It seems like only yesterday, but the Mac OS X we know and love today had its humble debut 10 years ago, on March 24, 2001 after several months as a public beta. You’ve come a long way, baby!
TUAW has compiled a great timeline of the major Mac OS X releases over the years to celebrate the operating system’s tenth birthday on Thursday. First released as 10.0 “Cheetah” on March 24, 2001 for $129, you can get a great look at the major milestones of Mac OS X over the years, right up to this summer’s planned introduction of 10.7 Lion, which aims to bring some of the iOS simplicity back to the Mac.
Mac OS X’s tenth birthday ironically comes on the heels of the announcement this week that Apple VP of software engineering Bertrand Serlet would be leaving the company after guiding the operating system from its NeXT origins to today.
We can recall the thrill of installing the original Mac OS X Public Beta, which dual booted alongside then-dominant Mac OS 9, only to discover that the early editions of Mac OS X were, in the words of TUAW, “slow, clunky and made many users want to throw their Macs out the window, into the closest body of water or quickly scurry back to the safety of OS 9.”
Realizing the mistakes of the first Mac OS X, Apple released 10.1 “Puma” in September, 2001, a free upgrade that went a long way toward stabilizing the young operating system. However, Mac OS X wouldn’t really begin to gain traction until August, 2002 with the debut of 10.2 “Jaguar,” when most users finally began the transition from the aging OS 9 to the modern OS X we know today.
Happy birthday, Mac OS X! Here’s to another decade together…
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(Image courtesy of MacRumors forum member Laser47)
