Chapter 1. Where It All Came From

The original Mac OS defined the basic metaphors that influenced personal computing and, for a decade, was the standard by which all other personal computer operating systems were measured. It was not until Microsoft Windows 95 was introduced that anything else came close. Unfortunately, while Apple made many mistakes, Microsoft continued to improve Windows and ended up owning the user desktop experience for the last half of the 1990s. Now, with the advent of a technological tour de force known as Mac OS X, the Mac is once again setting the standard for what a personal operating system should be.

The Mac OS as we now know it is far different from the version released in 1984. It is a successful hybrid of ideas that were first expressed in the original Macintosh and of technologies that come from a computing philosophy long considered to be the antithesis of the Mac experience: Unix. The fusion of these two very different camps gives us the platform we know and love today.

Instead of giving the same laundry list of features in this chapter that you can get from Apple's web site or from most other books covering Mac OS X, I'm going to take a look at the predecessors to Mac OS X and explore the various origins of the modern system. The intent isn't to tell the story of Apple Computer or Steve Jobs (although those histories are interesting); the focus here is on the technologies at hand, where they came from, and how they influenced the development of the Mac operating system. Each major technology of the current Mac OS X is introduced and its source identified.