> On Feb 4, 2015, at 10:04 AM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote: > > wikiedia is really vague on the date MacOS 10 was first shipped It depends on what you mean by “shipped.” The first OS X product released into the market was OS X Server 1.0, in March 1999: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0 It was basically OPENSTEP with a Mac OS 8 like skin on top. It didn’t even include Finder, because the first usable version of the Carbon API wouldn’t be completed for another two years. About a year and a half later, in September 2000, Apple shipped the OS X Public Beta. This was the public’s first look at the new Quartz/Aqua interface. This wasn’t a “beta” in the sense of “This isn’t released yet.” You paid for the disc and Apple shipped it to you. It was more like “We know this is still pretty broken, but we’ve ben promising a new OS since 1997, so if you want to see what we’ve been spending the last 4 years working on, we’ll sell you a copy cheap." Apple shipped Mac OS X 1.0 in March 2001: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0 So, there you have have it, a 2-year span during which OS X could be said to be commercially available. OS X 1.0 did include sudo. I don’t know if root was actually disabled by default at that point, though. I haven’t been able to find out if prior versions of the OS — including OPENSTEP and NeXTSTEP — also included it. I couldn’t even find old manual PDFs or even a man page archive. > So, I would say, Ubuntu wasn't copying Apple, > they are just a clone of Debian. And Debian is older system than MacOS 10. Nope. Though sudo has been in the Debian package repo since at least Debian 3 (2002), the base install has never included sudo. Debian’s sudo package didn’t install with a useful default configuration until Debian 7; you had to manually configure it in Debian 6 and earlier before you could actually use it. Needless to say, the root account is never disabled by default on Debian, as it is on OS X and Ubuntu. I’ve written up the full details of the non-universality of sudo here: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/48522/ Bottom line, Ubuntu *did* copy Apple in this respect, as they have so many times before. (Upstart, Unity, etc.)