Ten years ago today Apple launched a revolutionary new operating system that they called “OS X”. OS 10.0 Cheetah was released on March 24th, 2001.
Revolutionary it was, for it’s UI and many new features unseen in any other OS at the time (and in some cases, now!), but this revolution came at the cost of bugs – and boy were there bugs. It came with the now synonymous with OS X feature – the dock. More then that, it featured Terminal, AppleScript and PDF support, allowing for more in-depth abilities for tech users.
As far as applications, Apple built their own free mail client as well as an address book application to store details of friends, family & colleagues.
It was also the first iteration of aqua, the user interface style that has stayed around with OS X since. However, the first iteration was the main bug bear for users as it caused a lot of headaches with UI glitches and kernel panics.
With all of the bugs that came with Cheetah, it was the first iteration of what we now love and use every day. Only a few months later, Apple launched “Puma”, which was a free update for everyone who bought Cheetah. This addressed most of the concerns OS X users had at the time. This also brought about features like iTunes. Although it wasn’t formally released, it’s probably a more accurate precursor to what we use today.
