<Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> <P> The heritage of what would become macOS had originated at NeXT, a company founded by Steve Jobs following his departure from Apple in 1985 . There, the Unix - like NeXTSTEP operating system was developed, and then launched in 1989 . The kernel of NeXTSTEP is based upon the Mach kernel, which was originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University, with additional kernel layers and low - level user space code derived from parts of BSD . Its graphical user interface was built on top of an object - oriented GUI toolkit using the Objective - C programming language . </P> <P> Throughout the early 1990s, Apple had tried to create a "next - generation" OS to succeed its classic Mac OS through the Taligent, Copland and Gershwin projects, but all of them were eventually abandoned . This led Apple to purchase NeXT in 1996, allowing NeXTSTEP, then called OPENSTEP, to serve as the basis for Apple's next generation operating system . This purchase also led to Steve Jobs returning to Apple as an interim, and then the permanent CEO, shepherding the transformation of the programmer - friendly OPENSTEP into a system that would be adopted by Apple's primary market of home users and creative professionals . The project was first code named "Rhapsody" and then officially named Mac OS X . </P> <P> Mac OS X was originally presented as the tenth major version of Apple's operating system for Macintosh computers; current versions of macOS retain the major version number "10". Previous Macintosh operating systems (versions of the classic Mac OS) were named using Arabic numerals, as with Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 . The letter "X" in Mac OS X's name refers to the number 10, a Roman numeral . It is therefore correctly pronounced "ten" / tɛn / in this context . However, it is also commonly pronounced like the letter "X" / ɛks / . </P>

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