What is Mac OS X 10.0?
Mac OS X is Apple’s new operating system. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the “X” is pronounced “ten”, like the roman number,not“ex” like the letter. Don’t make me come over there.
Mac OS X was released on March 24th, 2001, with a suggested retail price of $129 and a version number of10.0. Don’t let the version number confuse you; this is the first official release of Apple’s new OS. It was preceded by many developer releases and onepublic betarelease.
To say that Mac OS X has been eagerly awaited by Mac users is an understatement. Apple has been trying to produce a successor to the classic Mac OS operating system for almost 15 years. It’s a tragicomic litany of code names: Pink, Taligent, Copland, Rhapsody. In the early days (the Pink project was launched in 1987), Mac users paid little attention to these efforts, confident that their current OS was the most advanced in the personal computer market. But as the years passed and competing operating systems evolved, both by adopting Mac-like GUIs and by advancing their core OS features, Mac users–as well as Apple itself–became skittish.
By 1995, Windows had confined Apple’s OS to a small corner of the market. Perhaps Windows 95 wasn’t “insanely great”, but the market had declared that it was “good enough.” Meanwhile, Microsoft quietly continued its own long-running project to radically revise its core operating system technologies: Windows NT (which eventually gave birth to Windows 2000, and soon, Windows XP).
By the time Apple’s penultimate next generation OS project, Copland, was mercifully killed in 1996, the situation was dire. Mac users had suffered too many broken promises, and Apple had stumbled down too many blind alleys. By all rights, Copland should have been Apple’s last chance. But the acquisition of NeXT and the second coming of Steve Jobs gave Apple one final window of opportunity.
