“A little over 15 years ago, Apple released a bear into the wilds,” Christopher Phin writes for Macworld. “Well, technically, it released Mac OS X into the wilds with its public beta program, but since this preview version of OS X was codenamed ‘Kodiak,’ a species of bear found in Alaska, I think I can be forgiven for spicing up the opening sentence to an article about an old beta version of an operating system.”
“Besides, for many this new OS was as unfamiliar and frightening as if you found a large brown bear sitting on your desk, although if said bear was clothed in pinstripes like OS X was, perhaps the reaction would have been different,” Phin writes. “Especially if you’d been charged $29.95 for it.”
“When Apple finally, finally got its act together to create a successor OS to the descendants of the System that powered the original Macintosh, it released previews initially only to developers, but in September 2000 it let anyone with a compatible Mac and thirty bucks to spare install and muck around with this strange and alien new OS—ahead of its proper release in March 2001. That’s just what I’ve been doing,” Phin writes. “And it’s weird to be back in the early days of OS X.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It couldn’t do much, but, boy, was it lickable – and it screamed “the future!” Pinstripes, brushed metal, and “when’s the next version?” is what we remember most.
During those years, Mac OS 9 was the go to system. When Macs started selling with OS X, 10.0 and 10.1, still the primary boot system was Mac OS 9, “Classic.” I think it wasn’t until 10.3 that we finally made the full on switch to OS X, while dabbling more and more with 10.2.
These days, Mac OS X betas are pretty solid. Not a lot of risk taking. Doesn’t matter how people complain about the GUI, the kernel is a rock.
That’s funny, I had the exact opposite experience. I bought my first iMac in 1999. I didn’t really like it, at first. I didn’t start using my iMac until I installed the very first OS X 10.0 beta and instantly fell in love. iMovie also helped, I really got into making dumb silly movies with it…it was so new, so great compared to the clunky Windows I had before & since I never really “grew up with the old MacOS”, this new 10.0 software was extremely exciting to use.
I guess it depended on if you had an installed base of users software and hardware, which dictated what OS you stuck to, until it was quite clear it’s time to make the switch. I still have that Mac G4, with OS 9 installed.
The first thing I did was run every app I had. Switching back and forth and doing stuff with them. I waited for my Mac to crash/freeze. It didn’t happen. Right there and then I knew that this is the future going in the right direction.
It was the dawn at the end of a very dark period. Windows had pre-emptive multi-tasking since 95 (i.e. 1995), in other words, for over five years. System 9 had nowhere to go, the pre-emptive multi-tasking simply couldn’t be grafted onto it. They tinkered with ‘Copeland’ (which was codename for System 8), but ended up releasing it as just a minor update to System 7.
The transition from 9 to X was rather painful, actually. I had the Cube G4 at the time, which came with 9. I had waited for ‘Puma’ (OS X 10.1) before migrating, and it turned out to be the first complete version, with all the functionality previously available in 9, but running on UNIX. There was simply no looking back; after working in OSX for a while, System 9 looked positively archaic.
I remember the first retail version of OS X being extremely slow on the Mac cube that was on display in our campus computer store. And it couldn’t even play a DVD.
In the present I have both Apple OS and windows 10 on my macbook air by way of parallels.
the only thing that windows does better is at rumning Microsoft access. that is because Access is not available to OS. Microsoft has gradually made Windows worse since Windows 7. Apple on the other hand, has improved the OS every year in features and speed. If i could get Access for Mac, i would part with Windows completely.
Still have my copy!
In some corners of the younger internet, OS X was seen as the end of the world. Remember the various agonized tantrums posted here when iOS 7 was released? Think of that times ten.
I lurked on a forum called “Mac OS X Talk” on the old Mac Fix-It site, and it swiftly became the base for Mac fans who were convinced Apple was killing the Macintosh by moving to this alien new OS. One poster repeatedly predicted that Mac users would abandon Apple and move to Windows 95 rather than use the new system. Mac Fix-It eventually removed the forum, as it was becoming an embarrassment.
——RM
… and no -menu … Well, I got over that.
You also got a t-shirt if you got it on release night.
As I remember, there was a line. Well before iPods, iPads and iPhones.
Booted my copy up on a G3 400 MHz Indigo Blue iMac.
Amazing is a word for the way the UI looked.
Kodiak?
Before Kodiak was Rhapsody.
Technically, Rhapsody was the ‘first’ beta of OS X. It wasn’t NeXTStep any more! But it wasn’t very Mac either. I remember bashing on Rhapsody until my head hurt.
It was Rhapsody! I remember that no design bureau in London would touch it until OS X 10.3 because of the sheer colossal costs of having to replace all our expensive software — software which we had built up over years on OS 7-9.2.2 and which was (finally) working perfectly together and very stable, thank you very much.
OS9 was the best operating system in the world at the time. Nothing else came close for productivity and ease of use, not to mention its beautiful interface.
Most of those OS9 programs and utilities (remember them?), didn’t exist on the new NeXTStep/UNIX Mac platform for quite a while — and thousands never made the transition at all.
The program makers weren’t willing or able to fund the costs of rewriting their code, making the leap into the then unknown, radically different, future system.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think even Adobe made Photoshop available for Mac OS X until version 10.2 or 10.3, which was a major hold up to early adoption for design companies.
What about all the scanners, printers, and so on? Did the manufacturers produce drivers for OS X yet? Did they hell. It took years, and some never bothered at all.
The investment in that sort of serious hardware still had to be recouped on Mac OS 9. That made for quite a delay before the inevitable switchover on the new dual boot machines creeping slowly into the studios and offices.
Happy days!