Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 05:05:33 GMT From: Rob Levandowski <roblnopsamhiz.com> Subject: Re: A Macintosh Computers and A Saab?
In article <3E9886DC.4B668B52nopsamsizefitterzzzz.com>, Johannes H Andersen <johsnopsamsizefitterzzzz.com> wrote: > Since I'm a cheapskate, I have only little experience in Apple. > Unix-based O/S - system 8? sounds good, but is it compatible with > earlier Apple O/S? PC's are cheap and can be upgraded from time to time, > and then there's always Linux. Apple is not an open architecture, this > is the real difference. This inevitably makes for more consistency, but > you have to pay for that privilege. In terms of style over substance, > Apple is like the Smart car. Mac OS X (pronounced "ten," Roman numeral) is compatible with most earlier Mac programs, all the way back to the original Macintosh from 1984. Old programs that won't work are those that talk directly to the hardware (such as "Norton Utilities" type programs) or which use unpublished interfaces that Apple warned might go away (that is, programs written by cocky programmers who screwed themselves). In most cases, there's an OS X "native" replacement. Mac OS X is based on BSD UNIX, and is increasingly compatible with FreeBSD. The UNIX core of OS X is indeed open source: it's called Darwin. However, the advanced graphics manager and user interfaces are proprietary. Still, OS X does ship with a full set of developer tools based on the GNU compilers, including a fully object-oriented graphic development environment. Macs take the same RAM as PCs, use the same PCI bus (and often the same cards), and share the same USB and FireWire/IEEE-1394/iLink peripherals. As for style over substance: I can use my Mac to run Word and Excel, surf the web, do my banking, play games, as well as run UNIX software like the Apache webserver, an LDAP server, a library card-catalog system based on MySQL... and do it all simultaneously. Kinda like how my Saab could be a sporty car that still held five people in comfort and navigated upstate New York winters with aplomb. :) -- Rob Levandowski roblnopsamhiz.com (Opinions expressed are solely my own and not a statement from my employer)
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