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The Macintosh community consists of a wide range of users from seasoned Mac enthusiasts to first-time computer users. The more technically oriented members of the Mac community enthusiastically awaited the release of OSX and Darwin; anticipating the opening of the door to the world of open source UNIX software. Members of the Mac community who have no experience in delving beneath the GUI are happily comfortable with the ease of self-installing software. To many Mac users the thought of configuring, compiling and sometimes programming to install software is not only seen as too time consuming, but to some an intimidating and thus inhibiting proposition.

Our software installs open source software which has been developed and distributed within the Open Source community - a worldwide community of programmers with a passion to see the development and evolution of reliable and quality software.

What exactly is open source software?
"The basic idea behind open source is very simple. When programmers on the Internet can read, redistribute, and modify the source for a piece of software, it evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing."
- Source: OpenSource.org

UNIX

The UNIX operating system was originally developed by a Ken Thompson a MIT student who was simulating the motion of the planets in the solar system. As the large multi-user computer Thompsons program was running on was expensive to run, he decided to attempt to run his program on a smaller computer, the catch being he needed to develop a new operating system. Thompson called this new operating system UNIX, because it supported a single user.

This new operating system caught the attention the programmers at ATT Bell Labs who proceeded to work on the UNIX operating system. In 1971 after the combined efforts of Dennis Ritchie and others at Bell Labs, UNIX became operational in the Bell Labs system.

In order to make UNIX portable, Ken Thompson developed a machine independent language which he called B. Later Dennis Ritchie modified B, creating the C programming language, and with Thompson rewrote the UNIX operating system in C, making it more portable.

During this time many universities who were all running 11/70 systems, were given the UNIX license for a minimal charge. With 80% of all computer science graduates having familiarity with the UNIX operating system UNIX soon became an industry standard.

UNIX comes in a couple of flavors. The Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD UNIX) is widely used by the scientific and engineering communities, while AT&T UNIX has been developed with the business community in mind. The latest version of AT&T UNIX, System V, Release 4 (SVR4) has been jointly developed by AT&T, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. Sun's operating system is running SVR4 under the name Solaris.

AT&T has sold its UNIX System Laboratory to Novell

For more information regarding the development of the software on our CD's please visit the following pages.

Additions and errata notification are welcomed -- The Webmaster.
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