Mac OS X Turns Five Today
Posted March 24th, 2006 @ 01:37pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Mac OS X is five years old today. I've been using Mac OS X since Developer Preview 2. In fact, I can further refine that: I've been using Mac OS X as my primary OS since DP2. Things in the early days were far from easy, but I've had very few problems since 10.0. All my classic apps worked back then, a few were carbonized (there's a word you don't hear anymore) or were in Cocoa, etc. Shortly after 10.1 shipped, I deleted Mac OS 9 from my entire system. I kept it around on a backup drive, but I never booted to it except once to run a disk utility.
Five years doesn't seem like that long ago. Admittedly, I've been without the "Classic" Mac much longer than most, so it seems like ages and ages ago - much more than five years - that I stopped using a version of the Mac operating system that didn't have a roman numeral in it.
Donate Life
Posted 24 Mar 2006 at 2:24pm #
That's about as long as you can get for OS X! Wow. I hopped on the bandwagon with my first Mac, a PowerBook G4 500MHz in April 2001, so that was only one month after 10.0 came out (and I bought my own copy of OS X since Apple wasn't yet preloading OS X).
10.0 may have been rough, but I saw it for its future, and a great future it was too. After struggling with Windows for years, plus alternative OSes that weren't going anywhere like BeOS and (ahem) Linux, I was ready for Apple to give me all they got. And they got a lot these days, thank God.
Cheers, Jared
Posted 24 Mar 2006 at 3:13pm #
Oh, how soon we forget; anyone remember OS X Server versions 1 through 1.2v3? Actually, come to think of it, I'd like to completely forget that ever existed. Sometimes I *still* get nightmares about that OS.
Posted 24 Mar 2006 at 3:19pm #
I had 10.0 and the public beta, but I only started using it as my primary OS upon the release of 10.1. That was the first version that was usably fast on my Yikes! G4/400.
Posted 24 Mar 2006 at 4:43pm #
I've been using Mac OS X as my primary OS since Public Beta. I would have started with DP3 but I had just bought a Dual G4 450 (Sawtooth) and much to my dismay DP3 didn't support the new SMP machines.
Posted 24 Mar 2006 at 5:03pm #
I was introduced to OS X at a conference in Chicago back when I started my current job. Back then, OS X was at the 10.0 level, and its NeXT roots were obvious. Being a NeXT fan - specifically a NeXT Computer (AKA Cube) fan, I knew what my OS of choice would be from then on. I immediately ran out and bought a G4 Cube and Studio LCD and was proud to have that sitting next to my NeXT Computer Prototype (yes, mine predates production models). I bought 10.1 for it (it only came with OS 9 since it was a demo model) and then upgrade to 10.2, then 10.3.
Three laptops (PBG3, Titanium, and 15" AlBook) and 3 desktops (Cube, iMac G4 1.25, mini core duo) later and I'm loving it. The only sad part is that OS X is so cool that now I rarely turn on my old NeXT anymore.
I personally keep Classic around for SimJesse (search page for 'SimJesse'). On the Core Duo, that means vMac or Basilisk. SimJesse is the greatest! 😀
Posted 03 Apr 2006 at 12:50am #
I've been using Mac OS X as my primary OS since the public beta. That said, I'd been using NeXT, then Windows with Yellow Box since before that.
I'd grown up on the Apple ][, then the Mac, all the way to Mac OS 8.6 at which point I gave up on the Mac and moved from Linux being a way to do Comp. Sci. assignments to being my primary OS.
At the time, along with chasing after my degree, I was also working part time + internships as a developer of medical imaging software, which was written in OpenStep (which later became Cocoa) for NeXT boxes, then via YellowBox on Windows. When Apple released the public beta, I bought a G3 Pismo powerbook, installed the OS, and haven't looked back.
Aside with some strange IO issues, the lack of /dev/random, and and a few others, I was impressed. These low-level annoyances were cleaned up by 10.1 though, and I've been happy ever since. It's been 5 years, and the OS just seems to be getting better and better. Still waiting for a /proc filesystem though.