Linux was never really a serious contender... The major competition to replace MacOS was between BeOS and NEXTSTEP. BSD wasn't a choice, it was something that came along with NEXTSTEP...
but by next year, shouldn't dual core PowerPC for MAC be feasible?
Since we're talking about "Macs" and not "MACs" you'd better get used to droppin the caps... It'll spare you the grief when you run into Mac users who *do* care a lot more..
I don't understand why the current generation PowerPC (970) or the next generation PowerPC can't be dual core like their POWER relative
Ummm.. The Power4 and Power5 *are* multi-core PowerPC processors...
IIRC, Apple was part of the failed ACE consortioum way back in the early 90s (including M$) where their OSs were separated by a HAL. They would've evaluated and compiled their OSs on severeal architectures from Mips, x86, Alpha, PowerPC etc
Who cares? NT ran on all the above architectures anyways, NetBSD practically runs on anything that will compute, and Darwin's predecessor ran on 68k, x86, SPARC, and was in the process of being ported to PowerPC before Apple acquired NeXT.
It is also rumoured that Apple have a x86 version of MAC OSX locked away for an emergency!
Well Darwin runs on x86 (the build is done for sanity checks on the code), but I don't know about the rest of the OS/services (if it is, it's horribly unoptimized and not ready for immediate release). Besides, you don't use an operating system, you use applications. Makes little difference if you can move your OS over if the apps don't move over with it...
OS-X however aint exactly designed for massive parallelism
No, but it and many of it's apps are sure threaded like a mofo...
It is freeBSD and current version OS X is at par with freeBSD 5
Actually originally there were portions of both NetBSD and FreeBSD in OS X... Of course much has changed over time...
An amusing point to note is that Rick Rashid, one of the key members of the team that created Mach at CMU, works for.... Microsoft
And Avie Tevanian (another key CMU member that worked on Mach) is at Apple... Point?
Did you also know that ex-MS guy Steve Perlman (Mr. WebTV) also was at Apple and created QuickScan (QuickTime's hardware based predecessor)?
One of the key contributers to the design of DirectSound (forgot the guy's name) now works at Apple? (after creating ACID)...
but most of the value they put in the closed parts of OS-X.
Actually CoreFoundation, IOKit, CSDA, DSS are all opensource as well... While I consider Cocoa the crown jewels, GnuStep is basically a re-implementation of the same thing...
ost likely weighed in on Apple's decision because it relies heavily on it. USB and Firewire are a big part of Apple's simplicity marketing pitch.
Neither BSD or Linux have a solid driver model, so it's really not a consideration. Besides that's why Apple implemented I/OKit...