The Challenges of Integrating the Unix and Mac OS Environments (2000)

[mrpippy]

"Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null"

https://www.brainmapping.org/MarkCohen/UNIXad.pdf

[lordleft]

Does anyone else remember when MacOS marketing made UNIX a significant part of its sales pitch? I remember a giant, titanium UNIX logo

[kergonath]

They also had adverts such as this one: http://www.brainmapping.org/MarkCohen/UNIXad.pdf [edit] also linked by mrpippy below.

There used to be things like this on Apple's website, too: https://www.apple.com/media/us/osx/2012/docs/OSX_for_UNIX_Us...

I can't find any mention of UNIX in Big Sur's pages, even though it is listed as certified on the Open Group's website.

[jonjacky]

Yes, I do. I recall they had ads where they showed the amazing things you could do with one-line commands at the shell - they had examples of pipelines including grep and awk etc. I remember being amused that these familiar idioms that had been used in the Unix/Linux world for ages were being presented as amazing new capabilities.

[mhd]

Yes, they got it certified with 10.5, I think. Small market these days, although I'm always surprised when I hear that both AIX and HP-UX are still receiving updates...

[pram]

It worked on me! I bought a PowerBook G4 in 2003, when I heard Fink/MacPorts and Jaguar were no longer complete nightmares to use. Been Mac only since then.

[bsharitt]

That's what got me onto MacOS X for many years.

[pwinnski]

I still remember being in awe that they pulled this off at all, clumsy as some of the compromises were.

Newer filesystems and application designs have eliminated many of the differences, although I still miss resource forks.

[klodolph]

I feel the modern approach takes the main strengths of resource forks and builds on them—instead of needing to use ResEdit, all of your application resources are just ordinary files stored in a directory. Images are stored in standard formats like PNG, data is often stored in plist or text formats.

[donatj]

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but macOS still has resource forks, right?

My understanding is that's where file tags, file comments and custom file icons are stored.

[m463]

I think resource forks suck.

That said, I think metadata about a file outside of the file has always been problematic. I don't know if there's ever been a clean solution to timestamps, r/w/x, ACLs and more.

[bad_username]

> some of the user interface features pioneered by Mac OS such the desktop

That is not true. The desktop metaphor, for example, was first introduced at Xerox PARC in 1970, and used commercially in the Xerox Star workstation in 1981.

[eschaton]

Not really, the basis for the desktop metaphor came from research done at IBM, and it was very extensively revised at Apple for Lisa. (See “Inventing the Lisa User Interface” from ACM Interactions in 1995.)

[JohnBooty]

Seems a deliberate and acceptable word choice. pioneer != inventor

[mattl]

That's not what pioneered means.

[musicale]

Apple seems to have a long history of integrations of Mac OS (and the Mac user interface) and UNIX, starting in the 1980s and continuing through today: A/UX, AWS (Apple Workgroup Server), MAE, Rhapsody, OS X, modern macOS...

Not to mention the OS X-like variants for their other platforms: iOS, tvOS, iPadOS, watchOS...

Also consider the various Mach implementations on Apple hardware: MacMach, MachTen, MkLinux, OS X/Darwin...

Sadly it seems that the classic Mac API died when Carbon and 32-bit apps died, so you can't easily port old Mac apps to modern macOS. macOS (and iOS) seem to have a rather poor record for backward compatibility, and it's only going to get worse with the current architectural switch to Apple Silicon...