> The two major phone OS companies both stand on the shoulders of IBM PC, openly bootable hardware, and the fantastic software systems nurtured and built on top of these platforms β the BSDs, GNU, Linux, and the long tail of all that run on them. It is very troubling that their own platforms are the antithesis of being openly hackable.
I can kinda see a lineage from the PC to Android, if only by way of Linux being born on the 386. But Apple? They've been doing their own thing since day 1; I can easily imagine a world where IBM never existed and the iPhone is unchanged.
Itβs a fine thread, but the links from FreeBSD to Darwin are real, and Darwin is behind macOS and iOS. Not just as a kernel, but a lot of the runtime and many of the auxiliary pieces of software too.
Oh, I agree that Darwin is, especially by way of NeXTSTEP but even independently since then, significantly derived from the BSDs (IIRC mostly FreeBSD, but also a chunk of NetBSD code got used to make it). I just think that that would have happened with or without the PC being around. In some parallel universe without IBM making the PC, the unix family still prospers, probably mostly on the 68000 family instead of x86, Apple does their own thing for a while, and then those lineages converge in Darwin just like in our universe.
I can kinda see a lineage from the PC to Android, if only by way of Linux being born on the 386. But Apple? They've been doing their own thing since day 1; I can easily imagine a world where IBM never existed and the iPhone is unchanged.