Looking back 25 years later, even Steve was wrong about Mac OS X

Twenty-five years ago, Steve Jobs took the stage at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco and unveiled Mac OS

This may seem like a stretch, but after watching the keynote for the second time – the first time was from the front row, thank you very much! – It’s remarkable how great a moment that was for Apple and the Mac.

This is funny. What’s remarkable about this moment is actually how calm seemingly. When I watch the video again, it seems almost surreal how Steve Jobs continues to do completely normal and boring things in Mac OS If someone looks at it without any historical context, it looks like a cult being whipped into a frenzy by its leader.

But I was there, and I can tell you that wasn’t the case. This was the moment, after 16 years of classic Mac OS — and let’s face it, the last five years have been very difficult — when all of the Mac’s flaws were swept away and replaced with something modern and ready for the challenge of the 21st century.

How did that work for Apple? The keyword seems so strange now because almost everything in it is fair How does a Mac work?even after 25 years. Yes, interface styles have changed over time, but that moment on stage in January 2000 redefined the Mac for 25 years and counting.

Thick of it

Let me provide a little of this historical context. The original Mac OS, released in 1984, was revolutionary, but its foundations were from the earliest era of personal computers. Its revolutionary graphical interface was famously black and white, and it ran one program at a time. Fifteen years later, it was clear that modern operating systems had to have protected memory, powerful multitasking, and powerful graphics functionality—but the classic Mac OS couldn’t achieve any of that. Apple has tried a number of different operating system update projects, but they have all failed.

The final step was to buy a NeXt from Steve Jobs, which was struggling, but had an operating system, NeXtStep, that had all the features a Mac didn’t. And hey, Steve Jobs will work with Apple again! Not a bad package deal. Worth every penny, if you ask me.

However, NeXtStep is not for Mac OS. It had some features that you might recognize today as Mac-like, but for the most part, its interface looked downright weird. It’s designed for a very niche audience, as opposed to the broad Mac audience that will need to migrate for the transition to be successful.

In the three years between Jobs’ return and the reveal of Mac OS At the same time, there was a cultural clash, as previous NeXtStep developers didn’t necessarily understand what those expectations were.

Developers and designers at Apple had to look at every feature in the two operating systems and decide what would happen: do it the Mac way, do it the NeXt way, let users choose between those two ways, or choose a new path entirely. Each of these decisions had serious consequences. If things weren’t familiar enough for Mac users, switching to Mac OS The world is surrendering to Microsoft. But Apple’s development team won’t make it to the finish line if it doesn’t reuse large parts of what NeXt has built.

These decisions will impact the trajectory of Mac users over the next quarter century.

Lick it

One of the design goals was that when you see it, you want to lick it. So we call it Aqua. This is the architecture of Mac OS 10.-Steve Jobs

Apple has managed to “introduce” Mac OS But the introduction of Aqua on January 5, 2000 is a very good thing.

Much of what we take for granted today is in Steve Jobs’ initial demo, and he received a standing ovation. The Dock debuted that day, complete with a “genie effect” to minimize and maximize windows. Of course, this Dock was such a mess that you could drag files into it, and then they disappeared from your desktop! You can drag it back, and it will appear again on your desktop. (The files are already in the Dock folder in your user folder! But the Dock set was rewritten before it shipped.)

OS X Finder itself was unveiled that day as well. Some consider this a day that will live in infamy, but it’s definitely the same Finder we use now! It offers the “classic” Mac icon and list views, as well as a column view imported from NeXt and favored by Steve Jobs. Jobs liked the new feature that lets you navigate through your file system in a single window, instead of each double-click on the folder bringing up a new window, as well as the addition of a web browser-style back button.

It’s a fairly short trip to watch Jobs explain how Windows now has three buttons in the top-left corner, colored “like a stoplight,” with icons that appear when you hover your mouse over them. These buttons have become icons of the Mac as much as the menu bar itself, but this was the first time anyone had seen them.

The list goes on. Jobs’ favorite NeXtStep app was an email client, which explains why he was thrilled to introduce Mail, a brand-new (cough) app from Apple that will be included for free with Mac OS Who Are You I’ve emailed you and we’ll suggest names as you write, something else we’ve taken for granted for the past 25 years.

Naturally, the basis of all this was the open source Unix base that still runs the base of all Apple platforms. Jobs received applause for things like dropping the menu while the video was still playing and running a poorly behaved application that crashed without bringing down the entire system. Audiences gasp in amazement when an “App terminated unexpectedly” alert appears, something that today would be a minor annoyance at best. (Also, an amazing bit of trivia: The QuickTime movie Jobs uses for his Mac OS

It’s also worth noting the amazing new features Jobs introduced that day that went nowhere. There was a button at the far right edge of the window’s title bar that put you into Single Window Mode, to simplify using your Mac. While modern Macs have a full-screen mode that does this task, placing that mode on the window’s title bar was awkward and the feature was removed before OS X 1.0 shipped the following March.

Then there’s the strange case of the Apple logo. In Jobs’ demo, and in the public beta of Mac OS He didn’t do anything. But by the time Mac OS

However, Apple’s new menu was nothing like the original. (In the latter days of classic Mac OS, it was basically a folder filled with whatever you wanted to put there.) Apple’s new menu was a lot like the old private menu in Finder, where you could turn off or restart your device. Mac. It’s pretty much the same to this day.

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Welcome to the future

It’s hard to believe that Mac OS From the interface design to the technical underpinnings, the longevity of OS

“This is our foundation for the next decade of Macintosh operating systems, and we’re thrilled about it,” Jobs said onstage 25 years ago. He cut back a little. And what he introduced that day still forms the foundation of the Mac… and almost everything else Apple does. No matter what comes next, no matter where Apple and the tech industry go from here, there’s no doubt that Mac OS