My first introduction to Mac OS X was at my high school friend Ben’s house. A few months prior to the public beta release he had puzzled us all with his purchase of a ruby red iMac. At that time we were all diehard Linux and Windows 2000 users who looked at the Mac as a crashy, crummy toy that was good for graphics but not much else. I would frequently refer to Mac OS as the toilet bowl of computing.
Those were beliefs that were built solely by dealing with the crummy Mac all-in-ones running OS 7.5 we had in one of the high school computer lab. Despite those strong beliefs, it was hard to deny the visual appeal of that translucent red plastic, especially compared to the beige boxes we had under our desks at the time.
The iMac was visually appealing on the exterior but it was obvious MacOS 9 wasn’t designed for this thing. When Mac OS X was debuted, it all made sense.
When I first saw those screenshots or Mac OS X at its debut I was in awe. It was so shiny. So fluid. So pulsating. It had cool technology under the hood with even cooler names: Quartz, Darwin, Cocoa. It all sounded so futuristic and leaps and bounds beyond what Microsoft and Linux were shipping.
We scoured the web to find all the screenshots we could of Apple’s new lickable OS. More important we gathered up $29.95 to purchase a copy of the public beta.
When that magical disc of unfinished bits arrived, it was nerd Christmas after school that day. We all gathered around the iMac and began the install process. As the progress indicator reached 100% and the iMac rebooted we looked in awe at the shiny new desktop. It truly was a whole new Mac.
And it was ridiculously slow.
Despite the missing features, insanely slow performance and weird bugs, I knew I was hooked. My goal from that point forward was to get a Mac of my own.
Mac OS X 10.0.0 shipped on March 24, 2001 and I conveniently graduated from high school that spring. Every kid needs a laptop to take to college so I persuaded my parents to buy me a sexy white iBook that dual booted MacOS 9 and OS X. I did my best to boot into OS X as much as I could, but it was far too slow and incomplete to do day-to-day work. It wasn’t until I dragged my girlfriend to Indianapolis to stand in line at CompUSA for a free burnt copy of Mac OS X 10.1 that it was all Aqua all the time.
Mac OS X is a decade old today and it fundamentally shifted the direction I was planning to take in college and my career. If you look back at all the screenshots of the public beta and that 10.0.0 release, it’s hard to not cringe when it’s placed next to a screenshot of Snow Leopard or Lion. But if you compare it to the versions of Gnome, KDE and Windows at the time, it was obvious Apple was onto something great.
A decade ago devices like the iPhone and iPad were still things out of corny sci-fi movies. Today they are a reality and that is thanks in large part to the work the Mac OS X team has done over the past ten years.