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Today is the 20th anniversary of the launch of Mac OS X, and Macworld has an interesting piece of the story that led to it. Jason Snell goes so far as to say that the new Mac operating system was “an act of desperation” on Apple’s part.
The reason, he explains, is that while Apple set a new direction for personal computers with the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, it had lost its way by the late 1990s …
In 1984, a graphical user interface on a personal computer was revolutionary; at the end of the 90s, not so much.
As revolutionary as the original Mac was, it was also an early 1980s project that lacked all sorts of features that would become commonplace in the late 1990s.
This operating system was originally designed to fit into a small memory footprint and run one application at a time. His multitasking system was problematic; clicking on an item in the menu bar and holding down the mouse button would effectively stop the whole computer from functioning. Its memory management system was primitive. Apple needed to create something new, a faster, more stable system that could keep pace with Microsoft, which was coming to Apple with the user interface improvements of Windows 95 and the foundations of the modern operating system from Windows NT.
By 1996, Snell says, Apple had given up.
In a particularly humble moment for Apple, the company began looking for a company from which it could purchase or license an operating system, or at least use it as the basis for a new version of Mac OS. . The company’s management, led by CEO Gil Amelio and CTO Ellen Hancock, had clearly come to the conclusion that Apple itself was incapable of building the next-gen Mac OS.
We all know what happened… then.
December 20, 1996 – Apple Computer, Inc. today announced its intention to purchase NeXT Software Inc., in a friendly acquisition for $ 400 million. Pending regulatory approvals, all NeXT technology products, services and 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 in which he co-founded 1976 – report to Dr. Gilbert F. Amelio, Apple CEO.
The acquisition will bring together the innovative and complementary technology portfolios of Apple and NeXT and significantly strengthen Apple’s position as a company advancing industry standards. Apple’s leadership in usability and multimedia solutions will be combined with NeXT’s strengths in development software and operating environments for the enterprise and Internet markets. NeXT’s object-oriented software development products will contribute to Apple’s goal of building a differentiated and profitable software business, with a broad range of products for the enterprise, enterprise, education and home markets .
Snell gives a good overview of the software challenges that followed and says that is what makes this anniversary so important.
As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X, it’s important to realize What we celebrate. We are celebrating a software release that was the culmination of Steve Jobs’ return to Apple. We’re celebrating the operating system we still use, two decades later. But we’re also celebrating the founding of iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS.
In this way, it’s not just the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X 10.0. It’s the 20th anniversary of modern Apple and the end of the dark days when Apple couldn’t fix its own operating system.
The entire track is a good read.
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