Apple's Student Reps will be demoing Mac OS X on Monday Jan 22 4-6 pm in EECS 1500. Be sure to come and see the future of Mac OS.

We will be handing out free Mac OS X Public Beta CDs for you to install and demonstrating some of the key features of Apple's next generation OS. If this isn't enough for you, we'll have some free pizza and soda so you can get a nice healthy dinner as well.

Wow, I thought, "free pizza." It's the dream of any college student, really; just bring the Tupperware.

So I decided to hunt down the free food. The pizza was nice, but what's in it for Apple?

Not only did Apple serve us free fresh pizza from Domino's, but also a fresh operating system (and free beta CDs). To make the package perfect, they had sent us one of their system engineers, anticipating the technically minded crowd. So what had been a hunt for food became an opportunity to participate in an interesting forum.

Being somewhat of an operating system nut myself, I usually keep up with the newest technologies in the field, the latest happenings, and who just forked off a new operating system or kernel. However, my usual obsessiveness was not subjected to Apple. This, simply due to prejudice, of what is in my opinion, bad operating system design, was a mistake I made. There actually is something to Mac OS X. Delighted by the gradual exposure to the demonstration that was taking place, I was able to can my native hunger, put the pizza down and start frying the reps with questions.

It turns out that Mac OS X (it is in fact pronounced "Mac Oh Ess Ten," one misconception that I suffered), does in fact have strong roots into the Unix world. Mac OS X is built on top of Darwin, which in turn is a microkernel built on top of CMUs Mach and based on FreeBSD (which in turn is based on Berkeley BSD 4.4-Lite, so on and so forth). Clearly a Unix-based OS, Apple claims that OS X not only is more stable than its predecessor (it now even boasts protected memory, a previously unknown phenomenon in the mac world) as well as preemptive multitasking (another alien of OS X's technology-virgin predecessors). Along with this comes all the other Unix goodies, like a distributed file system.

It is clear already that OS X is a huge improvement from its predecessor, Mac OS 9. Now with up-to-date technology, you can turn that stylish cube into something that is useful; the reps proudly showed us vi inside a tcsh terminal. Cross-compatibility, also, is key the rep emphasizes, "it demonstrates good code." But Apple will only release it for its PowerPC (G3 and G4) platforms.

Up until now, I was very happy with what I had heard; it seemed to me that it'd be compatible with virtually everything. This is also when the facts started rolling out. Firstly, its interface isn't based on X; it's something of Apple's proprietary working. Stylish, fast, cool? Yes. Portable? No. And it all went down from here; no use of /dev, /etc was only there for compatiblilty purposes, drivers were wrapper in XML and existed as "kernel extensions" whose interface remained undefined.

Although not as compliant as it initially seemed, OS X might still have something in for it. Apple has certainly applied all the latest technologies (resulting in the clamorous stream of buzzwords coming out from the reps). They have even gone to the extreme to wrap their drivers in XML. New, cool, fancy, fresh, Apple hopes to be setting the future standard here. Even their desktop is based on XML.

One smart thing Apple did, at least from this hungry geek's perspective, was to put a lot of emphasis on the ease of porting already existing BSD compatible applications to OS X, even providing a useful way of hooking certain interface properties onto different functions of a console application. The one lucky student on campus that manages to squeeze all the bells and whistles out of this interface while porting something, the rep informs us, would get some sort of scholarship. Would it be worth it for this (still hungry) hacker, to invest time and energy into participating in this competition? Not just yet.