Mar 25

7 Years Of Mac OS X!

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System 0.0 was introduced by Apple in 1984, being the first version of Mac OS X ever. If we look at it today, we may surely find it extremely limited, but considering the command line interfaces used by everyone at that time, Mac OS was way in front, and it also laid out the GUI layout for those to follow in the coming years.

Mac OS X 10.1 Puma

Mac OS X as we know it today was not born from Mac OS, but tried to explore completely new territories, and was based on NextSTEP, and ran on top of a BSD UNIX variant called Darwin, allowing it to have true multitasking for the first time. The Public Beta was introduced in September 2000, with the first official release, Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah" arriving on the 24th of March 2001, exactly 7 years ago (well, and a day, depends on your time zone...)!

Announced on the 21st of the same month in a press release, Mac OS X 10.0 was, according to Steve Jobs statement at that time, "the most important software from Apple since the original Macintosh operating system in 1984 that revolutionized the entire industry."

The feature list of Mac OS X 10 missed a lot of things that made this OS so popular in the meantime, such as Expose or Spotlight, but it was a big step ahead for that period, so that's exactly how it should be remembered.

At last, some interesting facts - the suggested retail price of the new OS was, at that time, $129, and system requirements - "a minimum of 128MB of memory and is designed to run on the following Apple products: iMac, iBook, Power Macintosh G3, Power Mac G4, Power Mac G4 Cube and any PowerBook introduced after May 1998."

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2 Responses to “7 Years Of Mac OS X!”

  1. MOAT Says:
    March 28th, 2008 at 3:33 pm

    I bought a mac in 2000 while the whole gateway craze was going on. I just wanted something new. Who would have thought how quickly it took off!

  2. gar Says:
    April 28th, 2008 at 1:28 pm

    Um… in 1984, Mac OS X didn’t exist in *any* form… OS 9.x and earlier were not based on anything similar to what’s in OS X. They were simpler OSes that accomplished their tasks well, but don’t go muddying the waters about when and where the Mac OS gained its Unix underpinnings. Pre-OS X was a very different beast………

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