What Is Mac OS X?
Mac OS X was born in the jungle, where it grew to be a lean, mean operating system. When Apple released the first Mac OS X operating system to hit the market, it was called Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah. That makes sense—because you know what's faster than a cheetah? A Mac! OS X is a line of Apple operating systems (OS) in every modern Macintosh computer. It is the successor to the classic Mac OS 9. In March 2001, Apple released the first Mac OS X operating system to hit the market: Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah. The name "Mac OS X" is a play on the phrase "real operating system," which many people thought of Macs before Apple released their operating system, a version of UNIX called Darwin. Mac OS X was born from the ashes of an ambitious but unsuccessful computer company. Next launched neXTSTEP in 1988, a company founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985. NeXT aimed to create a powerful desktop computer that could compete with PCs and Unix workstations. The hardware was impressive. It had a powerful processor, a graphical interface, and multitasking capabilities. However, it was too expensive for the market then and needed to gain more traction. The NeXTSTEP operating system, however, proved more successful than the company itself. It was an object-oriented, multitasking operating system borrowed heavily from BSD UNIX. Jobs took this model with him when he returned to Apple in 1996 (the company had acquired NeXT in 1996). Mac OS X is an improved NeXTSTEP version optimized for Intel architecture processors instead of Motorola chipsets used by earlier versions of Apple's operating system. As recently as Mac OS X 6 Snow Leopard, NeXTSTEP icons were used in OS X. For example, a NeXTSTEP camera icon appears when pressing command+shift+4 and the space bar. Why not? After all, it's hard to imagine a world without Apple products. It wasn't always this way: for a brief moment between 1984 and 1996, NeXTSTEP was the most popular operating system on earth. It was so revolutionary that Apple bought the company for $400 million in 1996. Apple has used the same icon set since then, even though it doesn't fit into its modern aesthetic. They're flat. They're simple. They're colorful! And they no longer feel like they belong on an iPhone or iPad screen.
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