Turns out Mac OS X is the second, not the first Apple operating system to be based on UNIX. Circa 1989 they had a special apple branded version that could run Classic Mac OS applications, had a terminal (called the CommandShell) and could even run the X11 window system.
So in 1989, Apple already had an operating system with preemptive multitasking (for the UNIX compliant applications), native multiple user support without using At Ease, a highly extensible POSIX compliant underlying system and a Mac OS interface running on it. I wonder why Apple never seriously considered using it as the basis for the Classic Mac OS replacement, although admittedly NextStep was a much more mature operating system with some far more compelling features (such as the postscript display layer and it's object-orientated programming language)
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