Simon Willison’s Weblog

A hacker’s introduction to OS X

8th January 2004

What is Max OS X by Amit Singh is hands down the best introduction to that operating system I’ve ever come across. It’s aimed at a technical audience, does a very good job of keeping a fair balance balanced when comparing OS X with other operating systems and has taught me a whole bunch of interesting things about the system.

Some highlights:

• A Brief History of Mac OS X
• Interesting tricks to play on the bootloader, which is apparently based on Forth
• What actually happens on startup
• Fun command-line tools that come with the system

The rest of the author’s site (which bares a striking resemblance to Eric Meyer’s classic stylesheet) is worth exploring as well—he has some fascinating notes on advanced Mac programming, a description of his environment of 55 operating systems on one PowerBook and for the hard core programming geeks, 108 solutions to the Towers of Hanoi problem. And if that’s not enough, he even has a genuine Donald Knuth reward cheque as well!

As for my own PowerBook, it was due to arrive today but my bank killed the card transaction because it didn’t fit my normal buying habits (I’d like to know who’s buying habits it would fit). After a series of transatlantic phone calls and the classic statement from HSBC that “you’re not supposed to have credit on a credit card” all is well in the world, and the system should arrive tomorrow or Friday. I await its arrival with sticky palms.