Just three days after Twitter’s birthday, it’s March 24th again and that means it’s the birthday of Apple’s most revolutionary and most used operating system, Mac OS X. I remember using OS X before it looked anything like OS X. Mac OS X “Server” came far before the client OS and the server flavor back in 1999/2000 looked just like Mac OS 9 with a few OS X style applications like Netinfo manager, Terminal and users / groups that would make you think you were using OS X without any aqua, brushed meta or candy interface. Even the dock we know and love was still on the drawing boards at apple.
Today marks the 10 year anniversary of OS 10.0 “Cheetah”‘s release to the masses. It was the first desktop OS based on the NextStep OS Kernal with FreeBSD and Darwin underpinnings and accessing the UNIX bit of the OS was just as easy and going to Utilities and launching “Terminal”. The Dock’s re-draws of its animations were poor and most users didn’t go OS X until version 10.1 (Puma) or 10.2 (Jaguar) due to lack of support from Adobe, Microsoft and other vendors. The printer makers were playing catch up and most of us would have to boot into OS 9 or run Mac OS Classic in order to run our favorite applications. In short, only the brave and less mission critical computers and users adopted OS X prior to 2003. The release of Jaguar (10.3) changed everything. Adobe CS was running natively, Microsoft office 2004 was out and more apps were being shipped to run natively in OS X and we were finally experiencing the polish that all new users to Macintosh experience today.
Geeks, I’d recommend reading a few of these press releases for when Mac OS X was unveiled. The world was certainly different back then.
Apple Unveils Mac OS X and Internet Strategy at Macworld Expo
Apple Unveils Mac OS X
Industry Leaders Rally to Support Mac OS X
Also, check out the Apple earnings report in 2000 where they made 2.34 billion that quarter. Compare that to the most recent earnings report of 26 billion in earnings in the most recent quarter. Wow.
OS X has really held up over the years. You have to think all that happened to bring Steve back to Apple and the acquisition of Next and the digital lifestyle strategy followed by iOS. Amazing.
Finally, TUAW has a great rundown of OS X over the years with screenshots.