On The Road To Os X
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday February 22, 2000
THE world is six months away, and counting, from the release of MacOS X. Thus spake Jobs as he previewed the new OS, with particular emphasis on the graphical user interface, code-named Aqua.
Running the same Developer 3 release that shipped earlier this week to Apple's eager legion of third-party partners and programmers, Jobs forecast the final beta would arrive in Q2, with shrink-wrapped software hitting the shelves mid-year - as a single "international edition" CD with all language modules included.
The final stage of the year-long rollout, which began with the first public glimpse of OS X and Aqua at San Francisco's MacWorld Expo in January, would culminate in January 2001, when the OS would be loaded onto all new Macs. The server edition, however, has been shipping since late last year. Why the lag?
"The core of OS X Server is the beginning of Darwin, which is the core of the final Mac OS X product," says Philip Schiller, Apple's vice-president of Worldwide Product Marketing.
"But the first version of OS X server didn't need a lot of the APIs we need for the client version, such as Carbon, which allows us to bring all Mac applications forward onto OS X, and customers need this gentle migration.
"But for a server you don't need that," continued Schiller, "you only need your file server, your print server and your Web server, and you can do that with a bunch of applications that we bundled with the server."
© 2000 Sydney Morning Herald