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Re:Emulate Mac OS 9 with QEMU by walrus01 on Monday December 03, 2018 @12:06AM (#18586445)
NeXT failed because of its hardware strategy/cost of manufacturing, and very high hardware sales price which kept away 95% of the potential customers. By the time they were "done" with making hardware and ready to be acquired, NeXT's OS was quite solid and stable, representing a good base to develop MacOS 10.0 from. If you take a look at MacOS 10.0 server, the first release, it's incredibly close to NeXT.

They probably looked at projects like FreeBSD at the time (1997-2000 era) and decided that too much time would be required to re-implement what they wanted to do, vs buying NeXT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0

Re:Emulate Mac OS 9 with QEMU by patrickg_zill on Monday December 03, 2018 @12:28AM (#18586539)
You're partially correct... NeXT's refusal to fully implement Posix is what locked them out of many government contracts, as it was and may still be a requirement.

Only the NSA was exempt from this requirement, and they did buy a lot of NeXT's equipment.

Re:Emulate Mac OS 9 with QEMU by pjmlp on Monday December 03, 2018 @02:18AM (#18586930)
Which is actually something that many that use OS X as pretty UNIX don't get.

NeXT was never about UNIX, the compatibility that it had was just to ease the porting into the platform, not to get away from it.

The Objective-C APIs were what mattered.

Likewise when it was reborn as OS X.

I attended an Apple session at CERN during the early OS X days, with the same idea being transmitted.

Re:Emulate Mac OS 9 with QEMU by klodolph on Monday December 03, 2018 @11:10AM (#18589825)
It's funny that you mention FreeBSD, because large portions of FreeBSD were incorporated into Mac OS X. If you look through the Mac OS X man pages you'll find references to various BSDs, mostly BSD and FreeBSD.
Re:Emulate Mac OS 9 with QEMU by walrus01 on Monday December 03, 2018 @11:33AM (#18590055)
Of course, but not to the extent that they took a freebsd base (vs NeXT) and put an osx GUI on top of it. When I first used osx from a command line at v10.4 and saw macports, the freebsd heritage was obvious.