While NeXT devices never sold particularly well, they were were influential: Tim Berners-Lee designed the first web browser in NeXTSTEP, for example. This operating system, while mostly closed source, used some open source code, notably from BSD. These devices, aimed primarily at academics, seriously impressed computer scientists with its high specs and its object-oriented, UNIX-inspired operating system: NeXTSTEP. That company was re-named Pixar.Īround the same time, Jobs also founded NeXT, which made high-end computers. He helped spin Graphics Group off from LucasFilm, for example.
When Apple fired Steve Jobs in 1985, he kept busy. Install Fusion under MAC OS X, then right-click Fusion in the Finder-> application and execute Show Package Contents, so that you can see the fusion file.
Just don’t expect to run Mac software on it. Not exactly macOS Sierra, is it? You can also get PureDarwin working in a virtual machine, if you’re willing to put in the effort. This volunteer-built operating system uses Darwin as its core, and you can even get open source user interfaces running on it. And there are third party versions of Darwin you can get running relatively easily, notably PureDarwin.
Darwin is just the basic foundation upon which the rest of macOS is built.īut that doesn’t mean you can’t get anything to run on Darwin.
So while you can download Darwin’s source code, free of charge, and you could compile it if you had the right skills, you’d never get macOS software working on it-including, ironically, many of those labeled “darwin” (unless you want to spend a few years and/or decades reverse-engineering the proprietary portions of macOS).