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Comment by batista | Hacker News Reader

>I don't believe this story at all, at all... NeXTStep, the precursor to OS X, was running on a 486DX2/66 I had in about 1995. NeXTStep ran on PA-RISC, Intel x86, Motorola 68K and SPARC architectures since well before 2000.

You missed the part where OS X diverged A LOT from NeXTStep in the years that followed.

1996's NeXTStep running on x86 and 2001's OS X running on x86 is a different beast altogether.

You seem to think OS X is just NeXTStep with a new theme -- actually it had lots of changes and hell of a lot of frameworks that didn't exist in NeXTStep.

From simple stuff (the window compositing manager, wasn't in NeXTStep, the Dock wasn't in NeXTStep, etc) to heavy additions: Carbon wasn't in NeXTStep, and it was absolutely crucial to OS X at the time, for easy porting of apps from OS 9.

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up until OSX DP1 the x86 builds were regularly shipped to ADC members with a familiar Mac UI. it seemed like "Classic" aka OS7/8/9 binaries running with minimal emulation was the main reason x86 builds temporarily disappeared from the public eye (to a very strange shock & awe in journalistic circles upon its return)

Worth noting, though, that those x86 builds used, and that classic theme was built in, Display Postscript.

The newer Quartz display subsystem only ever shipped for the PowerPC in the dev previews.

And the kernel changed from Mach 2.5 to Mach 3, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU.

There was also the odd Rhapsody project, which delivered a BSD-based Mac OS on x86 since 1997: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) - wonder how that fits in with the quora post.

Carbon sits on top of lower-level pieces - remember, we are talking about the guts of Mach and BSD and IO and drivers, not software that sits on top of it. There was definitely a Dock in NS :-)

May I ask, have you ever used a NS3.3 or 4.2 based system for any length of time?

To get to the welcome to the Macintosh screen (per the original answer), we are talking about the software on top of it. Carbon was probably not an easy port (endian issues to start with) never mind the switch in vector units.

>Carbon sits on top of lower-level pieces - remember, we are talking about the guts of Mach and BSD and IO and drivers

No, we also talk about all the higher level stuff -- the post says that he showed them a booting OS X, with Aqua, Carbon, apps et al running normally. This is not just porting the lower levels, this is a full stack port of OS X to x86.

>*There was definitely a Dock in NS :-)(

Not the Dock.app. The tiled NS dock has nothing to do with the functionality and look of the OS X app, it's a completely different app.

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