THE EVOLUTION OF MAC OS X FROM AQUA TO CATALINA
Mac OS X has been through a lot in 20-plus years. As someone who was sitting in the front row at Macworld Expo when then-CEO Gil Amelio brought Steve Jobs on stage to celebrate Apple’s purchase of NeXT, it feels like I’ve been a witness to the whole story. The macOS we use today is the result of iteration—sometimes rapid, sometimes painfully slow—over 16 major OS releases during those 20 years. Here are the highlights.
BEFORE THERE WAS MAC OS X, THERE WAS RHAPSODY
Before it was Mac OS X, the next-generation Mac OS was code-named Rhapsody. Software written for NextStep—what would become Cocoa—ran natively. Classic Mac OS apps ran in a compatibility window. Rhapsody aped Mac OS 8 in its design language, but Apple would throw that design away before OS X finally shipped.
Most important, major Mac software developers were not willing to rewrite their apps for the Yellow Box environment of NextStep. Apple had to go back to the drawing board and come up with a more robust transition approach for developers, which led to Blue Box, offering the ability to adapt classic Mac apps to run natively on the new operating system.
In 1999, Apple released
