Today Marks 20 Years Since Mac OS X First Launched

[Maconplasma]

Best version of MacOS X out of the box version 0 was Tiger.

 

[ccsicecoke]

I would pay $100 for official Mac OS X tiger/leopard/snow leopard to run on latest iMac with all apps updated

 

[litmag01]

Skeuomorphic. What a great and overly ornate word.

 

[Macintosh IIvx]

I remember installing it on day 1 and being wow'd by it all. Everything was so fluid and looked so modern and new. It was so slick. My bondi iMac came with Mac OS 8.1 back in 1998 and 10.0 made it feel like a completely different machine. Same can be said about my blueberry iBook, which came with 8.6 back in September 1999.

 

[Freeangel1]

TIGER 10.4 WAS THE BEST OF OS X!! FAST! NOT BLOATED! JUST WORKED! LOVED IT!

 

[Stella]

Snow Leopard was the best IMO. A unified interface, no experiments like before with a hybrid of brushed metal UI, for example, and overall very stable during it's lifetime.

Then along came Lion with it's horrifically ugly UI. Ugh. I'll never forget the Calendar and AddressBook. What were Apple thinking? It was like time travelling back to the 80s...

 

[Stella]

Or they'd have finally gotten Copland out the door then Gershwin. If they got a good CEO to get the departments and feature creep under control. Which was the huge problem with the project. The tug of war between departments and the constant addition of new features. Rather than finishing the project and adding new features in new versions.

Like Star Citizen today!! Totally mismanaged.

 

[Jonas07]

Gonna celebrate by using my broken macOS Big Sur

 

[DonInHtown]

The transition was an exciting time. Downloading and sharing all the beta releases of OS X on Hotline servers to try the newest features and fixes was fun.

 

[bobtem]

What day marks the anniversary of the second launch?

 

[iShater]

OSX started the push to migrate to Apple ecosystem for me. It was a great day when it came out.

 

[Kar98]

I still like the old Aqua look and feel. But, in terms of usability, I didn’t think OS X was really ready for prime time until late in the 10.2 stage.

Make that 10.4. The big thing that made it usable to me back then was the clover+space bar universal search.

 

[Monotremata]

Best version of MacOS X out of the box version 0 was Tiger.

Still got it running on my Titanium 1Ghz Powerbook hah. Comes in handy to play my old PPC games and jump into OS9 and use Emagic's SoundDiver to edit my MIDI gear.. Apple put out one PPC beta of SoundDiver for OS X after they swallowed Emagic (that wrote changes to your devices whether you told it to or not), and then let it rot like the rest of their tech.

 

[Mike_Trivisonno]

I miss Aqua, all bubbly, round, and colorful. Now we have Big Sur, flat, square, and monochromatic.

 

[doolar]

I remember installing OS X on my Pismo! Doesn’t feel like it’s 20 years ago. 😊

 

[CPark98]

Running Lion on my 16" MBP on parallels and it's the weirdest feeling.

 

[itsmeaustend]

Aqua was way better than the current crap.
I'm sorry, but macOS of today just seems like an incoherent bunch of "ideas" crammed together into an OS.
Old Mac OS X was more like linux with a very slick UI on top of a solid Unix. Now, it's getting to the point of "Windows-style" binary files and strange databases running stuff. Things you're never supposed to touch, and some that are downright out of reach.

Sounds like you're just trying to trigger people.

It's still Unix with a slick UI. There's always been binaries, and what database are you talking about? XProtect? Developer IDs? Because you're right, you're not meant to touch them...

 

[m00f]

I still like the old Aqua look and feel. But, in terms of usability, I didn’t think OS X was really ready for prime time until late in the 10.2 stage.

I agree. I installed 10.0 on my iBook and quickly realized what a mistake I had made! Then spent a few days undoing that. 10.2 is when I started using OSX full time and never looked back. 10.3 was my personal favorite of the PPC builds but 10.2 was a huge upgrade and usable

 

[bousozoku]

It wasn't until 10.3.4 that printing worked. I was trying to work and it was interesting, but I had to switch back to MacOS 9.x to actually get work done.

I remember buying Corel Graphics Suite because it ran natively and didn't cause the MacOS 9.x subsystem to drain resources.

I was hoping that Apple would buy BeOS because it was insanely fast on my PowerComputing PowerCenter 210. Alas, it was less functional than the original Mac OS X public beta.

It was an exciting time.

 

[otternonsense]

It makes no sense to me, either way. The only explanation I have is that the UIs are designed by graphic designers whose only goal is to make everything look pretty (which, admittedly, it does).

which is also antithetical to Jobs' philosophy about design that it's not about how it looks but how it works.

If you also consider a lot of these designers are temps, contractors or interns, without a serious chief designer since Jony's departure and with a CEO who doesn't care about design, engineering and signing off a watertight product, you can see why UX and UI are so haphazard and patchy with recent releases.

 

[otternonsense]

You can still buy a copy of Snow Leopard on eBay if it pleases you.

I also miss how indestructible the Nokia 3310 was but it doesn't mean I'll go back to a dumbphone.

 

[PsykX]

It has aged so well, it's still a piece of art even 20 years later.

 

[emembee]

Tiger was great as pretty stable, the first to run ppc and Intel and the last one to run classic mac, ok the apple menu doesn’t work great but surprising number of classic apps still work on it.

 

[thomas040]

I remember playing around with the Public Beta DVD on an iMac Tangerine.

 

[thomas040]

It has aged so well, it's still a piece of art even 20 years later.

they really did a solid job on that one.