- 2006.03.24
Ah, Mac OS X. Can you believe five years have already gone by
since 10.0 was released, and not only is Apple still in business,
but this newfangled Mac OS continues to flourish. The transition
from the NeXT purchase - from the subsequent integration of
personnel and technologies to actually rolling out a new Mac OS -
took a wee bit of time and effort.
Rhapsody and its multicolored boxes became OS X with Cocoa
and Carbon applications and its very noticeable Classic
compatibility layer.
Now we swing forward yet again to Mac OS X on Intel processors
with a transparent PowerPC compatibility layer. Classic is not
supported on Intel CPUs, but OS X is still OS X, even on
those fancy new Intel processors.
I was not an early adopter of OS X. From the start of the Public
Beta, I was intrigued by the promise of a more robust operating
system with its improved multitasking and increased stability, but
the first few editions of OS X felt unfinished. The promise
was there, but the OS X Public Beta, 10.0, and 10.1 were all a
little rough around the edges.
Jaguar Rocks
However, Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar", which sprang to life in 2002,
proved to be a marked improvement of functionality and polish.
Indeed, many pundits and users feel the Jaguar release was the
first truly usable version of OS X.
As I remember things, Jaguar was the first release to use the
cat names as a public identifier. While 10.3 "Panther" and 10.4
"Tiger" have followed and continued to improve by adding new
features, I've never taken my personal Macs past Jaguar - [partly
because I am a cheapskate, this site is Low End Mac after all, but
also because I feel Jaguar is a very solid operating system.]
During my transition in 2003, my Macs of choice
were a Snow iMac DV SE and a
Graphite FireWire iBook SE.
Both were fine computers and genuinely stable for using the classic
Mac OS. Thankfully, Jaguar was even more stable, flexible, and
robust enough to handle the tasks I threw at my G3-powered Macs.
Those tasks were nothing terribly fancy - word processing, email,
web browsing, chat, music playback, and some design work.
Everything more or less worked similarly enough to the old Mac OS
that I never felt lost as I figured my way around this new OS.
Overall, my first impressions were favorable, and I did not feel
this new Mac OS was terribly different from the classic versions.
Sure my iMac's 256 MB of RAM went from more than adequate to a bare
minimum for respectable performance, but the 576 MB RAM in my iBook
made things generally comfortable.
Between the fancy Quartz display technology and the
under-the-hood changes, overall snappiness was not as immediate as
the classic Mac OS. Of course, once the multitasking began, I could
appreciate how the Mac OS X interface stayed responsive,
unlike Mac OS 9 and earlier. Barring the occasional spinning
beach ball or kernel panic - thankfully rare - I was overwhelmed at
the uptime I could maintain.
Generally, my efficiency increased as I did not have to worry
about memory fragmenting, which often resulted in misbehaving
applications bringing down the entire OS. Instead, OS X would
usually allow the application to die gracefully, leaving the
operating system untouched.
All was not the same between this new incarnation of the Mac OS
and its predecessors. The terminal brought new found flexibility
and power that the old design didn't offer. While typing in
esoteric commands seemed anathema to the Mac's traditional GUI
approach to interaction, I found this tool encouraging. Indeed, an
increased comfort with the terminal led to my developing fondness
for *nix systems in general. Consequently, I found myself becoming
acquainted with OS X's free relatives - the BSDs and Linux.
If not for Apple's ability to comfortably merge (more or less
anyway) the power of Unix with the friendliness of the Mac OS, I
would never have discovered this other world of computing. Sure, I
had heard of the various Unix cousins, but I had never felt
compelled to dig into anything command line related. Hadn't I left
DOS behind because I did not want to muck around with such an
anachronistic way of interacting with a personal computer.
I suppose everything old will be new again. Sometimes the CLI is
the better tool, and sometimes the GUI is preferred. Good thing Mac
OS X was able to do such a good job with both interfaces.
What started out as a little dabbling has led me to embrace
these other operating systems on both PowerPC and x86 hardware.
While 90% of my computers are Mac OS systems, many still running
pre-OS X versions of the Mac OS, I have fully embraced the new
world.
This is somewhat to Apple's detriment, as I have hopped off the
upgrade treadmill. Instead, I am more likely to transition to a
Linux distribution in order to keep my Macs up to date. However, to
pass the casual user/family member test, Mac OS X has proven
to be a more than competent merger of robust underpinnings and
friendly interface, which is why my mother's system will continue
to run OS X.
I think we should all congratulate Apple for pushing forward
with a whole new operating system. After all, they had been talking
about doing so since the late 1980s.
The classic Mac OS is still great, but OS X is the future of the
platform, and I am not hesitant to give credit where credit is
due.
After OS X 10.5 "Leopard" is released (it should be
sometime this year), 10.3 and 10.4 will become the new basis for
low-end Mac computing. I'm sure I'll soon embrace all the wonderful
new tools introduced in the years since I started using Mac
OS X.
Happy fifth anniversary, OS X, and here's to many more.
