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Evolution of Mac Operating System – Mac OS X

Mac OS X, successor of Mac OS 9, is a family of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed by Apple Inc. It is the world’s most advanced Operating System. The first version of Mac OS X (Version 10.0), Cheetah, was released on March 24, 2001. It introduced a number of new capabilities to provide a more reliable and stable platform than Mac OS 9.

Certain parts from NetBSD’s and FreeBSD’s implementation of Unix were integrated in NeXTSTEP. NeXTSTEP is the core of the MAC OS X, which was developed by Steve Jobs (when he left the Apple in 1985 and opened a new company NeXT). Eventually, OPENSTEP, NeXT’s OS, was chosen to be the base for Apple’s next operating system. When Jobs returned to Apple, he altered the OPENSTEP into a system that would be accepted by Apple’s computer users. This project was named as Rhapsody and was later changed to MAC OS X.

As Mac OS X evolved, it moved away from the legacy Mac OS, to an emphasis on new apps like integrated home entertainment, enhanced business applications and the iLife suite. Each version also included modifications of Graphical User Interface (GUI).

Several features of Mac’s architecture are inspired from OPENSTEP. This architecture employs a layered framework, which helps in rapid development of the applications by giving existing code for common tasks. This operating system includes its own software development tools, most importantly an integrated desktop environment known as Xcode. It provides interfaces to compilers that support many programming languages like Java, Objective-C, C++ and C.

The Mac OS kernel is called XNU, which is based on Mach. The BSD subsystem is part of the kernel and so are several other subsystems, which are typically implemented as user-space servers in microkernel systems. HFS+ (Hierarchical File System) is the preferred file system on Mac OS X, which supports aliases, hard and symbolic links, multiple encoding, finding information in metadata, byte range locking, quotas, journaling, etc. New versions of Mac OS X are capable of reading and writing to the legacy FAT16 and FAT32 file systems. However, they are capable of reading NTFS file system, but not writing.

Versions of Mac OS X

  1. Version 10.0: Cheetah – Mac OS X v10.0, code-named Cheetah, was the first major release of Apple’s operating system, launched on March 24, 2001. It proved to be a good start of Mac OS X series, beset with performance issues and missing features, although it was praised for being a good start to an OS still in its infancy.
  2. Version 10.1: Puma – Mac OS X v10.1, code-named Puma, launched on September 25, 2001 as a free update to its predecessor version 10.0. Apple introduced many features in this release that were missing from the previous version, as well as improved overall system performance.
  3. Version 10.2:  Jaguar – Code-named Jaguar, Mac OS X v10.2, was initially available on August 23, 2002 either in a “family pack” or for single-computer installations. It was well-received by Mac users as a large step forward in the line-up of both command line and graphical applications, the areas of stability and general speed enhancements.
  4. Version 10.3: Panther – Fourth major release of Mac OS X, code-name Panther, released on October 24, 2003 with much improved user interface and system performance. It included more or many features as Jaguar had the before.
  5. Version 10.4: Tiger – Mac OS X v10.4, code-named Tiger, was released on April 29, 2005. It was the longest running version of Mac OS X, and also was the first version of any release Apple OS to use x86 processors i.e. to work on Apple-Intel architecture machines.
  6. Version 10.5: Leopard – Mac OS X v10.5, code-named Leopard, was launched on October 26, 2007 and was available in two variants: a server version and a desktop version. It was said to be the largest update of Mac OS X with several new features. It was also the first BSD-based operating system to obtain UNIX 03 certification and the final version to sustain the PowerPC architecture.
  7. Version 10.6: Snow Leopard – It was released on August 28, 2009, second longest time span between successive Mac OS releases, with an x86-64 architectures support. It focuses on increasing the system stability, efficiency and performance rather than changing the user interface and end user functionality.

Features

Mac OS X has many useful, interesting and cool features -

  • Aqua GUI – The graphical user interface of Mac OS X is called Aqua. Attractiveness and lucidity of Aqua is visible immediately as you look at a Mac OS X desktop.
  • iLife – Apple iLife suite includes GarageBand, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD, which are the best applications you will get bundled with an operating systems.
  • Security – It includes many security APIs, services and features, such as trust policies, application-level privileged operations, private/public keys, certificates, controlling/managing passwords, etc.
  • Speech Interface – Mac OS X is integrated with both synthesis frameworks and speech recognition.
  • Other features – Mac OS X is bundled with many other features like built-in cameras and photo library, iPod media library, messaging, etc.