Today is the 20th anniversary of the launch of Mac OS X, and Macworld has an interesting piece about the story that led to it. Jason Snell goes so far as to say that the new operating system for Macs was “an act of desperation” by Apple.
The reason, he explains, is that although Apple set a new direction for personal computers with the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, it was lost in the late 1990s …
In 1984, a graphical user interface on a personal computer was revolutionary; in the late 1990s, not so much.
As revolutionary as the original Mac was, it was also a project from the early 1980s that did not offer all the types of features that would become commonplace in the late 1990s.
This operating system was originally designed to fit in a small memory footprint and run one application at a time. Its multitasking system was problematic; clicking on an item in the menu bar and holding the mouse button down would effectively stop the entire computer from functioning. Its memory management system was primitive. Apple needed to do something new, a faster and more stable system that could keep pace with Microsoft, which was arriving at Apple with improvements in the Windows 95 user interface and the foundations of the modern Windows NT operating system.
In 1996, says Snell, Apple gave up.
At a spectacularly humiliating time for Apple, the company started looking for a company from which it could buy or license an operating system, or at least use it as the basis for a new version of the Mac OS. The company’s management, led by CEO Gil Amelio and CTO Ellen Hancock, clearly came to the conclusion that Apple itself was unable to build the next generation of Mac OS.
We all know what happened next.
December 20, 1996 – Apple Computer, Inc. today announced its intention to buy NeXT Software Inc., in a friendly acquisition for $ 400 million. With regulatory approvals pending, all NeXT products, services and technology research will be part of Apple Computer, Inc. As part of the agreement, Steve Jobs, president and CEO of NeXT Software, will return to Apple – the company he co -founded 1976 – reporting to Dr. Gilbert F. Amelio, Apple’s President and CEO.
The acquisition will bring together the innovative and complementary technology portfolios from Apple and NeXT and significantly strengthen Apple’s position as a company that is promoting industry standards. Apple’s leadership in ease of use and multimedia solutions will be combined with NeXT’s strengths in development software and operating environments for the corporate and Internet markets. NeXT’s object-oriented software development products will contribute to Apple’s goal of creating a profitable and differentiated software business with a wide range of products for companies, businesses, education and home markets.
Snell gives a good outline of the software challenges that followed and says that this is what makes the anniversary so important.
When we celebrate the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X, it’s important to realize what we are celebrating. We are celebrating the release of software that was the culmination of Steve Jobs’ return to Apple. We are celebrating the operating system we still use, two decades later. But we are also celebrating the founding of iOS, iPadOS, tvOS and watchOS.
So, this is not just the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X 10.0. It is the 20th anniversary of modern Apple and the end of the dark days when Apple was unable to fix its own operating system.
The complete piece is a good read.
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