To understand the desperation Apple felt in the mid - to - previous 1990s , look no further than toone particular MT - shirt . On the front was a 3 - D rendered numeric eight . On the back , the Scripture “ hand - On Experience ” and Mac OS 8 logotype .
At Apple ’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June 1996 , many of us got to experience the future of the Mac for the first time . We sire the t - shirt for exam driving Apple ’s transformational Modern operating system , one that replaced the woefully out - of - day of the month classical Mac oxygen with something that could compete with Microsoft . The operating system was dub Copland and it never shipped . The “ Hands - On Experience ” shirts and an play along Holy Writ , “ Mac OS 8 Revealed , ” were as expert it was ever going to get .
With its back against the paries and its interior computer software growth failing , Apple was left with only desperation moves . Fortunately , it made a good one , lead in Mac OS X 10.0 , which ship 20 years ago this week .
Classic Mac OS had to die
Classic Mac OS — the Mac operating scheme before OS X — was build on a shaky foundation . As rotatory as the original Mac was , it was also an early-1980s undertaking that did n’t provide all sort of features that would become commonplace by the late nineties .
That operating system had been originally design to meet in a small retention footprint and race one app at a time . Its multitasking organisation was tough ; tap an particular in the menu legal community and holding down the mouse clitoris would effectively block the entire computer from working . Its memory board management arrangement was crude . Apple needed to make something new , a faster and more static system that could keep up with Microsoft , which was coming at Apple with the user - user interface improvements of Windows 95 and the innovative - OS underpinnings of Windows NT .
That ’s where the t - shirt came in . Copland was intended to be Mac OS 8 , and it was supposed to ship in the middle of 1996 . It was go to extend pre - emptive multitasking , protect memory , a redesigned user interface with multiple themes , intelligent lookup , unspecific backup for OpenDoc ( if you do n’t experience , do n’t ask ) , and much more . The ship appointment slipped to the middle of 1997 , and some of Copland ’s more ambitious features were advertise off even further to a theoretic OS 9 computer code - named Gershwin . And then , a few months after Apple hand out those t - shirt , it killed the intact project .
A replication of the Mac OS 8 Copland t - shirt given to select WWDC attendees in 1996 .
What instead shipped as Mac OS 8 in the summer of 1997 was a version of the classic Mac OS , dressed up in the clothes of Copland . The advanced search technology , redesigned filesystem , revamped multitasking , and retentiveness aegis were nowhere to be found . While it offered some improvement over System 7 , Mac OS 8 did nothing to work out Apple ’s large operating - system problem .
Shopping for a future
In a spectacularly humbling mo for Apple , the company began research for a company from which it could purchase or license an operating system of rules or , at the least , use as the foundation of a new version of Mac OS . The troupe ’s management , led by CEO Gil Amelio and CTO Ellen Hancock , clearly had come to the ending that Apple itself was unequal to of building the next - generation Mac OS .
Though there were a lot of wild idea thrown around ( building Mac OS atop Microsoft ’s Windows NT kernel and reconstruct the platform using Java were two of them ) , the two most obvious butt were little companies with operating systems that had the modern feature Apple wanted most . Both were , perhaps unsurprisingly , being track down by former Apple administrator .
In one corner wasBe , Inc. , lean byJean - Louis Gasseé . Be was develop a fresh , innovative graphic interface from scratch , and it ran on the same PowerPC chips Apple used at the fourth dimension . You could even reboot from Mac OS into BeOS on certain Power Mac models . BeOS was gorgeous , fast , and offered modern search capableness that were far ahead of its time . Its biggest liability was that it was unfinished , so if Apple were to buy it , there would be a huge amount of development onward of it .
The NeXT deal not only gave Apple a modern Mac operating organization , it brought Steve Jobs back to Apple .
Time
In the other quoin wasNeXT , founded bySteve Jobs . Although perhaps a routine less cutting - edge than BeOS , NextStep was a more complete package , and it also had the Steve Jobs factor . Amelio and Hancock were plainly convinced , and broker a $ 400 milliondealto grease one’s palms NeXT and bring problem back to Apple in an consultative role .
You know what finally encounter to Jobs . He was an “ adviser ” who became a panel member who became the interim CEO who finally transformed Apple into one of the earth ’s large and most regarded companies by the time of his demise in 2011 .
What you might not have intercourse is that NextStep , that operating system of rules that add up over in the spate , was basically the core of Mac OS X. The software system decisions made at NeXT in the 1990s reverberate to this sidereal day , in computer code that hunt not just on the Mac , but on all of Apple ’s devices — iPhone , iPad , Apple Watch , and Apple TV .
The long road to OS X
Apple buy NeXT in December of 1996 . Mac OS X 10.0 shipped in March of 2001 . As powerful and advanced as NextStep was , it take the new Apple software organization — lead by NeXT’sAvie Tevanian — more than four years from accomplishment to a “ completed ” variation of Mac OS X. ( And check the clock 20 years ago this week is credibly unjust . I ’d score the closing of the Mac OS X passage as April 2002 , when Steve Jobs held a funeral for Mac OS 9 becauseOS X was finally sound enough . )
What took so long ? The NeXT interface call for to be revamped to resemble Mac O in rescript to get Mac exploiter on board with the new operating system . This was an country where Mac OS really won the twenty-four hour period . With each successive preview release , NeXT ’s influence faded away . Perhaps its greatest port bequest on macOS today is the Dock , which never existed before OS X.
NeXT ’s cracking bequest is on every Mac today : the Dock .
Apple
There were also several false start , including Rhapsody and Mac OS X Server , weird loan-blend of NextStep and Mac OS that did n’t get it right . Apple realized that it could n’t just ship NeXT ’s app - development environment , the Yellow Box – the ancestor of present - day Apple ’s Cocoa – and carry the developers of all Mac apps to completely rewrite their software for a new program .
alternatively , Apple had to create a layer cake of an operating system , with Yellow Box ( which grant NextStep developers such as The Omni Group to become fledgling Mac developer ) endure alongside Blue Box , a modernized variant of the existing Mac operating system lotion environment . By create Carbon , a set of modernised Mac - style interface , Mac developers could change their be apps to run on Mac OS X , rather than demand to rewrite them .
And of course , there was Classic , a virtualized version of the original Mac OS that would be subject of run unmodified apps . Using Classic was a supremely weird experience , but it did leave a span for people who could n’t give up their older software .
This is one big reason why Mac OS X took as long as it did to make it out into the world . It postulate to update the NeXT app approach ( which make it to this day across Apple ’s platforms ) while build multiple level of compatibility to give Mac software a piazza to run . And until Microsoft and Adobe publicly committed to establish OS X aboriginal versions of their apps , it was an open interrogative sentence if Apple could pull it off .
More than Steve Jobs
It ’s often said that Steve Jobs was the most valuable asset in the Apple - NeXT deal . And it ’s out of the question to indicate that , give what befall to Apple in the several years after the deal .
But it ’s also an unfair to orient to make . Apple ’s intact operating - system strategy for the last 20 years has used NextStep as a foundation . Every iPhone app developer who uses classes such as NSObject , NSString , and NSArrayare staring it properly in the font : the NS prefix arrive fromNextStep .
So when we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Mac OS X , it ’s of import to realizewhatwe’re keep . We ’re celebrating a software system release that was the windup of Steve Jobs ’s riposte to Apple . We ’re celebrate the operating system we still use , two ten later on . But we ’re also lionize the creation of iOS , iPadOS , tvOS , and watchOS .
In that way , this is n’t just the twentieth anniversary of Mac OS X 10.0 . It ’s the twentieth anniversary of modernistic Apple , and the remnant of the dark day when Apple could n’t fix its own operating system . ( Been there , experience that , get the t - shirt . )
