Say hello, wave goodbye

What an amazing ride it’s been. As Mac OS X faces the final curtain, let’s remember 20 years of OS excellence

- CARRIE MARSHALL

From the first beta in 2000 to Catalina in 2019, Mac OS X continually raised the bar for what personal and pro computers can do. It made computers easier and more entertaining, more personal and more powerful, and it was a key part of the most extraordinary period of innovation the world has ever seen.

It also featured a lot of cats

Before OS X, Apple was not in good shape. This Apple was not the Apple of Steve Jobs. It was the Apple of Gil Amelio, of poor quality products and a thoroughly dysfunctional corporate culture. This Apple wasn’t working. According to Steve Jobs, Amelio believed that “Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water, and my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.”

That ship was floating on the back of System 7, the operating system first released in 1991. Development of its successor, Copland, began in 1994 but was never completed despite a beta release to developers in 1995. Copland was an attempt to stave off disaster. Macs were considerably more expensive than Windows PCs, and Windows 95 seemed likely to narrow the distance between Windows’ famously unpleasant interface and the Mac’s more user-friendly approach. Apple was losing market share and Copland was the solution.

At least, it might have been if it had ever been released. It was a multi-user, multitasking operating system with extensive customisation and ran natively on the PowerPC processors Apple now used in its Macs. It would be more efficient, more flexible and it would crash a whole lot less. But it never shipped. The planned 1996 release date slipped to 1997 amid ever-growing complexity and a $250m per year budget – money that Apple could ill afford. Copland was cancelled in 1996.