A Quarter of a Century of Mac OS X

About this Mac screenshot of Mac OS X public beta Kodiak

From lickable Aqua…

The fall of 1984 was the beginning of my journey with the Macintosh, as I posted in My Mac Story: Part 1. At that time, the operating system for the Mac was System 4.2. I used the Mac for 14 years on three different machines from that operating system through MacOS 9. Then, there was a major shift. The Macintosh operating system was very long in the tooth, and a new, modern replacement was needed.

Apple was beleaguered and on the brink of bankruptcy when it acquired NeXT Computer in 1997, bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple. In three years, the engineers from NeXT worked with the engineers already at Apple to transform the NeXT operating system into something that could run the Macintosh for the next decade.

Earlier this month was the 25th anniversary of Steve Jobs taking the Macworld keynote stage and, as part of a long presentation, introduced the world to the next generation of the Macintosh operating system (at 1:07:34). Derived from the NeXT OS, MacOS X provided a UNIX-based underpinning to a new but familiar user interface and modern features we take for granted today, such as protected memory, preemptive multitasking, and modern networking.

It would be another year before the public release of MacOS X 1.0, but that presentation 25 years ago set the stage for the interface and features that today powers not only the Macintosh but iPhones, iPads, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and HomePods. The name has changed from MacOS X, to OS X, to the current macOS. (By the way, the “X” in the name is pronounced “ten.” It’s a Roman numeral.) The look of the interface has changed and evolved from the lickable Aqua to the current iOS-inspired Sequoia. The OS that was supposed to last a decade has served the Mac for 25 years.