1.7. Mac OS X 10.0Apple shipped Mac OS X Public Beta in September 2000. More than 100,000 people bought the beta, and Apple reported that there were more than 75,000 feedback submissions. Not only did the Public Beta serve to indicate that Apple was going to ship Mac OS X, it helped Apple identify the issues that users needed to have addressed in order to replace the original Mac OS. After four years in development, the first full release of Mac OS X, known to the engineers who worked on it as Cheetah and to the public as Version 10.0, finally shipped on March 24, 200117 years and 3 months after the introduction of the original Macintosh. People gathered at stores everywhere to welcome its introduction. The fusion of Mac OS and Unix was complete, and Apple finally had the next-generation operating system that it wanted. This release brought the following features:
Impressive as it was, by all measures, the first release of Mac OS X was not quite ready for most of the Mac faithful. It lacked DVD playback, and the major applications like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office weren't released yet. Still, it was more than usable for the Unix geeks, who were among the early adopters. Many improvements were to come, but Mac OS X's first consumer release signaled that it would not be another failure like Copland. 1.7.1. Darwin and Open SourceAs Mac OS X was developed, Apple made sure the open source foundations of Mac OS X remained open by starting up the Darwin project. Darwin is essentially the non-GUI part of Mac OS X and is a complete operating system in itself. If you are interested in running Darwin separately, you can download it for free from Apple's Darwin site (http://developer.apple.com/darwin/) and have a full working operating system. It won't have the Mac OS X Aqua desktop, but you can use Darwin just like you would Linux, from the command line and using the X11 window manager. The main tree of Darwin is kept under pretty careful control; after all, Apple builds the base to an operating system that it distributes to millions of people from this tree. To provide a place for experimentation, Apple and the Internet Software Consortium run the OpenDarwin project . You can find the OpenDarwin site at http://www.opendarwin.org/. 1.7.2. Developer ToolsWhen Apple released Mac OS X, they made a great decision by also deciding to provide development tools to every Mac user for free, including the Project Builder IDE and the Interface Builder GUI layout application . These aren't just simplified tools to learn development with; they are the same tools that Apple uses to develop the operating system itself as well as its various applications. These tools allow development of Carbon - and Cocoa-based applications, system libraries, BSD command-line utilities, hardware device drivers, and even kernel extensions (known as KEXTs). The developer tools aren't installed by default, because Apple doesn't think most users will want them and would probably want the almost 500 MB of disk space for something else. But developers, as well as power users who want to compile programs available in source code form on the Internet, can easily find them and install them from a variety of sources. And, since they are free, any user who wants to try developing software can do so purely by investing the time it takes to learn. 1.7.3. Command-Line AccessIt is difficult to say what kind of success Mac OS X would enjoy without having access to the command line. According to legend, as Rhapsody developed into Mac OS X, there were many within Apple who didn't want to ship the Terminal command-line toolor at the very least, wanted it installed only as part of the developer tools. After all, the command line was seen as the antithesis of the Mac experience. However, those who wanted the command line to be present prevailed, and the Terminal shipped in the /Applications/Utilities directory. This was a fortunate move indeed, as a large percentage of the early adopters of Mac OS X were not traditional Mac OS users, but switchers from Linux and other flavors of Unix, including Solaris and FreeBSD . Without access to the command line, these usersa market to which many at Apple in 2000 probably didn't expect to sellwould never have moved to the platform. |