> What Bill Gates said was absolutely true! Rhapsody with the NeXT Mach kernel, a pulled-in, non-NeXT BSD application layer, and then various other Mac layers (GUI, Cocoa, etc). Technically there is nothing wrong with his statement.

Actually, technically there's everything wrong with that statement. It's just not the case.

Cocoa is NeXTStep. Take a look at the APIs. Everything is prefixed with NS.

The old Carbon APIs were completely reimplemented--those original Mac OS Classic APIs were mostly written in 68000 assembly with a liberal amount of Pascal thrown in--totally unsuitable for the new flagship OS.

I used OpenStep for about a year before the first OS X Betas were released. I can tell you first hand that Rhapsody was 90% NeXT and 10% veneer to make it "look like a Mac". "Terminal.app" barely changed from OpenStep to Mac OS X. Several other apps looked identical too. I'm pretty sure the minify button iconified the icons the way OpenStep used to.

Don't forget that NeXTStep/OpenStep had a full BSD subsystem too. That's not new or unique to Mac OS X. Go to your terminal and "man open". Notice the "First appeared in NextStep" part.

The fact is Mac OS X 10.0 is NeXTStep/OpenStep with some extra compatibility layers for the carbon APIs (plus an VM for doing running OS 9 apps). Saying that they "just pulled the kernel out" is patently false.