OT: btld problem??

[Fairlight]

Confusious (Chris Rendall) say:
> OS X is based on FreeBSD.  You have a full command line available.  My
> Mac uses tcsh as the default shell in the Terminal application.  The
> command line is available for OS X on PowerPC and Intel.

Knew it was based on FreeBSD, although accounts actually seem to vary on
this.  Some say FreeBSD of differing vintages.  Maybe they evolve it with
each new release.  I really broke most contact with Apple main line pre-mac
at about the IIgs (although I've used them), and the last macs I used were
a mac IIcx at university (when those were new, mind you), and a PowerMac
70 at my wife's univesity, also when they were new.  The PowerMac was
anything -but- powerful, and my last experience with the platform, along
with (at that time) still plummeting market share led me to just break from
them.  Their big mistake has remained consistent:  They keep their hardware
platforms proprietary.  That's caused them no end of trouble as far back
as '86, and even a bit before.  I've never gotten that, as which would you
rather have...exclusive control over 2-7% of the market, or a fair amount
of control plus royalties over roughly 50% of the market?  We won't examine
things like their removing all the ground pins from SCSI. :) They've made
some questionable calls that affect even a good segment of the electronic
music industry.

But the funny thing about OS/X itself is that...it's not new as such.  Its
entire main architecture style is about 15yrs old, based in the original
NeXTStep on black NeXT hardware, which ran BSD 4.2 on top of a mach
microkernel, complete with X11 and an awesome wm that has been emulated by
OSS ones in look+feel at least 3 different times, just to my knowledge.

Now we have FreeBSD running on top a mach microkernel and people herald
it as the Next Coming.  I find no end of irony in the fact that, right
down to the microkernel bootstrap layer, it's a 15yr old architecture with
modern code, and the approach really is not much different.  I think Bill
Vermillion said that the displays were different; NeXTStep was a PostScript
display with an identical aspect ratio to print.  I don't think the OS/X
is.  If it is, well...another lift from the past.

None of which is meant to detract from OS/X.  It's sensible, it works, and
it's user-friendly.  No sense in changing something that works.  I have no
problem with the age of the architecture style.  My point is, it's been
done before...and only this time around are people actually sitting up and
taking major notice en masse.  Different target audience and different
marketing sums up a lot of it.  

But those of us that remember the original get to lean back and wonder why
thousands of people just woke up and smelled the coffee when it was ground
over a decade and a half back.  Most of these people wouldn't have allowed
themselves to be pushed near a NeXT.

mark->