[X Newbies] he said, she said.

[Florin Alexander Neumann]

On Thursday, Jul 24, 2003, at 21:41 Canada/Eastern, Tracy Keirns wrote:

> [...] he told me it was wonderful that the Macintosh OS was made from 
> LINUX [...] When I corrected him by saying that OS X was built on Unix 
> he looked at me like I knew nothing about computers

Unix was originally designed in 1969 by Ken Thompson at Bell Labs 
(according to legend, so he could play games on a DEC PDP-7 
minicomputer). It was highly successful and it was eventually adopted 
by many manufacturers, who distributed and supported their own variants 
or version, to the extent that nowadays the term "Unix" (originally 
spelled "UNIX") means a family of related operating systems, rather 
than any specific one. (Apple had its own version, the late unlamented 
A/UX.) Mac OS X is based on a member of this family, the BSD version of 
Unix, developed at UC Berkeley.

Linux (a contraction of "Linus Unix") was originated by an engineer 
from Finland, Linus Torvalds, who re-wrote a Unix kernel (i.e., basic 
elements of the operating system) without using any proprietary code, 
thus creating a version which was free from any corporate restrictions.

So both BSD (on which the Mac OS X is based) and Linux are Unices (some 
prefer "Unixen"), i.e., flavours of Unix. Therefore, in geekspeak, you 
should have replied, "Mac OS X is built on BSD, not Linux".

And, to be pedantic about it, officially there never was such a beast 
as "Macintosh OS". Apple applied the name "Macintosh" both to the 
computer and to the operating system. Eventually, the powers-that-be in 
Cupertino decided that was too confusing, and, sometimes in the '90s (I 
can't recall when), officially baptized the operating system "Mac OS" 
(not "Macintosh OS").

f