| When then-Apple-CEO Gil Amelio announced in 1997 that the company had bought NeXT and that Steve Jobs, Apple's erstwhile founder and visionary, would be returning, many die-hard Macintosh fans were horrified. Apple was not in good shape at the time, and the purchase of NeXT almost certainly meant that the beloved but creaky old Mac OS would be replaced by something new: the rock-solid but rather schizophrenic NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP operating system developed at Jobs's company. This operating system was based on Unix and aimed at high-powered professional workstation users, not the novices and creative pros who traditionally used Macs. To many, then, the absorption of NeXT meant the imminent end of the era of the Macintosh as the user-friendly, nonthreatening computer for everyday people.
All eyes were on Jobs as he took control and began rebuilding Apple from its mid-90s doldrums, and nobody was quite sure what to expect from the rumored next-generation operating system, code named Rhapsody, which was being built for Macintosh computers mostly by Jobs's long-time collaborators from NeXT. Would Rhapsody be just like the old Mac OS, with the old, well-worn look and feel, but more stable? Or would it be more like OPENSTEP—an often too-thin veneer of usability over an awkward and hard-edged core of Unix?
As it turned out, the Mac OS X that Apple shipped to customers in 2001 had genes from both of its progenitors. From the user's standpoint, it shared most of its design metaphors with the classic Mac OS, and a long-time Mac user could figure it out without too much trouble. But under the hood, it was a NeXT fan's dream; without putting too fine a point on it, Mac OS X is really the most modern version of OPENSTEP, with a flashy user interface and some libraries for classic Mac OS compatibility tacked on. Programmers used to the NeXT way of doing things hardly had to change a thing; Apple's Xcode is essentially the same development kit used at NeXT throughout the 1990s. Apple's creation of the slick Aqua interface, with its transparency and animation effects, went a long way toward making this system friendly to the casual user, but there were inevitably a lot of things that novices had to get used to, such as multiuser operation, Unix permissions, and the occasional need—especially toward the beginning, when a lot of features had not yet been fully implemented—to open up this spooky thing called the Terminal where textual Unix commands were to be typed. |
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