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Mac OS X is a line of proprietary, graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Computer, the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently shipping Macintosh computers. more...

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Mac OS X is the successor to the original Mac OS, which had been Apple's primary operating system since 1984. Unlike its predecessor, Mac OS X is a Unix-like operating system built on technology that had been developed at NeXT through the second half of the 1980s and up until Apple Computer purchased the company in early 1997. The operating system was first released in 1999 as Mac OS X Server 1.0, with a desktop-oriented version (Mac OS X v10.0) following in March, 2001.

The current server edition, Mac OS X Server, is architecturally identical to its desktop counterpart but usually runs on Apple's line of Macintosh server hardware. Mac OS X Server includes workgroup management and administration software tools that provide simplified access to key network services, including a mail transfer agent, a Samba server, an LDAP server, and a domain name server.

History

Despite its branding as simply "version 10" of the Mac OS, Mac OS X has a history that is almost completely independent of the earlier Mac OS releases.

Mac OS X is based on the Mach kernel and the BSD implementation of Unix, which were incorporated into NEXTSTEP, the object-oriented operating system developed by Steve Jobs's NeXT company after he left Apple in 1985. Meanwhile, during the years without Jobs at the helm, Apple attempted to create a "next-generation" operating system of its own through the Taligent and Copland projects, with little success.

Eventually, NeXT's OS — called OPENSTEP at the time — was selected to form the basis for Apple's next OS, and Apple purchased NeXT outright. Jobs was re-hired, and later returned to the leadership of the company, shepherding the transformation of the programmer-friendly OPENSTEP into a system that would be welcomed by Apple's primary market of home users and creative professionals, as a project known as Rhapsody. Rhapsody later evolved into Mac OS X.

Mac OS X has evolved through its successive versions, away from a focus on backward compatibility and toward "digital lifestyle" applications such as the iLife suite, enhanced business applications (iWork), and integrated home entertainment (the Front Row media center).

Description

Mac OS X was a radical departure from previous Macintosh operating systems; its underlying code base is completely different from previous versions. Its core, named Darwin, is an open source, Unix-like operating system built around the XNU kernel, with standard Unix facilities available from the command line interface. On top of this core, Apple designed and developed a number of proprietary components including the Aqua themed Quartz Compositor and the Macintosh Finder user interface shell.

Read more at Wikipedia.org