legitimacy, and robustness that helped win developers and users over. That is speculation on my part, however I think Microsoftā€™s continued work on the Windows Subsystem for Linux also adds credence to that argument.

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I am full in Apple fan. I still have a windows computer or two. They are not used often. My work computer is a Windows computer.

The foundation of OS X in Unix was the best thing to happen. I had someone tell me that Unix was obsolete. This was in the mid 90s. The absurdity of that statement is laughable.

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If you had ask me yesterday I would have said most of the Internet ran on Unix/linux servers. Boy, would I have been wrong.

Hello there! Happy to see that MPU now has a nice Discourse-based forum, I have been absent as a listener for a long while, but the @MacSparky newsletter had the news of the macOS 20th anniversary, I have just finished listening to this episode which I thoroughly enjoyed!

I have been an Apple user since I first put my 13 yo hands on an Apple ][+, and have lived thru the first years of the Mac (including having an original 1984 Mac, an SE and later an SE/30), I was on the dark side for many years, when I sold my SE/30 to get an IBM AT with an 80286 CPU.

Many years passed, I worked for a large multinational in networking and security which had just left Apple hardware and moved to Windows 95 as I joined, and only came back to the Apple family in 2009.

I missed many interesting years, but not the iPhone which I got in 2008, and that was my way to get back into the Mac, too.

Lately I have invested a fair amount of time into listening to amazing interviews of former Apple staff being interviewed by the Computer History Museum team, and found many interviews and panels delightful, with many stories about Steve Jobs, his quirks, his genius, his humanity, and his failures.

The one interview which blends very well with the theme of this episode is the one with Avie Tevanian, who invented the Mach kernel at the core of NeXT and later implemented in OSX.

Itā€™s two separate VERY LONG interviews, done in 2017, the first one from his youth to when NeXT was acquired by Apple, while the second one is fully focused on his very productive years at Apple, managing software engineering right during the times mentioned oh so well by @ismh in the episode.

As I have listened to these two interviews over the past few days, my recollection of the events as told by Tevanian and @ismh made me appreciate even more how the choices made by Jobs and his team at the newborn Apple had such a powerful impact on the machines we use and love.

The story behind Carbon is told by Tevanian in very much the same exact terms like it is discussed on the episode, but with even greater nuances.

Itā€™s nice to broaden the historical perspective on a company which has such a deep influence on many of us!

Here are the links, if anyone is interested in hearing a software geek talk about software and life events of someone who loves making software! :wink:

The pre-Apple days:

The Apple days:

Greetings all from Switzerland!

Ciao, Luca

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@lucaberta

Thanks for sharing this. Iā€™m adding it to the list for the next feedback episode.

Also, welcome back!

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I really enjoyed this episode. My first Mac was an iBook G4 with OSX Panther. This was drastically different than the beige-box Windows family computer I was used to. I still couldnā€™t believe the idea that you could install a program simply by dragging the icon into the Applications folder.