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Comment by eddieroger | Hacker News Reader

I preferred this quote:

> The Macintosh on which I type this has 64MB: Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there when you have that much RAM?

My Macintosh running UNIX-compliant OS X on a system with 8GB of RAM laughs at this statement, as I wrote code for my slightly less powerful Apple-made UNIX machine with 1GB of RAM that sits in my pocket.

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Had Apple bought Be instead, the outcome would most likely be completely different.

Be, while not Unix at heart did have a bash based CLI.

Except for the original Mac OS, almost all mainstream OS did have a CLI of some sort.

Having a bash like CLI is meaningless in terms of means to be a UNIX compatible OS.

I was born in 1997, so the only Mac I've ever owned(a 1GHz eMac) has never run anything that wasn't UNIX or UNIX-y. (I toy around with OpenBSD on it now)

Then you also haven't known the world of the Intel Macs. That really changed things since you could now build almost any *nix-based app on the box with very minimal modifications. I think this is one of the reasons they've become so popular with the developer community - UNIX underneath, Aqua to make the system friendly, ability to build almost any code you can compile and run Windows in desperate times thanks to Boot Camp.

By the way, does anyone know what kind of Macintosh had 64 MBs of RAM in 1994?

Most of the midrange and high-end models at the time did support over 64 MB of RAM (the Centris 650/Quadra 800 supported 136 MB, the Quadra 950 supported 256 MB, etc.). In fact, even the 1987 Macintosh II could be pushed to 68 MB (or 128 MB with a ROM upgrade).

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