Today is the 20th anniversary of the launch of Mac OS X, and Macworld has an interesting piece on the history leading up to it. Jason Snell goes so far as to say that the new operating system for Macs was “an act of desperation” by Apple.
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The reason, he explains, is that while Apple had set a new direction for personal computers with the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, it had lost its way by the late 1990s …
In 1984, a graphical user interface on a personal computer was revolutionary; by the late 1990s, not so much.
As revolutionary as the original Mac was, it was also an early-1980s project that didn’t offer all sorts of features that would become commonplace by the late 1990s.
That operating system had been originally designed to fit in a small memory footprint and run one app at a time. Its multitasking system was problematic; clicking on an item in the menu bar and holding down the mouse button would effectively stop the entire computer from working. Its memory management system was primitive. Apple needed to make something new, a faster and more stable system that could keep up with Microsoft, which was coming at Apple with the user-interface improvements of Windows 95 and the modern-OS underpinnings of Windows NT.
By 1996, says Snell, Apple had given up.
In a spectacularly humbling moment for Apple, the company began searching for a company from which it could buy or license an operating system or, at the least, use as the foundation of a new version of Mac OS. The company’s management, led by CEO Gil Amelio and CTO Ellen Hancock, clearly had come to the conclusion that Apple itself was incapable of building the next-generation Mac OS.
We all know what happened… next.
Mac Os Catalina
Dec. 20, 1996–Apple Computer, Inc. today announced its intention to purchase NeXT Software Inc., in a friendly acquisition for $400 million. Pending regulatory approvals, all NeXT products, services, and technology research will become part of Apple Computer, Inc. As part of the agreement, Steve Jobs, Chairman and CEO of NeXT Software, will return to Apple–the company he co-founded in 1976–reporting to Dr. Gilbert F. Amelio, Apple’s Chairman and CEO.
The acquisition will bring together Apple’s and NeXT’s innovative and complementary technology portfolios and significantly strengthens Apple’s position as a company advancing industry standards. Apple’s leadership in ease-of-use and multimedia solutions will be married to NeXT’s strengths in development software and operating environments for both the enterprise and Internet markets. NeXT’s object oriented software development products will contribute to Apple’s goal of creating a differentiated and profitable software business, with a wide range of products for enterprise, business, education, and home markets.
Snell gives a good outline of the software challenges that followed, and says that’s what makes the anniversary such an important one.
When we celebrate the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X, it’s important to realize what we’re celebrating. We’re celebrating a software release that was the culmination of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple. We’re celebrating the operating system we still use, two decades later. But we’re also celebrating the foundation of iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS.
In that way, this isn’t just the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X 10.0. It’s the 20th anniversary of modern Apple, and the end of the dark days when Apple couldn’t fix its own operating system.
The full piece is a good read.
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It was two decades ago to the day—March 24, 2001—that Mac OS X first became available to users the world over. We're not always big on empty sentimentality here at Ars, but the milestone seemed worthy of a quick note.
Of course, Mac OS X (or macOS 10 as it was later known) didn't quite survive to its 20th birthday; last year's macOS Big Sur update brought the version number up to 11, ending the reign of X.But despite its double life on x86 and ARM processors and its increasingly close ties to iOS and iPadOS, today's macOS is still very much a direct descendant of that original Mac OS X release. Mac OS X, in turn, evolved in part from Steve Jobs' NeXT operating system—which had recently been acquired by Apple—and its launch was the harbinger of the second Jobs era at Apple.
Cheetah, Mac OS X's initial release, was pretty buggy. But it introduced a number of things that are still present in the operating system today. Those included the dock, which—despite some refinements and added features—is still fundamentally the same now as it ever was, as well as the modern version of Finder. And while macOS has seen a number of UI and design tweaks that have changed over time, the footprints of Cheetah's much-hyped Aqua interface can still be found all over Big Sur.
Tricube Mac Os X
AdvertisementOS X brought many new features and technologies we now take for granted, too. For example, it enabled Apple's laptops to wake up from sleep immediately, and it introduced dynamic memory management, among other things.
Mac OS X's greatest impact in retrospect may be in the role it had in inspiring and propping up iOS, which has far surpassed macOS as Apple's most widely used operating system. And indeed, macOS lives in a very different context today than it did in 2001. It was recently bumped from the No.2 operating system spot globally by Google's Chrome OS, ending a very long run for Mac OS as the world's second-most popular desktop operating system in terms of units shipped.
The most popular desktop operating system in 2021 is Windows, just as it was in 2001, but the most popular OS overall is Google's Android, which has dramatically larger market share in the mobile space than iOS does.So while Mac OS X's influence is profound, it exists today primarily as a support for iOS, which is also itself not the most popular OS in its category. Despite Apple's resounding success in the second Steve Jobs era, as well as in the recent Tim Cook era, the Mac is still a relatively niche platform—beloved by some, but skipped by much of the mainstream.
Mac Os Mojave
After 20 years, a lot has changed, but a whole lot has stayed the same.