John Hinsley wrote:
> 
> Tim Rowledge wrote:
> >
> > John Hinsley <jhinsley at telinco.co.uk> is widely believed to have written:
> >
> > > My own guess is that Apple will, sooner or later, have to drop Mac OS in
> > > favour of OSX.
> > OSX _is_ MacOS; they've simply finally done the sensible thing and put a
> > real bottom layer under all the fluffy bits that make a machine more
> > than a dead commandline machine. I just wish Acorn had got around to
> > doing the same thing.
> >
> 
> Aaaaarggghhh! I really don't want to talk about Macs: I can't afford one
> and I don't know anyone (except virtually) who can. We are poor folk
> ;-).
> 
> But it seems to me that you can't argue (and it's an argument by
> definition!) that "OSX _is_ MacOS" when they're still shipping the
> things with OS8 (or whatever) -- or at least, they were last time I
> looked.
> 
> Where do we differ? Am I substantially wrong when I say that OSX looks
> to be a sort of high speed collision between BSD, Mach and a front end
> (aka fluffy bits) designed IIRC by the Nautilus folk?
> 
> Where is the OS? In the fluffy bits?

You have the core level which is called Darwin, that is a modified BSD,
it's 
free. Then you have a display engine that is called Quartz and is 
display PDF, vector/postscript display. And you have three ways to run 
apps: 
Classic: Load old mac os under mac os x.
Carbon: A subset of the classic api that let's program run on both old
 mashines, the ones to old to run os x, and also run on os x with protected
memory and preemtive multitasking.
Cocoa: Build apps in objective C or java and run with the full lib support.
And you can also compile BSD apps and run them too.

Karl