Touted as “the world’s most advanced operating system, combining the power and openness of UNIX with the legendary ease of use and broad applications base of Macintosh®”, Mac OS X 10.0 was preceded by a paid Public Beta, and was the result of more than four years of work and hence – supposedly – a pretty polished release, which at least fixed the most prominent issues and complaints regarding the Beta, all for 129 USD.

Mac OS X 10.0 was code named Cheetah and from this version, up until the introduction of OS X Mavericks in June 2013, Apple gave all of its Macintosh Operating Systems feline-related code-names. Later it even used the codenames publicly in marketing and promotional communication.

For many Mac users Cheetah was the first proper introduction to the new graphical user interface Aqua and its app launcher/manager, the Dock, to the new UNIX-like underpinnings (featuring access to a proper command line interface through the Terminal app), native system-wide PDF support, the word processor TextEdit and Mail email client, and, most of all, long-awaited stability features such as memory protection and full preemptive multitasking.

Mac OS X Version 10.0 required a Power Macintosh G3 (beige or B&W), PowerMac G4, G4 Cube, iMac G3, 1998 or later PowerBook G3, PowerBook G4 or iBook G3 with 128 MB of RAM and at least 800 MB of Hard Drive space, but 1.5 GB was recommended.

In the press release Steve Jobs was quoted saying

“We can’t wait for Mac users around the globe to experience its stability, power and elegance.”

Let’s just say that while Mac OS X 10.0 was undeniably sleek and eye-pleasing, technologically versatile and advanced, it was also very, very sluggish and was missing basic features. We’re talking about features available in the outdated and soon-to-be-unsupported Mac OS 9, such being able to watch a DVD, burn media to a CD or use a printer from a major brand. In other words: Apple’s new OS era was off to a very slow start, in spite of its codename.

The Mac OS X 10.0 box had a fold out cover and included, alongside a slim tutorial booklet and license agreement papers, three CDs.

One was for the installation of Mac OS X 10.0 and the second for adding the Mac OS X Developer tools. The box significantly contained a third CD, with Mac OS 9.1. This was needed to double boot the Macintosh or to use Apple’s “Classic” environment  which enabled the use of older Mac OS applications from inside Mac OS X, through virtualization.

Despite four “Developer Preview” versions and the aforementioned Public Beta, the harsh reality was that many popular Macintosh apps in 2001 still didn’t have native Mac OS X counterparts. In the case of professional mainstays such as Adobe Photoshop, Carbon versions (i.e. versions which ran natively on both Mac OS 9 and X) were made available only in the following years, with embarassing delays.

In his epic review, engineer/journalist John Siracusa clearly stated that the

“10.0 release is not quite ready for prime time. This is most certainly an early adopter’s OS release. Interface responsiveness and effective stability are the two biggest fundamental problems, but missing features and compatibility issues rank just as high if you actually intend to use OS X as a full Mac OS 9 replacement”

At least one of those major issues, CD burning, was hastily addressed in what can only be described as a coding marathon as former Apple engineer Drew Thaler recollected in an interview with Stories of Apple:

“We’d designed our CD-burning software on (Mac) OS 9. We did it with (Mac) OS X in mind, but because we did it outside of Apple, it was all theoretical — none of us actually had any free time where we could play with (Mac) OS X until, literally, the end of January 2001.

At that point we started working on a Mac OS X port. But we quickly found that it didn’t support many of the features that we needed: no direct access to the CD burner, no way to handle blank CD media, not even recursive mutexes in the pthread library! Of course we quickly started talking to the right people in CoreOS to get these problems solved, but still, there was just so much missing that we were planning on a June or July 2001 release of CD burning in Mac OS X.

Now as we were working on resolving all those problems, Mac OS X 10.0 was released. Sometime around the end of March — maybe even on launch day? — Steve Jobs announced that “CD burning will be available in Mac OS X by the end of next month.” In our group, we all freaked out. WHAT!? Nobody had told us that!

Suddenly everything changed. We went from “Let’s do this the right way” to “Do it as fast as possible, at all costs!” We hacked around the pthread problem, wrote our own quick-and-dirty kernel extension, and got it all ready to ship in literally four weeks. Mac OS X CD burning support was released on May 1st as part of 10.0.2, a day “late” but actually three full months ahead of our original plan.”

Alongside missing features, Mac OS X was also seriously hobbled in performance and responsiveness, which ranged from bad to embarassing, depending on the hardware configuration, particularly when compared to running Mac OS 9.

The problems weren’t fully addressed or resolved and in January 2002 a lawsuit was filed against Apple. The law firm of King & Ferlauto alleged that Apple had violated the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act by not supporting certain G3-equipped models of Mac systems with the same features in Mac OS X afforded to more recently developed G4-based systems. According to the firm Apple’s press release published in May of 1998 said that Mac OS X would be “fully optimized” for PowerPC G3-based systems, but that “the reason for this slow performance was not due to the inherent limitations of either these computers or OS X,” but “Rather, it was due to Apple’s willful failure to write software drivers in OS X to take advantage of [certain ATI-based hardware accelerators].”

One year before, in January 2001, during the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Steve Jobs had solemnly stated that “Mac OS X is the future of the Mac, and we hope it will delight our customers with its unrivaled power and ease of use”.
This vision ultimately proved itself true, but it took quite a while to get there and actually delight Apple’s customers. At least a couple more felines.

The last version of Mac OS X 10.0 was 10.0.4, in June 22, 2001. It was superseded on September 25, 2001 by version 10.1 of Mac OS X, code-named Puma, which was released as a free update, fixing more outstanding issues such as DVD playback and printer support. Unfortunately performance continued to be a sore point for Mac OS X, at least until the arrival, in August 2002, of Mac OS X 10.2, aka Jaguar.

Note: the screenshots of Apple’s website and of the Mac OS X 10.0 desktop are “courtesy of Apple”. The photo of the contents of the Mac OS X 10.0 box is from the Storie di Apple / Stories of Apple archive. 

To paraphrase Steve Wozniak’s “virtually every [computer] machine is a ‘Macintosh’ now”, virtually every smartphone is an ‘iPhone’ now.

How did this happen? What really did Apple do differently from other mobile companies?

The most important thing is that although the iPhone as built upon the Newton, Palm and General Magic vision, Apple mostly started from scratch and didn’t limit itself to just improving an already existing and established set of specs currently available on the market. It chose a revolutionary approach instead of an evolutionary one.

In a 2017 Computer History Museum event, iPhone engineers remembered how much they were disappointed by the incremental updates strategy of the existing players.

In the video of the event, at 19:56 (to 24:16) you can hear Apple iPhone hardware engineer Hugo Fiennes stating: 

“I’ve been a big phone owner […]. I used to buy the latest release [thinking] ‘This is the one! This is the one! It’s gonna be… oh, it’s awful!’ [And I’ll] Sell it on eBay and buy another one. And I’ve been through many different ones. No one was really pushing the boat out (?) to what was really possibile. […] There was a lot of stuff there which… you looked at that stuff and it’s obvious that everyone else was just… they had to make some different variants of phones. It was just incremental. They were holding stuff back. And Apple had nothing to hold back. It was just ‘Go for it’. What’s the best stuff we can get? Let’s add a bit to that and push and push all of the chip vendors a bit harder. And the screen vendors and everyone a bit harder. And get this amazin thing. Nokia was just being incremental. Everyone was being incremental.”

Apple iPhone Software engineer Nitin Ganatra adds: 

“Every single time a new phone came out, for me anyway, I had this hope that ‘OK, this is actually gonna be the phone that I want to use. And they never were. It was because they _were_ very incremental. It’s a brand new year and Sony Ericsson now has this brand new phone… Last year’s was OK but, boy, they’ve done an year of learning! Let’s see what they’ve come up with now!’ And one year later it’s about like what they had released a year before.” 

Apple iPhone Software engineer Scott Herz (not so jokingly) quips: 

“Except that it had like a special key on the side that did somehting stupid!”

And Ganatra sums it up: 

“And it was slower than last year’s [model]. It probably had slightly worse battery life. And had this fuzzy screen that allegedly was color. You know, it was just bad in all this ways…”

The real secret wasn’t that Apple was working on the iPhone. It was its approach. They worked in secret and managed to surprise competitors and >pundits alike.

As iPhone engineer Nitin Ganatra remembers: 

“[The secrecy] was an impediment. Of course it was an impediment. But at the same time there was so much value there as well by having this secret and having it be. ‘Let the rest of the world think that in order to develop a phone you have to this incremental thing, right?’ And that’s what the industry looks like. Everybody’s gonna have effectively a dot one and they’re gonna take a whole year to come out with that. I think that that all served us very well in the end. Nobody knew what was coming. Nobody knew what we were working on. And if anybody had to guess they would think that it looks probably a lot like the Blackberries did at that time, or the Treos did at thet time. If you asked anybody, based on what had already happening in the phone industry before, they would think that we would have a very minor increment on top of the best phone that was there in 2006. Right? Because that was the pattern that everybody else was following. Why would we have anything better? I think those years of slow development in the phone industry also helped us too. In addition to keeping it secret, it helped us really make a big splash!”

Apple rethought the rules and wasn’t afraid to make bold choices, sometimes even taking steps back.

An example of this is how they took the keyboard away, making space for whichever UI was needed at any moment. 

Nowadays 99% of mobile “smart” phones have no keyboard/keypad.

Eventually Google, Motorola, Samsung or Nokia – which were and are also full of smart engineers – would have got a similar result, but they would have done it much, much later.

Apple’s advantage, which allowed them to leapfrog the competition, was in coming from a different market, thinking outside of the box and having executives who pushed a precise vision, free of market shares, needs, investors or other baggage.

Remember that in 2007, even tough Apple was riding on the gigantic success of the iPod, it was definitely an upstart in the mobile market, not an incumbent. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughed at Apple’s strategy, while Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, co-chief executives and co-chairmen of Research In Motion (RIM), dismissed [Apple and the iPhone] as

“kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space with lots of choice for consumers”, adding that “in terms of a sort of a sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that’s overstating it.”

Palm CEO Ed Colligan, answering to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff commented that it wasn’t easy succeed mobile business:

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone” adding that “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

And yet Apple succeeded. An important factor in Apple’ approach was exactly that it wasn’t part of that mobile market and that it was coming from a computer business mindset, not just a mobile one. Apple treated the iPhone like a computer, not like a phone: they even adapted their personal computer operating system, not the iPod OS or any mobile “firmware”. 

This later proved as a big asset, e.g. making native apps possible, or adapting the OS to other form factors, such as the iPad.

Lastly, Apple didn’t cater to telcos. Since day one the iPhone was sold both by mobile operators and by the Infinite Loop business, and it’s Apple that decides features, and provides and controls the software the device runs on and its updates. In 2018 this, unfortunately, is still one of iPhone (and iPad’s) strenghts and one of Android’s biggest problems.

Here’s a bit of information (and context) about the people who are standing together with Jobs as he’s showing off his sleek brand new cubic-shaped computer.

Unfortunately I’m not sure who the first person on the left is – for now –, but the second one on the left is definitely Rich Page. At Apple had a key role as engineer and developer, and worked on Lisa’s hardware and software. Most importantly he also was one of the NeXT founders, as are the other two persons that are closer to Jobs in the picture.

The first one is Dan’l Lewin. He was a marketing manager and was in charge of NeXT’s relations with Universities and in general of the education market the workstation was targeted to.

The man with the glasses near Lewin is famed Macintosh software developer Guy “Bud” Tribble. He was also one of the key people who developed NeXTSTEP and later the OPENSTEP API. For the record Tribble is now back at Apple, where he has the role of Vice President of Software Technology (and unofficially one of Infinite Loop’s “policy” supervisors).

Finally, the last person on the right is probably Peter Van Cuylenburg, who was NeXT’s COO, i.e. its Chief Operating Officer.

If you’d like to see more, please head on to Roman Moisescot’s All About Steve Jobs website. There’s an album full of photos and video stills from the 1988 event where, among others, you can see NeXT founder and Chief Financial Officer Susan Barnes and main investor Ross Perot. Somehow absent, though, is another founder, George Crow, who was also a Macintosh veteran, and who had the role of NeXT’s “Vice president of analog engineering”.

On September 1985 Jobs had chosen to leave Apple with other veterans of the Macintosh and Lisa teams. He had been ostracized in May after a failed board coup in which he opposed and lost against John Sculley, the former Pepsi Executive he brought to Apple in 1983 to “change the world” together.

The first machines were actually made available for testing in 1989, after which NeXT started selling them in limited numbers to universities with a beta version of the UNIX-based NeXTSTEP operating system installed. Initially the NeXT Computer, or The Cube, as it was nicknamed, was targeted at U.S. higher education establishments only, with a base price of 6,500 USD.
Later, in 1990. NeXT’s computers were released on the retail market, selling for $9,999. 

The NeXT Computer was widely reviewed in magazines, which lauded its hardware capabilities and the combination of UNIX underpinnings and polished Graphical User Interface, but also lamented the very high selling price. When asked if he was upset that the computer’s debut was delayed by several months, Jobs supposedly responded, “Late? This computer is five years ahead of its time!”

Under the hood of the black cube (made of magnesium and designed by german firm frogdesign, who Jobs had chosen and worked with at Apple) the workstation ran on the then new 25 MHz Motorola 68030 CPU. Actually the Motorola 88000 RISC chip was originally considered, and the NeXTSTEP system software was even ported to it (according to lead developer Avie Tevanian) but this CPU was not available in sufficient quantities. So it was panned in favor of the latest iteration of the 68×00 line. It was same chip chosen by Apple, but running at a higher frequency (40 MHz), for its top of the line Macintosh model, the Macintosh fx, released a few months later, and sold at an even higher price, 10,000-12,000 USD.

NeXT’s machine had undoubtedly impressive hardware specifications. It supported from 8 to 64 MB of RAM, had a 40 MB (swap-only), 330 MB, or 660 MB hard disk drive, and adopted a futuristic (and sleek) 256 MB magneto-optical (MO) drive as its removable storage system, though it was later ditched in favor of a more traditional and low cost floppy disk drive. The workstation came with an Ethernet connection by default and had top-notch graphic capabilities. It implemented a licensed on-screen version of Adobe’s professional graphical printing language PostScript, and could drive a 17-inch MegaPixel high resolution grayscale display, measuring 1120 x 832 pixels with total fidelity between monitor and printed page. At the time most PCs or Macs on the market were mostly limited to 640×480 pixel displays and two of the few notable exceptions were Apple’s Two Page Monochrome Display and Portrait Display.

Owing to its education and research targetting, The NeXT Cube was also the first computer to ship fitted with a general-purpose Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip, the Motorola 56001. The chip could be used to support sophisticated music and sound processing, offloading this work from the main CPU.

The NeXT Computer was succeeded by the NeXTcube, an upgraded cube-shaped model, released together with the NeXTstation, nicknamed “the slab”, housed in a low profile “pizza box” case form-factor. Finally, in 1992, NeXT launched “Turbo” variants of the two models, with a 33 MHz 68040 processor and maximum RAM capacity increased to 128 MB. 

Due to disappointing sales, high costs, and hardware development problems, NeXT withdrew from the hardware business in 1993. Apparently, in four years only a meagre total of 50,000 NeXT machines was sold.

NeXT reached an agreement with Canon offloading its factory, hardware-design center, and 60 employees, and in the further years devoted all resources to its operating system and revolutionary software development offer, under the new name NeXT Software Inc.

Wozniak: “In the years 1980 to ’83, when the Apple II was the largest-selling computer in the world, we didn’t advertise it once. Everybody else who was making products for it was advertising for it. All of our ads were for the Apple III, which never sold in that time frame. Because we were trying to make the Apple III the big business machine instead of IBM.

Livingston: That didn’t happen, right?

Wozniak: That didn’t happen. I think it was a total fallacy. I think we should have advertised the Apple II. If you’ve got the world’s best-selling computer, keep it going as much as it can. But the company kind of wanted the Apple III to win and the Apple II to lose. It was really weird because you’d walk into the company and everybody had an Apple III on their desk—nobody had an Apple II. The Apple II was the largest-selling computer in the world, and the only guy working for it in the company was the guy reprinting the price list.“

I’ve done a bit of research and, not counting brochures, catalogs and magazine inserts, there are at least 16 (sixteen!) ads for the Apple ][ in the years Wozniak mentions. 

1980 Apple II Ben Franklin Ad
1981 Apple II & III Henry Ford Ad
1981 Apple II & III Thomas Edison Ad
1981 Apple II & III Thomas Jefferson Ad
1981 Apple II & III Thomas Jefferson Ad
1981 Apple II & III Orville Wright Ad
1981 “Optical Engineer” Ad
1981 “Baked Apple” Ad
1981 “Pepperidge Farm” Ad
1981 “Make Waves” Ad
1981 “Farmer Ron” Ad
1981 “Three Good Reasons” Ad
1982 “Great Carrots” Ad
1982 Apple “Personal Relationship” Ad
1982 Apple “One Bite” Ad
1983 Apple IIe Introduction Ad

The main source for this data is the wonderful MacMothership website, whose gallery of ads has a section which spans from 1980 to 1983.

Here’s an excerpt of the gallery, with only the ads dated 1981. I have circled in red the ones promoting the Apple ][.

It’s true, some of the ads advertise both the Apple ][ and the Apple /// and later on, in 1983, Apple’s promotional efforts were understandably focused on the Lisa but the fact is that Wozniak’s recollections are wrong. 

Although undoubtedly some Apple executives unfairly dismissed Woz’s masterpiece and treated it as their past (and Steve Jobs is among them), up until the end of the Eighties the Apple ][ had a very, very important role and Infinite Loop’s advertising clearly reflects that importance.

It was was a POSIX-compliant, “true” UNIX, licensed and based on AT&T UNIX System V Release 2.2, and later Releases 3 and 4 and BSD versions 4.2 and 4.3. 

It was quite expensive and ran only on top of the line 68K Macintosh models, such as the Macintosh II, Quadra and Centris series. The Macs not only had to be equipped with 68020, 68030 or 68040 processors but the operating system also needed a FPU and a PMMU, a paged memory management unit. 

Although you could just use the standard X windowing system, one of the bonuses of A/UX was that – while still being a UNIX-compliant system – it also provided the ability to run System 6 and System 7-era Macintosh-native software. One could have a terminal window with a shell running multiple commands and at the same time work on a document in Microsoft Word. 

The first release ran only a small percentage of the Mac application base, in particular third party software, which were programmed to access Mac hardware directly or in unofficial ways, and could only display one program onscreen at any one time. In the following versions – starting from 1.1 – compatibility was improved and an A/UX version of the Finder was also provided, further bridging the gap between the two operating systems.

Unfortunately Apple did not develop a version of its Finder-friendly UNIX operating system for the PowerPC CPUs, which the Macintosh platform switched to in 1994. The final version of A/UX, 3.1.1, was released in 1995 and, like all versions beyond 3.0, ran only on the Workgroup Server 95, an A/UX specific Macintosh model based on the Quadra 950. 

After this, for a few years Apple chose to sell its new servers, the Apple Network Server model 500 and 700 with a totally different UNIX operating system, a version of IBM’s AIX, which had no compatibility at all with Macintosh software, unlike other Apple solutions for the UNIX world.

Note: the A/UX screenshots are taken from http://www.aux-penelope.com/