Gruber makes multiple references to Jobs' faults in that article. He is simply shredding the quotes that Issacson used without actually thinking about what they meant or checking the facts.
What about this article do you think is Gruber twisting Issacson's words?. Every example has a well documented reason on why Issacson is flat out wrong.
Did we read the same article? Where does Gruber "shred" anything? Bill Gates says that "Instead the purchase ended up bringing in Avie Tevanian, who could help the existing Apple operating system evolve so that it eventually incorporated the kernel of the NeXT technology.", and Gruber says "Mac OS X 10.0 was a hybrid of Mac and NeXT technology, but it was clearly the NeXT system with Mac technologies integrated, not the other way around."
What Bill Gates said was absolutely true! Rhapsody with the NeXT Mach kernel, a pulled-in, non-NeXT BSD application layer, and then various other Mac layers (GUI, Cocoa, etc). Technically there is nothing wrong with his statement.
But it doesn't sound as impressive to Steve Jobs to say that only the microkernel (which we know is a critical part of a system), so better still to simply claim Gates is the liar?
> and then various other Mac layers (GUI, Cocoa, etc).
Incorrect. The GUI wasn't ported, it was rewritten for OS X. Cocoa's heritage is NeXT to the core. Nothing vaguely resembling Cocoa existed in the classic Mac environment.
> a pulled-in, non-NeXT BSD application layer
Incorrect. There is little of "BSD" in the Mac OS X environment, save for some FreeBSD userland components, most of which only matter on the command line. The application layer of Mac OS X is Cocoa.
(There is also the Carbon application layer which does partially derive from classic Mac, but that existed solely to ease application porting of existing Mac apps. But even Carbon is a hybrid, and was actually back-ported to Mac OS 9.)
> Technically there is nothing wrong with his statement.
Any Mac OS X software developer will know enough to confidently refute the accuracy of Gates' claims.
> What Bill Gates said was absolutely true! Rhapsody with the NeXT Mach kernel, a pulled-in, non-NeXT BSD application layer, and then various other Mac layers (GUI, Cocoa, etc). Technically there is nothing wrong with his statement.
Actually, technically there's everything wrong with that statement. It's just not the case.
Cocoa is NeXTStep. Take a look at the APIs. Everything is prefixed with NS.
The old Carbon APIs were completely reimplemented--those original Mac OS Classic APIs were mostly written in 68000 assembly with a liberal amount of Pascal thrown in--totally unsuitable for the new flagship OS.
I used OpenStep for about a year before the first OS X Betas were released. I can tell you first hand that Rhapsody was 90% NeXT and 10% veneer to make it "look like a Mac". "Terminal.app" barely changed from OpenStep to Mac OS X. Several other apps looked identical too. I'm pretty sure the minify button iconified the icons the way OpenStep used to.
Don't forget that NeXTStep/OpenStep had a full BSD subsystem too. That's not new or unique to Mac OS X. Go to your terminal and "man open". Notice the "First appeared in NextStep" part.
The fact is Mac OS X 10.0 is NeXTStep/OpenStep with some extra compatibility layers for the carbon APIs (plus an VM for doing running OS 9 apps). Saying that they "just pulled the kernel out" is patently false.
Yes, I have. And I can confidently say that Mac OS X, even today after a decade of evolution and sweeping changes, is clearly a direct descendant of NeXTStep and has little in common with System 7. I'll also reiterate what others said -- there is everything wrong with Gates' statement.
I do iOS development now, and I spent the 90s doing NeXTSTEP/OpenStep. I still own two NeXT machines.
The main differences now are 1) cheaper, faster hardware, 2) menubar at the top instead of a floating vertical menu, 3) I keep the Dock on the left instead of on the right side of the screen, 4) fancier development tools.
What about this article do you think is Gruber twisting Issacson's words?. Every example has a well documented reason on why Issacson is flat out wrong.