Thanks for every Like, Comment and Favorite! Thanks for Like, Comment and Favorite! More FREE great Mac OS X Games in playlist - https://www.youtube.com/play. Thanks to the good people at Floodgap Systems, you can access the HappyMacs software repository via their web browser based Gopher proxy just long enough to download a Gopher client from there and install it on your vintage Mac. After that you can use that Gopher client for all further accesses to.
Let's kick of this week's Think Retro with some blasphemy: today, there isn't all that much difference between a Mac and a PC. Oh, yes, sure; for my money a Mac is still more powerful, more productive and just plain more lovely than a PC, even taken alone without the benefits of the broader Apple ecosystem. But setting aside the basic identicalness of the actual hardware powering the two platforms, most people could probably accomplish most tasks on either without too much wailing and gnashing of teeth. This is because, starting with Windows 95, Windows has made some astonishing leaps—if in a kind of agonizing slow motion—to bring it up to Mac-like levels of user-friendliness.
But in days of yore—the mid 1980s—PCs were devilishly unfriendly things. I was called round to a relative's house at one point to fix their computer because, like, you know, I had a computer, and I sat staring at the DOS command prompt in quiet bafflement, desperately trying to dredge up memories of the few occasions I'd ventured into CP/M on my Amstrad PcW10. A meta data game mac os.
From its very birth, though, when you switched a Macintosh on you were greeted not with a blinking insertion point which required special incantations even to get you to a more friendly graphical user interface once that became an option, but instead with a smile.
It's such a simple thing. Almost facile. But when you flicked the power switch on the back and were greeted with a smiling little representation of the very machine you just switched on, you instantly felt a kind of kinship with this strange and enigmatic hunk of technology.
Best friend mac os. You could, I guess, say it was a cheap trick—you might not like having your emotions manipulated with quite such bare-faced chutzpah—but for me it was always one of those things that made the Mac truly special; that right from the start, you saw something friendly and cheerful and affirming. It made the ritual of booting your Mac that little bit more something to be looked forward to, that little bit more pleasing—and in the days when booting your Mac took several minutes, anything that made you dislike the process less was to be welcomed.
The 'Happy Mac' icon, which you see above, was of course designed by the wonderful Susan Kare, and it has now itself become truly iconic.
It actually survived—albeit with some tweaks—into the modern OS X age, but only just. The version you see above is from Mac OS 10.1, which was actually the last version of the operating system to feature the Happy Mac. With 10.2, which in many ways marked the maturation of Mac OS X into the true successor to the classic OS, it was replaced with the grey Apple logo we see today. 'He was carried off into the night,' said Kare in this New York Times story. 'There isn't even a milk carton that reads, ‘Have you seen this icon?''
The New York Times? Sure, I'm assuming this wasn't front page news, but that such an august organ would run a story on an icon disappearing from a computer's boot sequence is quite remarkable.
In the same piece, there's this terrific, labored response from Apple to the Happy Mac's forced retirement: 'As with everything in Mac OS X ‘Jaguar,' the start-up experience has been vastly improved to be fast, simple and gorgeous. This includes the beautifully rendered Apple logo and progress wheel that is now displayed while the powerful Mac microkernel is loading.'
'Beautifully rendered' is such a peculiar phrase, when the Apple logo was just a plain grey silhouette; I guess she meant something like 'beautifully realized', but 'rendered' just makes me think of the process by which it is displayed on screen, and I get a bit giggly imagining a scenario in which the Apple logo is a bit squashed and badly upscaled and in really, really bad 3D, prompting Jobs to ask the designers to render it more beautifully.
You could, though, replace the dull gray apple silhouette with any file of your choosing, and I remember delightedly swapping in a beautiful, lush, full-color Happy Mac from my carefully curated stock of third-party icons in Pixadex. The utility I used flashed up dire warnings about messing with your system, to the extent that I was really very nervous the first time I clicked the button to apply the change—I'm not one of life's born tinkerers—but I loved it to bits once it was done. It really was an homage to my joy at seeing the Happy Mac smile back at me the very first time I switched on a Mac. Hey, little buddy! What are we going to do today?
A decade ago today, Apple released Mac OS X 10.0. But the real celebration should be for v10.1, which released in September 2001. Apple gave birth to a new operating system that spent six months in an incubator, having been born prematurely. How strange that yesterday, a day before Mac OS X's tenth anniversary, Apple announced the departure of Bertrand Serlet, who is regarded as the father of Mac OS X.
Into the Incubator
I got a bad reputation among over-zealous Mac fans for writing stories like this one, on March 7, 2001, for CNET News.com: 'Mac OS X code released, despite missing features.' I observed that Mac OS X would ship without support for basic features like DVD drives and laptop sleep mode. Mac OS X 10.0 didn't fully support Apple's own hardware and took away features that Mac users had in v9.x.
The follow-up story was more explicit: Mac OS X 10.0 'will not support CD-rewritable, DVD or DVD-recording drives' -- even though movie making was a longstanding Mac selling point and Apple had included CD burning in iTunes. I later learned that the new operating system also had problems with external storage devices, too, as Apple hadn't yet made APIs available to developers.
Mac OS X also lacked major developer application support -- for three reasons:
1. The operating system wasn't ready, even though Apple and many Mac enthusiasts failed to admit it. That Apple wouldn't ship Mac OS X 10.0 on new computers for several more months (May 2001) was indication enough the software birthed prematurely.
2. Mac OS X represented a major shift for Apple operating systems. It was fundamentally different from Mac OS 9.x and required developers to port or rewrite applications. Apple provided excellent tools, but developers moved cautiously. Apple's biggest developer supporter would turn out to be Microsoft, which released a new Mac version of Office about two months after Mac OS X 10.1 shipped.
3. Apple made a major OS transition during a recession, when computer sales were sluggish, the company reported quarterly losses and while Microsoft wrapped up development for Windows XP. Mac OS X simply wasn't a high developer priority, particularly when Apple wasn't shipping the operating system on new computers and Mac market share was low.
It's Classic!
Apple made many smart decisions bringing to market Mac OS X 10.0, which lineage traces back to NeXT. Near the end of 1996, Apple bought Steve Jobs' NeXT Computer, mainly for the operating system. But Apple also got Jobs and terrific developers, like Serlet; the NeXT team started improving Mac OS right away. Version 8.5, which shipped on trendy, translucent iMacs in 1998, brought many tweaks and tucks and great improvements to performance and stability, which got even better with v9.x.
The very stable Mac OS 9.x would become OS X's 'Classic' mode. Inside the box, Apple packed the new and old Mac OS versions. Users could launch the older operating system within the newer for running older applications. It was a smart way of providing backward compatibility while offering a completely new operating system.
Perhaps Apple learned something from Microsoft's mistakes. Microsoft had long made backward compatibility a top development priority, but to a fault. Newer Windows versions needed to be compatible with older applications. Then Microsoft made a break from the priority, breaking applications in the process. Windows 2000, which launched in February 2000, was Microsoft's next-generation operating system -- derived from NT and free of legacy MS-DOS. But it had huge compatibility problems with older applications (particularly enterprise in-house developed), existing hardware and games. Microsoft would later fix many, but not all, of these compatibility problems with Windows XP.
Using Classic mode, Apple protected its future operating system from legacy code while providing users a way to use their past applications. Besides Classic mode, Apple provided excellent developer tools for allowing third-party applications to run on OS X rather than OS 9.x classic and for writing more-native apps that better tapped into core new features.
Born to Greatness
Some children, even those birthed prematurely, are born to greatness. Mac OS X left the incubator with the September 2001 release of v10.1. Apple preempted Windows XP's launch by several weeks, releasing Mac OS X 10.1 to much better reviews. The upgrade was feature complete, although OS X still needed more third-party applications. They would come.
Apple followed 10.0 and 10.1, codenamed Cheetah and Puma, respectively, with Jaguar in August 2002. Panther (10.3): October 2003. Tiger (10.4): April 2005. Samurai of hyuga book 4 mac os. Leopard (10.5): October 2007. Snow Leopard (10.6): August 2009. Version 10.7, Lion, is expected in summer. Apple released four OS X upgrades between the release of Windows XP's gold code and widespread availability of Windows 7.
As I explained in February, four products released in 2001 are foundational to everything Apple has released since -- Apple Store (OK, it's a thing not a product), iTunes, iPod and Mac OS X (two versions). From Mac OS X, Apple derived iOS. While Apple's Mac OS X development seemed to slow down during the latter Noughties, it merely shifted focus -- first to getting out Intel-based OS X and building up iOS as a major mobile platform. Lion promises to bring back to Mac OS X features developed for iOS.
Mac OS X may have birthed prematurely, but it has reached adulthood and even spawned progeny in iOS. But I've got to say, as a reporter covering OS X from before its release, 10 years ago it was inconceivable that the operating system would be where it is today. Happy Birthday, Mac OS X!
Be Happy Mac Os X
Please share your Mac OS X memories (whether positive or negative) in comments, or email joewilcox at gmail dot com.
Be Happy Mac Os Catalina
You could, though, replace the dull gray apple silhouette with any file of your choosing, and I remember delightedly swapping in a beautiful, lush, full-color Happy Mac from my carefully curated stock of third-party icons in Pixadex. The utility I used flashed up dire warnings about messing with your system, to the extent that I was really very nervous the first time I clicked the button to apply the change—I'm not one of life's born tinkerers—but I loved it to bits once it was done. It really was an homage to my joy at seeing the Happy Mac smile back at me the very first time I switched on a Mac. Hey, little buddy! What are we going to do today?
A decade ago today, Apple released Mac OS X 10.0. But the real celebration should be for v10.1, which released in September 2001. Apple gave birth to a new operating system that spent six months in an incubator, having been born prematurely. How strange that yesterday, a day before Mac OS X's tenth anniversary, Apple announced the departure of Bertrand Serlet, who is regarded as the father of Mac OS X.
Into the Incubator
I got a bad reputation among over-zealous Mac fans for writing stories like this one, on March 7, 2001, for CNET News.com: 'Mac OS X code released, despite missing features.' I observed that Mac OS X would ship without support for basic features like DVD drives and laptop sleep mode. Mac OS X 10.0 didn't fully support Apple's own hardware and took away features that Mac users had in v9.x.
The follow-up story was more explicit: Mac OS X 10.0 'will not support CD-rewritable, DVD or DVD-recording drives' -- even though movie making was a longstanding Mac selling point and Apple had included CD burning in iTunes. I later learned that the new operating system also had problems with external storage devices, too, as Apple hadn't yet made APIs available to developers.
Mac OS X also lacked major developer application support -- for three reasons:
1. The operating system wasn't ready, even though Apple and many Mac enthusiasts failed to admit it. That Apple wouldn't ship Mac OS X 10.0 on new computers for several more months (May 2001) was indication enough the software birthed prematurely.
2. Mac OS X represented a major shift for Apple operating systems. It was fundamentally different from Mac OS 9.x and required developers to port or rewrite applications. Apple provided excellent tools, but developers moved cautiously. Apple's biggest developer supporter would turn out to be Microsoft, which released a new Mac version of Office about two months after Mac OS X 10.1 shipped.
3. Apple made a major OS transition during a recession, when computer sales were sluggish, the company reported quarterly losses and while Microsoft wrapped up development for Windows XP. Mac OS X simply wasn't a high developer priority, particularly when Apple wasn't shipping the operating system on new computers and Mac market share was low.
It's Classic!
Apple made many smart decisions bringing to market Mac OS X 10.0, which lineage traces back to NeXT. Near the end of 1996, Apple bought Steve Jobs' NeXT Computer, mainly for the operating system. But Apple also got Jobs and terrific developers, like Serlet; the NeXT team started improving Mac OS right away. Version 8.5, which shipped on trendy, translucent iMacs in 1998, brought many tweaks and tucks and great improvements to performance and stability, which got even better with v9.x.
The very stable Mac OS 9.x would become OS X's 'Classic' mode. Inside the box, Apple packed the new and old Mac OS versions. Users could launch the older operating system within the newer for running older applications. It was a smart way of providing backward compatibility while offering a completely new operating system.
Perhaps Apple learned something from Microsoft's mistakes. Microsoft had long made backward compatibility a top development priority, but to a fault. Newer Windows versions needed to be compatible with older applications. Then Microsoft made a break from the priority, breaking applications in the process. Windows 2000, which launched in February 2000, was Microsoft's next-generation operating system -- derived from NT and free of legacy MS-DOS. But it had huge compatibility problems with older applications (particularly enterprise in-house developed), existing hardware and games. Microsoft would later fix many, but not all, of these compatibility problems with Windows XP.
Using Classic mode, Apple protected its future operating system from legacy code while providing users a way to use their past applications. Besides Classic mode, Apple provided excellent developer tools for allowing third-party applications to run on OS X rather than OS 9.x classic and for writing more-native apps that better tapped into core new features.
Born to Greatness
Some children, even those birthed prematurely, are born to greatness. Mac OS X left the incubator with the September 2001 release of v10.1. Apple preempted Windows XP's launch by several weeks, releasing Mac OS X 10.1 to much better reviews. The upgrade was feature complete, although OS X still needed more third-party applications. They would come.
Apple followed 10.0 and 10.1, codenamed Cheetah and Puma, respectively, with Jaguar in August 2002. Panther (10.3): October 2003. Tiger (10.4): April 2005. Samurai of hyuga book 4 mac os. Leopard (10.5): October 2007. Snow Leopard (10.6): August 2009. Version 10.7, Lion, is expected in summer. Apple released four OS X upgrades between the release of Windows XP's gold code and widespread availability of Windows 7.
As I explained in February, four products released in 2001 are foundational to everything Apple has released since -- Apple Store (OK, it's a thing not a product), iTunes, iPod and Mac OS X (two versions). From Mac OS X, Apple derived iOS. While Apple's Mac OS X development seemed to slow down during the latter Noughties, it merely shifted focus -- first to getting out Intel-based OS X and building up iOS as a major mobile platform. Lion promises to bring back to Mac OS X features developed for iOS.
Mac OS X may have birthed prematurely, but it has reached adulthood and even spawned progeny in iOS. But I've got to say, as a reporter covering OS X from before its release, 10 years ago it was inconceivable that the operating system would be where it is today. Happy Birthday, Mac OS X!
Be Happy Mac Os X
Please share your Mac OS X memories (whether positive or negative) in comments, or email joewilcox at gmail dot com.
Be Happy Mac Os Catalina
Screenshot Source: Wikipedia
