“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.