People often ask me if I think Apple is a company that knows how to make a good server. My answer is usually a little longer than what those people probably had in mind. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web server in 1989 on a computer running the NeXTSTEP operating system. At the time, NeXTSTEP was a fledgling, Unix-like operating system that was in many ways a by-product of Steve Jobs leaving Apple in 1985. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he brought the Unix-like operating system (then known as OpenStep) with him. Over the course of the following decade, NeXTSTEP replaced the Apple operating system, ultimately becoming Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server.

The operating system that has evolved into Mac OS X hosted the first web server, but much has changed since 1989. Sure, Mac OS X Server still has a web server, although now it runs Apache. And Apache is one of the hundreds of open source products now built into Mac OS X Server. Mac OS X Server can now manage thousands of client computers using Open Directory and Profile Manager. Over the years, Mac OS X Server has been a file server, a podcasting server, a video streaming server, and an imaging server for Mac OS X client computers. Basically, Mac OS X Server can do most anything that administrators might want a server to do.