Geek Milestones
There was a birthday yesterday. On March 24th, ten years ago, my very favorite computer operating system appeared. MacOS X 10.0 was officially released.
If I wanted to be a flaming geek about it, both the name and the birthday are incorrect. MacOS X 10 is not an updated MacOS 9. Just about everything about it, from the filesystem to the codebase, is different. MacOS X 10 is based on BSD Unix by way of NeXT, which makes either closer to forty (Unix), thirty-four (BSD) or twenty-five (NeXTSTEP). But I left my pocket protector at home today, so I’ll just move on.
Apple’s Mac operating systems from 7.5 on up were pretty decent single-user systems, but its limitations were increasingly apparent. In 1994, Apple launched a major initiative to create a new OS, codenamed Copland. After spending a lot of money and angering a lot of developers, it failed.
From the mid-nineties until 2001, it sometimes seemed like Apple couldn’t get out of its own way. The press referred to it using the leading modifiers “troubled” and “beleaguered”, and some pundits were fitting the company for a shroud. “Falling profits and plummeting stock” were frequently mentioned, and Apple’s failure to create a modern operating system was viewed as just another sign of the inevitable end.
One thing Apple did have was some cash on hand. Since they could not build an operating system, the next move was to buy one. Former Apple senior VP Jean-Louis Gassée had formed a new company called Be that had an operating system I thought was just brilliant: BeOS. I was pretty sure that Apple would buy them out. They nearly did, but at the last moment, they bought Steve Jobs’ NeXT instead.
After being forced out of Apple in 1985, Jobs created the next big thing, NeXT, a remarkable workstation with a remarkable operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution of Unix (BSD) called NeXTSTEP. The only problem was that the price tag was also quite remarkable, and well beyond the budget of most. Jobs said it was designed mainly for academics, scientists and technical professionals. Tim Berners-Lee designed the World Wide Web on NeXT. When sales of hardware flagged, NeXT adapted their software to run on multiple processors: Sun SPARC, Intel x86, Motorola 68k, and HP’s PA-RISC. It clearly would not be difficult to port to IBM’s RISC processor, the Power PC 750 that Apple called the G3.
Acquiring NeXT had the added advantage of bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple. Within a year, he was Interim Chairman, and soon after dropped the “Interim”. He also turned around third-party developers, who were tired of Apple’s record of broken promises. It took over two years to convert the Mac’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to Unix libraries, but in the end, applications could run on the new OS without forcing developers to assume the major costs of a complete rewrite. Support for the MacOS 9 “Classic” environment was also retained. Developers came on board.
It was MacOS X 10, not the iMac, that saved Apple. It is no use to build advanced hardware without equally advanced software.
Truth be told, NeXTSTEP 5, er, MacOS X 10.0 was not really ready for prime time. It was kind of slow, and with limited device support, but underneath a very promising interface there beat the heart of solid, reliable, extensible operating system: Unix.
Each version of MacOS X has been named after a cat. The first, 10.0, was named Cheetah. In six months, Apple rolled out a more solid version: MacOS X 10.1, “Puma”. Eleven months after that “Jaguar” was shipped. It’s been getting better and better ever since.
This coming summer, the eighth iteration, MacOS X 10.7 “Lion” will be unveiled at the World Wide Developer’s Conference. MacOS X is still improving and still growing. I see no reason to think that it won’t still be with us in another ten years.
Happy Birthday, MacOS X 10!
If I wanted to be a flaming geek about it, both the name and the birthday are incorrect. MacOS X 10 is not an updated MacOS 9. Just about everything about it, from the filesystem to the codebase, is different. MacOS X 10 is based on BSD Unix by way of NeXT, which makes either closer to forty (Unix), thirty-four (BSD) or twenty-five (NeXTSTEP). But I left my pocket protector at home today, so I’ll just move on.
Apple’s Mac operating systems from 7.5 on up were pretty decent single-user systems, but its limitations were increasingly apparent. In 1994, Apple launched a major initiative to create a new OS, codenamed Copland. After spending a lot of money and angering a lot of developers, it failed.
From the mid-nineties until 2001, it sometimes seemed like Apple couldn’t get out of its own way. The press referred to it using the leading modifiers “troubled” and “beleaguered”, and some pundits were fitting the company for a shroud. “Falling profits and plummeting stock” were frequently mentioned, and Apple’s failure to create a modern operating system was viewed as just another sign of the inevitable end.
One thing Apple did have was some cash on hand. Since they could not build an operating system, the next move was to buy one. Former Apple senior VP Jean-Louis Gassée had formed a new company called Be that had an operating system I thought was just brilliant: BeOS. I was pretty sure that Apple would buy them out. They nearly did, but at the last moment, they bought Steve Jobs’ NeXT instead.
After being forced out of Apple in 1985, Jobs created the next big thing, NeXT, a remarkable workstation with a remarkable operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution of Unix (BSD) called NeXTSTEP. The only problem was that the price tag was also quite remarkable, and well beyond the budget of most. Jobs said it was designed mainly for academics, scientists and technical professionals. Tim Berners-Lee designed the World Wide Web on NeXT. When sales of hardware flagged, NeXT adapted their software to run on multiple processors: Sun SPARC, Intel x86, Motorola 68k, and HP’s PA-RISC. It clearly would not be difficult to port to IBM’s RISC processor, the Power PC 750 that Apple called the G3.
Acquiring NeXT had the added advantage of bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple. Within a year, he was Interim Chairman, and soon after dropped the “Interim”. He also turned around third-party developers, who were tired of Apple’s record of broken promises. It took over two years to convert the Mac’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to Unix libraries, but in the end, applications could run on the new OS without forcing developers to assume the major costs of a complete rewrite. Support for the MacOS 9 “Classic” environment was also retained. Developers came on board.
It was MacOS X 10, not the iMac, that saved Apple. It is no use to build advanced hardware without equally advanced software.
Truth be told, NeXTSTEP 5, er, MacOS X 10.0 was not really ready for prime time. It was kind of slow, and with limited device support, but underneath a very promising interface there beat the heart of solid, reliable, extensible operating system: Unix.
Each version of MacOS X has been named after a cat. The first, 10.0, was named Cheetah. In six months, Apple rolled out a more solid version: MacOS X 10.1, “Puma”. Eleven months after that “Jaguar” was shipped. It’s been getting better and better ever since.
This coming summer, the eighth iteration, MacOS X 10.7 “Lion” will be unveiled at the World Wide Developer’s Conference. MacOS X is still improving and still growing. I see no reason to think that it won’t still be with us in another ten years.
Happy Birthday, MacOS X 10!