Click "Edit page" to edit this list.

Welcome to the Typical Mac User Live show. My name is Victor Cajiao and I am your host this evening. My regular Podcast Typical Mac User Podcast can be found at www.typicalmacuser.com and that shows is released weekly on Tuesday nights.

If you are listening to the Talkshoe stream and want to be an interactive part of the show. All you have to do is sign up for Talkshoe at www.talkshoe.com (It's free) and get an ID

The you can Call Phone Number: (724) 444-7444
Talkcast ID: 3097 you will be asked top put in your talkcast ID and then you can put in the number you choose for your talkcast ID.

Topics for show

A deep dive into OS X

Well while I was gone on vacation I did a show about the history of the GUI. One of my listeners wrote and and reminded me that I forgot to mention NEXTSTEP in my history and of course he was right.

Tonight I wanted to digg feeper into exactly what is OS X and it's NEXTSTEP roots from a history, functionality and usability perspective. I'm confident that much of this information will be familiar ground to many of the long time mac user listeners but if you are like me and fairly new to the Mac you will discover some information about the OS X operating system that you may not have know.

As always I'll look to my live audience to keep me honest and chime in as many of my listeners in the aduience are not Mac newbies.

A Brief History of Mac OS X

• May 1985 was not a good mont for Steve Jobs. All of his operational responsibilities at Apple were "taken away" from him because the board at Apple was not please with his overall performance.

• No a demotion but an opportunity

• Within week of Jobs being effectivly demoted he came up with an idea for a startup for which he pulled in five other Apple employees.

• The idea was to create the perfect research computer (for Universities and research labs).

NEXT Computing was born and Jobs was off to the races once more to build his next "perfect OS"

• NEXTSTEP 1.0 shipped on September 18, 1989, over two years later than what Jobs had first predicted and hoped for.

• By 1996, there had been many version of NEXTSTEP including ONESTEP and one version for the PC, and things were not looking good for them.

• All along the way Apple had been looking for a new Operating system. In 1996 Steve Jobs called Amelio the current CEO of APple, to discuss possibilities of licensing OPENSTEP (the follower to ONESTEP. Jobs pitched NeXT technology very strongly to Apple,and eventually Apple acquired NeXT in February, 1997, for $427 million. Many think this was one of the best moves (one of very few that Amelio made.

• Apple named its upcoming NeXT-based system Rhapsody. Rhapsody saw two developer releases, in September, 1997, and May, 1998.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: ANYONE IN THE AUDIENCE EVER USE RHAPSODY? OR WHAT WAS THE BUZZ THEN ABOUT WHAT WAS HAPPENING.

• Next a monumental even took place at Apple. Once again Jobs became the interim CEO of Apple on September 16, 1997.

• Mac OS X was first mentioned in Apple's OS strategy announcement at the 1998 WWDC. Jobs said that OS X would ship in the fall of 1999, and would inherit from both Mac OS and Rhapsody. Moreover, backward compatibility would be maintained to ease customers into the transition.

• Mac OS X did come out in 1999, as Mac OS X Server 1.0 (March 16, 1999), a developer preview of the desktop version, and as Darwin 0.1. Mac OS X beta was released on September 13, 2000.

• So now that we are grounded in the roots of Mac OS X lets dig a lot deeper into OS X architecture

• Darwin

• The first version of Darwin, 0.1, was released on March 16, 1999 as a fork of a developer release of Rhapsody. Although Darwin is an operating system in itself, it's really a collection of technologies that have been integrated by Apple to form a major, central part of Mac OS X. By the way a learning for me was that critical application environments of Mac OS X, like Cocoa and Carbon, are not part of Darwin. I simply did not know this until doing the research for this piece.

• So what's in Darwin?

If you don't believe that Darwin is a mash up of many technology's consider that starting with Darwin 7.0.x (corresponding to Mac OS X 10.3.x) Darwin consists of over 250 packages.

• Many of these are Apple packages (including the Mac OS X kernel and various drivers), while the others originate from *BSD, GNU, etc.

• Apple has leveraged a lot of existing open source software by integrating it well (usually) with their system: apache, bind, binutils, cvs, gcc, gdb, gimp_print, kerberos, mysql, openssh, openssl, pam, perl, postfix, ppp, python, rsync, samba, and many more BSD/GNU/other packages ... are all part of Darwin.

• The one thing you can count on with Darwin is that in a lot of case, Apple has made important modifications to open source code to optimize/adapt it to their platform

• Any house is built of layers

• Mac OS X like any operating system is built of layers of operations. It is a very difficult thing to desbriby but let me try by using the metaphor of building a house.

Any house needs a good foundation or it will surely fall. Well MAX OS Ten's foundation starts with the hardware.

need a physical computer to run the OS. That in essence is our foundation on which the house rests.

• The framing for the walls of our house come in the form of the Open Firmware. Open Firmware is a non-proprietary, platform (CPU and system) independent boot firmware. Similar to a PC's BIOS, Open Firmware is stored in ROM and is the first stored program to be executed upon power-up.

You can enter Open Firmware by pressing the key combination cmd-opt-O-F just as you power on a Macintosh. Once you do this you should see a welcome message and some other verbiage, and should be dropped into a prompt . You can continue booting the machine by typing mac-boot, or shut it down by typing shut-down.

• The core electrical wiring and dry wall for our walls come in the form on the The Kernel. The Mac OS X kernel, and it's object extensions make up the Kernel Environment, the lowest (most fundamental) layer of Mac OS X. These objects include. . .

• XNU Mach: takes care of preemptive multitasking, including kernel threads,protected memory,virtual memory management, inter-process communication,interrupt management and other things.

• BSD component uses FreeBSD as the primary reference codebase. Some aspects that BSD is responsible for include: * process model,user ids, permissions, basic security policies,TCP/IP stack, BSD sockets, firewall and others

• I/O Kit uses a restricted subset of C++ (based on Embedded C++) as its programming language. This system is

responsible for input and output, throwing exceptions and too many low level functions to get into here.

• Once our foundation is poured, the walls are framed, electrical is in and dry wall is hung we can start building our house even more with some Core services In Darwin

• The Core Services layer can be visualized as sitting atop the kernel. This layer's most important sub-components are CoreFoundation.framework and CoreServices.framework. It contains various critical non-GUI system services (including APIs for managing threads and processes, resource, virtual memory and filesystem interaction):

• Application Services. This layer can be visualized as being on top of Core Services. It includes services that make up the graphics and windowing environment of Mac OS X.The core of the windowing environment is called Quartz. Quartz consists of broadly two entities: Quartz Compositor: consists of the window server (the WindowServer program) and some private libraries. Quartz implements a layered compositing engine, in which every pixel on a screen can be shared between different windows in real time.

• Next comes the Application Environments which to are equivalent to the final touches or our home. The carpet, wood flooring, nice kitchen cabinets, toilets that flush etc. They provide the programing environments that all of our favorite OS X programs depend on and that we must have in order to have what we call our "mac user experience"

There are multiple execution environments on Mac OS X within which respective applications execute:

SHOW ENDING:

Well I want to thank Kreg Steppe from the valid Syntax and Technorama podcast for being here tonight. Also everyone listening to the stream the re-podcasted show, those of you in the chat and of course those of you on the phones for participating in another great Typical Mac User Live Podcast. Remember my regular Podcast Typical Mac User Podcast can be found at www.typicalmacuser.com and that shows is released weekly on Tuesday nights. This show will be release in my sream late tonight. If you haven't subscribed to that show yet, head over to the web site at www.typicalmacuser.com and hit the ONE BUTTON iTunes subscription.

For now this is your Host Victor Cajiao saying, enjoy the rest of your Sunday