“It’s hard to believe that 14 years have elapsed since OS X — then Mac OS X — was originally released as a supposedly finished product,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “But it wasn’t quite the first version of Apple’s Unix-based OS to be available to the public. The previous September, Apple sold you a Public Beta, for $29, designed to demonstrate that, first and foremost, the new OS was real and that it would soon be ready for public consumption.”
“I remember the Public Beta well. The interface was good-looking all right, though I chafed at the ‘lickable’ comment from Steve Jobs. Did he really once lick the screen of a Mac as was reported?” Steinberg writes. “One of my editors at the time inserted ‘cartoonish, goofy’ into my description of the Dock.”
“Today, there are well over 70 million Mac users, far more than ever,” Steinberg writes. “The vast majority never touched the original Mac OS. Over 50% are using OS X Yosemite, a record when it comes to the adoption rate.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
Apple bought NeXT, but in reality: NeXT took over Apple. – MacDailyNews, February 1, 2006
Related article:
Happy 14th birthday, OS X! – March 24, 2015