When Steve Jobsreturned to Apple,it was in a direstate, the reasonbeing that the MacOS was very outdat-ed and hadn’t seena revision in years.Therefore, whenApple announcedMac OS X, it wasmet with an enthu-siasm that can hardly be overstated. The Apple faithful had been waiting fifteenyears for a worthy successor to the classic Mac operating system.Several had even jumped the gun and switched to the only com-mercial alternative, the Windows OS from Microsoft. Mac OS Xhad been through a series of code names in the developmentstages—Taligent, Copland, Rhapsody, and Cheetah. The last wassupposed to be just an internal code name, but it sounded coolenough as a branding for the final version, so it stayed on whenthe product left the labs.
OS X was supposed to regain some of the lost market share forApple, the market share that was lost to Windows 95 when it wasreleased in 1995. Consumers flocked to Windows 95 in droves.Sure, it lacked the fine polish of the Mac OS, but it was cheaperand compatible with all IBM PC clones. It wasn’t “insanely great,”but for most people, it did the job. After all previous attempts at reating a next-generation operating system to leap ahead ofWindows had failed, the second coming of Steve Jobs and theacquisition of NeXT gave Apple one final window of opportunity.
It was a fundamental divergence from the classic Mac OS. Thisoperating system was completely based on the XNU kernel andwas very “Unix-like.” (XNU is the name of the kernel used in theopen source Darwin computer operating system, which Appleuses as the foundation of Mac OS X. It is a hybrid kernel based ona mixed Mach kernel and the FreeBSD kernel codebase. XNU is arecursive acronym for “XNU is Not Unix.”) This ensured that itwas extremely stable and secure. The core is called Darwin, and iscompletely open source. Apple added a lot of custom technologiesto Darwin such as the QuickTime engine, the Aqua interface,Finder, etc. Pre-emptive multi-tasking and memory protectionwere some of the core technologies Apple introduced, whichensured that the OS could multi-task effectively with all theresources shared among the various applications as and whenrequired. They also ensured that an application crash would nottake down the entire system.
The Aqua interface was the most distinct addition to theDarwin core. It gave the operating system a beautiful, liquid sortof look and feel. Windows XP was released a short while afterMac OS X, and Mac users had the opportunity to sneer at thedecidedly ugly looks of XP when compared to Cheetah. The Aquainterface has undergone a lot of refinement over the years andcompared to the smooth and minimalist look of Tiger today,Cheetah looks a bit too gaudy; but at the time, it was the goldstandard in interface design.
There have been five versions of OS X so far—Cheetah (March2001), Puma (September 2001), Jaguar (August 2002), Panther(October 2003) and Tiger (April 2005). Though all the other ver-sions had to be paid for, Puma was basically a bug-fix release thatwas released as a free update for existing Cheetah users. The forth-coming version of Mac OS X is called Leopard, and is expected to ship in October 2007. As Apple puts it, “Just as Vista tries to getcloser, Mac OS X Leopard is right around the corner—ready to leapeven farther ahead.” There will be a lot of comparisons of Tiger toVista in this book, but it is to be noted that Tiger is already a two-year-old operating system, and that the real competitor for Vista isgoing to be Leopard.
