Some die-hard Mac traditionalists may not be thrilled about how Mac OS X is based on UNIX; heck, it even includes a command line for intrepid nerds and lovers of irony. And while Apple's doing an impressive job of shielding "regular people" from the scarier aspects of the UNIX experience, rather than being embarrassed at the thirty-year-old underpinnings of its brand-new operating system (as some people feel it should be), the company is practically revelling in the fact. (Personally, we at AtAT were UNIX geeks long before we were Mac geeks, so we're loving it.)

Faithful viewer StephBrown tipped us off to the latest sign that Apple is evidently serious about supporting the UNIXy roots (nerd pun unintended) of its new OS: according to a CNET article, the company has just hired Jordan Hubbard, one of the co-founders of FreeBSD that's spent most of the past decade evangelizing and supporting the open source version of UNIX from which Apple's own open source Darwin core is derived. This is big, because the very fact that Jordan's going to be working on Mac OS X may lend the platform some welcome respect and serious consideration among the hardcore UNIX geeks out there.

Certainly the man's recent post to the FreeBSD mailing list may draw some attention from an audience who might otherwise never have given the Mac a second thought. In his own words, "OS X has finally managed to achieve what's been something of a holy grail for the Unix community-- take a powerful Unix core (BSD) and mate it with a usable desktop, GUI development tools and some real applications, all without sacrificing access to the underlying features of Unix... proving that [Apple is] more than willing to appeal to the techies out there as well as the general consumer who may never get past the desktop."

If you're itching to think in stereotypes, look at it like this: the Mac has long been the bastion of creative, arty types who generally aren't extremely technical because they haven't needed to be; the Mac just works. Now, what would happen if Mac OS X attracts a steady influx of serious tech-heavy nerds as well, who can appreciate the platform from a geek's perspective? Well, aside from massive culture shock and the premise for a really bad sitcom, we'd say we're looking at a user base comprising the best of both worlds driving the platform forward-- and helping Apple to improve it continuously until everyone realizes it's the best choice for the average shmoe, too. Can't beat that. Bring it on!