Mac OS X at 20
Juli Clover (tweet):
On March 24, 2001, a Saturday, Apple began allowing customers to purchase Mac OS X, the successor to the classic Mac OS. The first version of Mac OS X, “Cheetah,” was famous for its “Aqua” interface with a water bubble-style design for everything from windows to buttons.
Jason Snell (tweet):
I’ve written a lot about Mac OS X over the years. Compiling that timeline reminded me of that. I was a features editor at Macworld when Apple began shipping OS X precursors, and so I edited most of our early coverage. Beginning with Mac OS X 10.1, I wrote most of Macworld’s big feature stories covering each release.
[…]
(While I wrote shorter reviews for Macworld, John Siracusa was always reviewing OS X at length for Ars Technica. Here’s a list of all his reviews.)
Fun fact: Mac OS X required a Mac with at least 128 MB of RAM, the same amount the original iPhone shipped with 6 years later.
Unless you have an old PowerMac lying around, the only way for you to run this today is via emulation, in qemu-system-ppc. If that’s a rabbit hole you want to jump into today, check out the Emaculation wiki.
Previously:
- iTunes at 20
- FFmpeg Is 20 Years Old
- 25 Years Ago: BeOS
- Old macOS Desktop Pictures, Upscaled
- Google Maps at 15
- iPad at 10
- Composite Mac Desktop Picture
- Ten Years of Apple on One Page
- 25 Years Ago: RAM Doubler Debuts
- Happy 25th Birthday, AppleScript
- 25 Years Ago, Apple Introduced the Newton
- Congratulations
- ATPM 7.04
Update (2021-07-03): Ken Case:
Here’s what the @OmniGroup home page looked like when Mac OS X shipped 20 years ago
Back then, it was essential that Apple move forward from ‘classic’ Mac OS. Protected memory, multi-user setups, and support for multiple applications running safely side-by-side were the main advantages of Mac OS X over Mac OS 9. But Mac OS X also brought with it the Unix core (and shell), a new display technology, and the Cocoa frameworks.
The transition was rough for the existing Mac users. The early versions were not as complete and stable as one would have hoped. The processing requirements of early Mac OS X pushed existing Mac hardware to their limits. Many application vendors dragged their feet adopting Mac OS X and the new technologies and features available.
But Mac OS X made the Mac interesting for a whole new group of people. It was the only platform at then time that they had Microsoft and Adobe productivity app as well as the Unix shell and tools available. This was a huge bonus for web designers and developers, but also for scientists.
Coincidentally, 20 years ago today, Stan Ng (Marketing), Jeff Robbin (iTunes) & I pitched Steve Jobs the P68 Dulcimer project.
8 months later that project became the iPod.
I suspect the pitching for P68 took place on March 23 (a Friday), but (a) maybe those folks really were working six days a week, and (b) there’s no question Apple was truly firing on all cylinders in 2001.
Ng and Robbin are still at Apple. Ng has led Apple Watch product marketing since it debuted, and Robbin is still in charge of Apple’s Music apps (and I think apps like TV and Podcasts too — anything derived from SoundJam iTunes).
Looking back, I have to say the Dock and Column View are the two most significant UI enhancements OS X brought to my world. Nothing has changed my daily desktop computing habits more in the 20 years since.
While I’m working on a proper article to celebrate 20 years of Mac OS X, here’s a brief visual tour of Mac OS X 10.0.3 I published back in 2008 on my other blog, System Folder.
20 Years in the “evolution” of System Preferences on Mac OS X
If you’d like to look back at my writing on the subject, here’s a collection of links.
Twenty years ago, I was working in Apple Technical Training getting Mac OS X development and system administration courses out into the world.
What an amazing couple of decades!
For the Mac OS X anniversary, one of my first experiences with it:
Adobe Illustrator 10 claimed to support Mac OS X. It shipped just after Mac OS X 10.1, and did technically run on that OS — but its installer did not.
Maybe they assumed everyone would install on OS 9 and then upgrade the OS.
After a few hours on the phone with Adobe tech support, I think they finally came up with some way to muck with the installer files to allow it to complete on X.
I started out writing about the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X and accidentally wrote a love letter to Gil Amelio. Purchasing NeXT was like a season of nothing but strike-outs except for a home run that won the World Series.
Strange to think that these days I have plenty more UNIX-centric options and yet there is no real (user-friendly, end-to-end) equivalent to it and its ecosystem (although WSL is tipping the scales heavily, no form of Linux is truly equivalent).
All of that eye candy came at a cost, though. Performance in the early versions of Mac OS X was notoriously bad as the hardware caught up. By the time most users were ready to switch from Mac OS 8 or 9, OS X was in pretty decent shape.
If you want to learn more about Mac OS X, I’ve rounded up some links for you[…]
Today, with Mac OS X gone and Intel chipsets not far behind, I thought it would be fun to look back at OS X and the transition to it compared to the recent switch to macOS 11 Big Sur.
One thing I do remember repeatedly is the persistent flakiness of the Mac’s file system. Despite the promise of Mac OS X to protect the operating system from the effects of other software crashing, a lot of effort had to be put into preventing HFS+ from developing serious errors. Yet it wasn’t until Mac OS X 10.2.2 in 2002 that Apple introduced journalling to work around those problems, to a degree. Even then, after any serious crash, the cautious Mac user restarted their Mac to ensure that its file system didn’t slide steadily down the slippery slope to serious faults. Whole products like DiskWarrior were built on this lasting Achilles heel, and some days I seemed to be forever fscking around in Single-User Mode.
Just four years ago yesterday (27 March) – with iOS 10.3 – Apple introduced its replacement, APFS. Since then, this new file system has come to epitomise Apple, its strengths, endearing features, and flaws.
Steve Jobs got up on stage at MacWorld New York in the summer of 2000 to tell everyone the progress of Mac OS X. A round of applause followed him saying that everything was on schedule.
But…
He said they were going to change the name of the releases. The fall 2000 release would now be Public Beta and the final release would be in the spring of 2001.
Rename?
Hardly. That’s what you call a final release that is 6 months away.
But he got away with it.
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It was fun while it lasted.
Now is 20 years later after the first version of Mac OS X. Apple should release a new Mac OS with emphasis on artificial intelligence. For instance, when you do repetitive tasks, the Mac should identify that and prompt to do it for you. It would be a new revolution.
TeX: macOS 12 "Clippy"? That sounds terrible. I already disable Siri on all my devices. I want machines to have predictability, not undocumented magic. This is not a situation that calls for the magic pixie dust buzzword of "AI".
It was an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.