In this first part of a two-part series, Simson Garfinkel and Michael Mahoney explain why Cocoa and Mac OS X aren’t nearly as revolutionary as they are evolutionary — and still in the process of refinement. The story begins with Apple’s genesis in the 1970s and takes you through key events up through 1993, when NeXTSTEP began to flounder. In Part Two (Friday, May 10), Simson and Michael pick up the story with the Star Trek project and bring you to the current iteration of Mac OS X. Update: Apple has released a “Kernel Programming” online book, which has a wide and diverse audience like the set of potential system software developers for MacOSX, including the following sorts of developers: device-driver writers, network-extension writers, file-system writers, developers of software that modifies file system data on-the-fly, system programmers familiar with BSD, Linux, and similar OSes, developers who want to learn about kernel programming.
Steve Jobs and the History of Cocoa, Part I
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
If “X” stands for that which is unknown, then Apple’s next-generation operating system is fundamentally misnamed.
But what if “X” just stands for 10? The next number after OS 9?
I does stand for 10. Officially it’s pronounced “Mac OS Ten” with, for example, 10.1 being “Mac OS Ten Ten Point One”.
I know it actually does mean 10. But that’s something the writers don’t actually assume. They assume it to be mean something different. I would like to see them write an article about Windows XP and base if off the military designation for XP (eXPerimental) rather than eXPerience
>the military designation for XP
I’m sure that the plane will just have the X in the name:
XF-16, X-31
I think it’s good that Apple are using a 2000-year old numbering
system, designed to work well with an abacus. It shows some respect
for tradition.
There’s also the tradition of showing the copyright dates in film
credits in Roman numerals. Any film buff should be able to convert
MDXXXVIII to Indian numerals.
X stands for 10 and uniX. The latter is similar to X Windows (windowing for uniX) and LinuX (Linus’ unix). I don’t know why people are making such a fuss about it. It’s much more logical than XP.
It’s marketing and appearance. So what?
X Windows is NOT windowing for uniX
X Windows was called ‘X’ because of mouse pointer shape used in the protocol.
X Windows is OS agnostic.
VMS is one good example.
Hmm, I didn’t know that. Better get myself a new example. You do agree on LinuX?