[SeoxyS]

> Is there somewhere where Bill Gates said "none of the NeXT code made it into OS X".

You're twisting Isaacson's words. He said:

> noted that Apple ended up not adopting the entire NeXT operating system

This doesn't mean none of NeXT's code made it in, it means not all of it.

But, putting aside the nitpicks, I, as a technical person, do not care much for the technical details. I'm much more interested in Jobs' hippie counter-culture history and his philosophical view than the technical details of which system was the more important precursor to OS X.

[chc]

The book says Apple opted to evolve its existing operating system, which was OS 9. This strongly implies that NeXT's contribution was negligible, but even if you don't see it that way, there is just no reasonable way you can read it to make it true. Mac OS X was an evolution of NeXTSTEP, full stop. Even if OS X contained twice as much OS 9 code as it appeared to, it would still basically be NeXTSTEP.

To wit: Foundation, AppKit, the BSD underpinnings, Mail, TextEdit, Preview, the Dock and countless other components — even that silly beachball wait cursor! — were refugees from NeXT. Even Finder, which borrowed its name and some of its appearance from OS 9's Finder, was essentially a Carbon rewrite of NeXT's Workspace Manager.

[recoiledsnake]

I am not the one doing the purported twisting. Read the linked comment in my post above. My impression after reading that comment(written by someone else) was Bill Gates was quoted as saying that somewhere in the book(could be elsewhere for all I know).