Re: Where Are The Computer Companies?

On 4 Jun 2025 03:30:11 GMT, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote in
<ma9su2Fgg9qU3@mid.individual.net>:

On Wed, 4 Jun 2025 00:08:29 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
 

When people think “Unix” nowadays, they really mean a Linux or BSD
system. That’s what works they way they expect a “Unix” system to work.
Not Apple.

 
I think AIX. It's System V with tweaks. Back in the early '80s we have
something that looked a lot like Unix running on a PDP-11 but it
couldn't have been Unix since you couldn't really buy Unix.
 
Unix always was a mine field, as SCO found out when their principal
product was lawsuits.

Insert here boilerplate that I should save as a FAQ:

UNIX® is a registered trademark of The Open Group.

https://unix.org/trademark.html

The trademark is capitalized.  The lower-case usage is generic.

LINUX, for all intents and purposes, is a Unix.  So is BSD.

MacOS is UNIX®.  We've had a Mac mini, and iMac, and now
a Mac Studio.  I ssh into it remotely to fiddle, and it
has a better-than-POSIX shell environment.  When I need
to get at GUI apps, I vnc into it, which can be enabled
in MacOS as "screen sharing".

The GUI interface is based on Cocoa from NeXTStep, which
also has a lot of components available in GNUStep on Linux.
(Indeed, my Linux desktop runs Cairo dock, which looks
and acts like the MacOS dock.)  The display server is integrated
into the window manager -- much like Wayland's architecture.
I suspect this is why there's the "!APPLE" config flag that
Lawrence is harping on -- by default, MacOS doesn't have
an X11 display server.

Penultimately, Apple does contribute to the open source community.
CUPS, for example, is maintained by Apple, and is what makes
Linux printing so easy.

And finally:  I once bought a car in the 00's that came with
an iPod.  So when Underworld was having an "exclusive" concert
online only for Apple devices, I was able to get a shell on
the iPod and find the URL for the concert -- then played it
using mplayer on my Linux box.  In this way (at least at the time),
iOS is to MacOS what Android is to Linux -- both exercises in embedded
Unix.

--
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