Before Mac OS X, There Was OS 1 Through 9: A History of Apple's Operating System

macintosh
Wikimedia Commons

Apple has been building operating systems since 1984, when it launched the original Mac System 1.0 for its MacIntosh personal computer.

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Nearly 30 years of innovation has culminated in the Mac OS X Mountain Lion, which will launch this month, and iOS 6, which is coming this fall.

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Mac OS System 1.0 (1984)

Mac OS System 1
GUI Guidebook

Whereas earlier operating systems were strictly text-based and relied on complicated input commands, Apple's first OS was image-based. After touring Xerox's labs in the early 1980s, Apple engineers realized that the next phase of computing would rely on bitmapping. The technology, which was still new, let the engineer control each individual pixel on the screen. Where the user used to see only text, he could now see images plus text.

Apple's interface was modeled on the physical desktop—hence the name we still use today. Applications would appear as "windows" that would appear to overlap, with the active window appearing on top. You could drag and drop—the digital equivalent of grasping and moving—a file onto the trash icon to delete it.

Other features that debuted on System 1 were calculator, trash, Finder (file manager), and text editor.

[Sources: Macworld, Steve Jobs]

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Mac OS System 2.0 (1985)

Mac OS System 2
uMac

The main upgrade from System 1 to System 2 was an improved Finder, which jumped from version 1.1 to 4.1 across a single operating system release. Now there were key-commands to create a new folder and shut the computer down, and the whole system ran 20% faster, among other upgrades.

1985 was the year Apple's co-founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, resigned. Jobs formed another computer company, NeXT, soon after he left.

[Sources: The Apple Museum, uMac]

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Mac OS System 3.0 (1986)

Mac OS System 3
GUI Guidebook

This was Apple's first OS not overseen by Steve Jobs. It added file-nesting functionality to Finder—you could now create folders within folders. It also introduced Disk Cache, which would store commonly used commands in a small amount of memory for faster performance.

But System 3.1 was absurdly buggy. Apple was forced to quickly release a new version to fix the bugs, but it didn't get all of them.

[Sources: GUI Gallery, The Apple Museum]

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Mac OS System 4.0 (1987)

Mac OS System 4
GUI Guidebook

The four editions of System 4 brought the software up to speed with the hardware. The new OS added support for multiple monitors and for disk drives with 32MB and above.

System 4.2 introduced MultiFinder, which allowed units with sufficient memory to run several programs at once. Finder remained on the system, just in case your system was too early-'80s to handle that new new.

[Sources: GUI Gallery, uMac]

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Mac OS System 6.0 (1988)

Mac OS System 6
uMac

Apple skipped System 5, for some reason.

New in System 6? Color support. Finder itself remained black and white, but the system now showed third-party apps' true colors.

Added to the trash bin "emptying" window was a "cancel" button to salvage your files before they were gone for good. (Until System 7, dragging a file onto the trash deleted it immediately.) Idle windows (behind the active one) could now grab the user's attention through the top menu bar if it needed an input.

[Sources: GUI Gallery, uMac]

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Mac OS System 7.0 (1991)

Mac OS System 7
GUI Guidebook

System 7 was huge! Here's what it did:

  • Collapsed the Finder/MultiFinder distinction, "turning on multitasking for good." The combined file manager took the name "Finder" and has kept it ever sice.
  • Added color to Finder, which made features look more three-dimensional.
  • Introduced virtual memory. This turns unused space on your disc drive into random access memory (RAM).
  • Added compatibility with QuickTime (sold separately).
  • Turned Trash into a folder. Items placed there would remain until the user "emptied" the trash.
  • Brought fonts out into its own folder so users could easily add new ones.

[Sources: GUI Gallery, uMac]

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Mac OS 8.0 (1997)

Mac OS 8
GUI Guidebook

Apple dropped "System" from its OS titles. Finder was upgraded in various ways, including an improvement of the file system that saved hundreds of megabytes of disc space on hard drives above 1GB.

OS 8.5 also introduced Sherlock, which combined Finder's search capabilities with web search.

This version debuted the same year that Steve Jobs became interim CEO after Apple acquired NeXT, the company he founded after he left Apple.

[Sources: GUI Gallery, uMac, CNET]

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Mac OS 9.0 (1999)

Mac OS 9
GUI Guidebook

Aside from a sleek redesign, OS 9's main two updates were:

  • Multiple users. Different computer users could have their own settings and reserved portions of the disc drive.
  • Software Update. Users could download system updates directly from the Internet and were notified when a new update became available.

[Sources: GUI Gallery, uMac]

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Mac OS X (2001)

Mac OS X
GUI Guidebook

OS X was a new dawn for Mac OS. First and foremost, every version of this OS was associated with its own wild cat, beginning with 10.0: "Cheetah." 

Here are some other important improvements:

  • Apple reimagined the entire user interface. It introduced the dock, for example, and fit windows inside rounded rectangles instead of hard-cornered ones.
  • It had a completely new code base. OS X's kernel was an open-source, UNIX system that was itself a runnable operating system.
  • Programs were given protected memory—now a standard feature of operating systems—so that one application's data couldn't corrupt another's.

Despite these improvements, Cheetah users complained about how slow it was. Later versions of OS X improved speed and added major features such as Safari, Exposé, Spotlight, Dashboard, and Time Machine.

OS X has been Apple's longest-running operating system, beating System 7's longevity by five years so far. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is due this month.

[Sources: GUI Gallery, Telegraph]

And the latest version of OS X...

Mac OS X Mountain Lion (blue bg)
Apple

Here are all the new features in OS X Mountain Lion >>

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