As we shared earlier today, the macOS operating system – formerly called Mac OS X – is turning 20 this Wednesday, March 24, 2021. To celebrate the occasion, none other than Scott Forstall decided to use his Twitter account tonight to congratulate Mac OS X.
In a post on his personal Twitter account, which he doesn’t use often, Forstall celebrates the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X and remembers when Steve Jobs decided on the name of the tenth version of Apple’s operating system.
“I still remember when we named you. In a small room on IL1. When Steve cut a big X on the wall and smiled. See how far you’ve come from a young Cheetah, ”said Forstall. The system was called Mac OS at the time, but Apple was working on a completely new version that came to be Mac OS X.
Longtime Mac users may remember that the first versions of Mac OS X were named after big cats, but that was only because Apple used “Cheetah” as the codename for Mac OS X 10.0. After that, the company decided to use the names of the big cats for other versions of OS X, such as Puma, Tiger and Leopard.
Scott Forstall has worked for NeXT with Steve Jobs since 1992 and joined Apple in 1997 after the acquisition of the company. He became senior vice president of software for Apple in 2003 and was deeply involved in the development of the iPhone in 2005 – which made Forstall be considered the “father of iOS”. In 2006, he took the lead in developing Mac OS X as well.
Forstall left Apple in 2012 after the Apple Maps controversy, in which the company replaced Google Maps with its own map solution, which was considered unfinished and buggy. He was replaced mainly by Craig Federighi, who leads Apple’s software engineering to this day.
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