MacOS version history

This is SUPPPPPPPPPER sketchy, someone more knowledgeble please fill out.

Mac OSX is a premier operating system. Its considered more conversative than its main competitor for the consumer desktop, microsft windows. Whereas microsoft has the man power to roll out completely rewritten code every 3 years, apple bid its time wisely, and the history of OSX can be traced back at least 15 years.

Theres three main paths that can be followed to a confluence point in apple computers.

First from the operating system view

In 1986, next(maybe even something else) was developing a product based on the mach kernel.

(Someone please trace the history of Next, and its involvement with apple during the early to mid 90's, namely, WHY was Next able to survive...was it living off apple? or did it have to go to apple because it was not performing on its own).

In late 1996, Next was fully responsible for getting the apple team up to date. Over the next 4 years, it helped apple with the systems side of osx.

Next from the GUI perspective

Since its inception practically, apple has always been about innovation. It made a mistake (which it can't be blamed for) by dividing its resources among the lisa and the macintosh in 1984. But as the lisa never caught on (from 84-86), apple focused on macintosh. Through these efforts, it developed through research and trial and error a set of human interface guidelines, with its first release as a book in ????. Apple continued to focus lots of its effort on creating a usable operating system, to the point where it began to lose strength because of its lack of professional features. Nonetheless, when it came time for OSX, apple poured on its experience in GUI, and usability desig. .

Finally, from the language/third party developer perspective

Apple was responsible for smalltalk which begat java and objective-c. Apple pushed objective C, which was feasable long before java. Now, objc, java, AND python can be used to program OSX natively. Its stuck with objc since 1990 basically, and this has created a sense of confidence and comfort among the developer community. Adding industry standards like java and python only furthered this comfort. Contrasted with microsoft, which completely develops its own languages, apple's choice has shown to be more elegant, but microsoft has the market, and hence the manpower to do what it wants.

Bringing it all together

Apple developed its gui/usability experience as much as its systems experience (and that of next's) into making OSX.

By relying on next and BSD (something thats 30 years old), on objectiveC, and staying true to the BSD spirit of keeping things open, apple has mixed its classic conservative approach with a humble approach toward the power of the opensource community.