Mac OS X 10.0

Mac OS X 10.0 (code named Cheetah) is the first major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system. It was released on March 24, 2001 for a price of $129 after a public beta.

Mac OS X was Apple's long-awaited successor to the classic Mac OS. It was derived from NeXTSTEP and FreeBSD, and featured a new user interface called Aqua, as well as improved stability and security due to its new Unix foundations. It introduced the Quartz graphics rendering engine for hardware-accelerated animations. Many technologies were ported from the classic Mac OS, including Sherlock and the QuickTime framework. The core components of Mac OS X were open sourced as Darwin.

Six months after its release, Mac OS X 10.0 was succeeded by Mac OS X 10.1, code named Puma.

Development

New and updated features

The features of the release include the Dock which was a new way of organizing one's Mac OS X applications on a user interface, and a change from the classic method of Application launching in previous Mac OS systems. It included the Terminal, it was a feature that allowed access to Mac OS X's underpinnings, namely the Unix core; Mac OS had previously had the distinction of being one of the few operating systems with no command line interface at all. Also, it included the Mail email client, it’s features included the ability to configure the software to receive all of a user's email accounts in the one list, ability to file emails into folders, ability to search for emails, and ability to automatically append signatures to outgoing emails. The Address Book was a new application which had features including exporting and importing cards to and from vCard format, API to interface with other applications, change of address notifications, contact groups, auto-merge when importing vCards, customizable fields and categories, the automatic formatting of phone numbers. TextEdit replaced the SimpleText application with new features. PDF support was added, it allows the user to create PDFs from any application. The OS introduced the new Aqua UI. Several features of Mac OS 9 were ported to Mac OS X, including the Sherlock desktop and web search engine.

Removed features

*File-sharing client — The system can only use TCP/IP, not AppleTalk, to connect to servers sharing the Apple Filing Protocol. It cannot use SMB to connect to Windows or Samba servers.
*File-sharing server — As a server, the system can share files using only the Apple Filing Protocol (over TCP/IP), HTTP, SSH, and FTP.
*Optical media — DVD playback is not supported, and CDs cannot be burned to.

Architecture

Mac OS X is built on Darwin, a Unix-like operating system derived from FreeBSD. It also adopted a new XNU kernel, derived from Mach, as a replacement for the Mac OS nanokernel used in classic Mac OS.

Unlike Mac OS 9, Mac OS X had protected memory and preemptive multitasking. This meant that if an application's memory becomes corrupted due to a bug, the application would crash without the entire system crashing and needing to be rebooted.

Mac OS X also had support for OpenGL, AppleScript, and the Carbon and Cocoa APIs.

Language support

Mac OS X 10.0 began a short era (that ended with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar's release) where Apple offered two types of installation CDs: 1Z and 2Z CDs. The difference in the two lay in the extent of multilingual support.

Input method editors of Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean were only included with the 2Z CDs. They also came with more languages (the full set of 15 languages), whereas the 1Z CDs came only with about eight languages and could not actually display simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and/or Korean (except for the Chinese characters present in Japanese Kanji). A variant of 2Z CDs were introduced when Mac OS X v10.0.3 was released to the Asian market (this variant could not be upgraded to version 10.0.4). The brief period of multilingual confusion ended with the release of v10.2. Currently, all Mac OS X installer CDs and preinstallations include the full set of 15 languages and full multilingual compatibility.

Marketing

Mac OS X 10.0 was not externally marketed with its codename, a practice which began with Mac OS X Jaguar.

Reception

Release history

System requirements

*Supported Computers: Power Macintosh G3 Beige, G3 B&W, G4, G4 Cube, iMac G3, PowerBook G3, PowerBook G4, iBook
*RAM:
**128 MB (unofficially 64 MB minimum)
*Hard Drive Space:
**1,500 MB (800 MB for the minimal install)

Timeline

References

External links

Mac OS X v10.0 review
at Ars Technica
* from apple.com

{{Apple Inc.

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2001 software
PowerPC operating systems