[Ham-Mac] [linuxham] OS X hint

[Kristen A. McIntyre]

Regarding Mac OS X, it is not "real unix".  It is also a "work-alike," but of a different flavor (as are later releases of BSD).  OS X derives from Mach - a microkernel project done at CMU that was a 4.3 BSD work alike.  2BSD derives from 7th Edition, and 4BSD, Unix 32V, but all of the ATT dependencies were removed (read, made into a work-alike) for the 4.3 Tahoe release, followed by 4.3 Reno, so that it wouldn't be encumbered by strict ATT licensing issues - now carried on by what's left of SCO.  FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc. are all derived from 4.3 Reno, I believe.

More history here:

http://www.levenez.com/unix/unix_a4.pdf

I was around for much of this, working at both Sun and Apple.

On Jul 31, 2010, at 11:34 AM, Elwood C. Downey wrote:

> Two little things. One is, since I've been using UNIX since it was first released from
> Bell Labs in the 70s, I'm want to say that Linux is a "work-alike" to UNIX and has a
> completely separate heritage. It was started from scratch by Linus Torvalds in the early
> 90s. On the other hand, Mac OS X is "real UNIX" in that it derives from Berkeley UNIX,
> aka "BSD", one of the early adopters of the Bell Labs source.


                                     -Kristen (K6WX)

"Your eyes ... it's a day's work just looking into them" 
                                        Laurie Anderson

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