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Plus none of that stuff was around when OS X development truly started: With NeXTSTEP.
NeXT was the company that Steve Jobs founded after he was kicked out of Apple. They produced a Unix system that was aiming at the business productivity market. It had all the basic elements that still exist to this day with OS X, minus the MacOS legacy bits.
It did not use X Windows either.
Postscript-based display technology, hybrid microkernel, Unix/BSD-based, Objective-C programming language, ObjectOriented application development based around various 'kits' released by Next. It even had the 'dock'. blah blah blah
Sounds familiar? It should. It's basically everything that makes OS X, OS X. After NeXT's hardware failed to be competitive it was purchased by Apple and this is how Steve Jobs got back to being CEO.
They tried to standardize the API for Unix GUI application development and they called it 'OpenSTEP'. Linux has a open source OpenStep implementation called 'GNUStep', which is the 'other' GNU desktop.
If you look you'd notice that GnuStep and OS X Cocoa APIs are extremely similar.
Of course they dropped the Postfix-based display window used in early versions of OS X and replaced it with the somewhat similar Quartz stuff when they released the OS X 10.0 desktop version, but certainly going from what they had in NextStep to X Windows would of been a huge step back in terms of features and performance.
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If you look at the historical rants against X Windows: people complained over and over again that it was too complicated, to slow, and had all sorts of hugely ugly problems and it was not particularly good at networking either. Mostly they said that it would be easier to drop it and do something else and that it would take decades to fix X's deficiencies.
Well, here we are. Decades later and much of X Windows has been improved massively through a combination of modernization and workarounds at the widget toolkit level. Still remains a lot of work to be done, of course.
NeXT was the company that Steve Jobs founded after he was kicked out of Apple. They produced a Unix system that was aiming at the business productivity market. It had all the basic elements that still exist to this day with OS X, minus the MacOS legacy bits.
It did not use X Windows either.
Postscript-based display technology, hybrid microkernel, Unix/BSD-based, Objective-C programming language, ObjectOriented application development based around various 'kits' released by Next. It even had the 'dock'. blah blah blah
Sounds familiar? It should. It's basically everything that makes OS X, OS X. After NeXT's hardware failed to be competitive it was purchased by Apple and this is how Steve Jobs got back to being CEO.
They tried to standardize the API for Unix GUI application development and they called it 'OpenSTEP'. Linux has a open source OpenStep implementation called 'GNUStep', which is the 'other' GNU desktop.
If you look you'd notice that GnuStep and OS X Cocoa APIs are extremely similar.
Of course they dropped the Postfix-based display window used in early versions of OS X and replaced it with the somewhat similar Quartz stuff when they released the OS X 10.0 desktop version, but certainly going from what they had in NextStep to X Windows would of been a huge step back in terms of features and performance.
------------------------
If you look at the historical rants against X Windows: people complained over and over again that it was too complicated, to slow, and had all sorts of hugely ugly problems and it was not particularly good at networking either. Mostly they said that it would be easier to drop it and do something else and that it would take decades to fix X's deficiencies.
Well, here we are. Decades later and much of X Windows has been improved massively through a combination of modernization and workarounds at the widget toolkit level. Still remains a lot of work to be done, of course.
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