“That iPad in your hand? It feels like the most modern of computers. But like the iPhone and the Macintosh, the Apple tablet revolves around a core piece of software that can trace its roots all the way back to the early 1970s,” Klint Finley reports for Wired. “It was built atop UNIX, the operating system originally created over 30 years ago by researchers at AT&T’s Bell Labs.”
“UNIX is the same software that gave rise to Linux, the open source OS that drives Google Android phones and underpins so much of the modern internet. Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs once tried to hire Linus Torvalds, the irrepressible Finnish coder who created Linux and gave the thing its name,” Finley reports. “But Torvalds said ‘No,’ and not long after that, Apple hired Jordan Hubbard, the creator of FreeBSD, a lesser known, but still thriving, open source operating system based on UNIX. It was a better fit: Mac OS X shares conceptual roots with Linux, but it shares honest-to-goodness code with FreeBSD.”
Finley reports, “Hubbard left Apple last month to return to the world of open source UNIX, taking the chief technology officer post at a iXsystems, a company that offers servers and other data center hardware that runs FreeBSD. Apple was quite an education, and now, he wants to bring the ‘Apple approach’ back to the open source game.”
Much more in the full article here.