A Day To Remember For Apple

Published by: Codrut Nistor, in News

October26th2007

After a long string of delays, Apple's latest operating system, known as "Leopard", is only a few hours away from the official launch. There are a lot of people that expect it to become a "Vista killer", but that's what remains to be seen. Anyway, before talking about the close future, I think we should take a look into the past, first, so let's have a short history lesson, shall we?
Leopard is near

In Apple's history, there are two different ages to talk about, when it comes to the operating systems built into their computers. The first one starts with the first OS that shipped with the first Macintosh, back in 1984, and lasts until 2001, when the last "Classic" Mac OS was released. The last period started in 2000, with the release of Mac OS X, and continues with the release that's going to occur in just a few hours...The "Classic" Era: 1984 - 1999As you can see in the screenshot below, the first Mac OS looked pretty advanced for a period when most people using computers were using only the command line. Even more, the classic Mac OS doesn't have any command line at all.

While its ease of use was the most important strong point, Mac OS was also heavily criticized for its limited memory management capabilities, cooperative multitasking and various conflicts among its own extensions.The file system used by Mac OS was first the Macintosh File System (MFS), later replaced by the Hierarchical File System(HFS).During its "classic era", Mac OS moved from 1-bit black and white grapohics to color, Apple's Color QuickDraw improved drawing routines laying the foundation of one of the most advanced graphical user interfaces of its time. A last thing that I will mention before moving on to Mac OS X is that way back in 1989, Apple's 32-bit QuickDraw was able to handle 16M color graphics, two years before Microsoft launched Windows 3.0!

The Mac OS X Era: 1999 - present day

Based on a core with roots in the UNIX world, known as Darwin, Mac OS X was first released in 1999, when Mac OS X Server 1.0 has seen the light of day, and all its versions got "names from the jungle", as I like to call them, from Cheetah and Puma, to Tiger and Leopard. It would be really interesting to see how are they going to call the next release...maybe "Lion"?

Since all eyes are on Leopard now, it's enough to mention that Mac OS X achieved the unique performance of increasing its speed with each new release, on the same hardware, while other operating systems require more and more resources (it's enough to mention Windows here, and most Linux distros also need more and more resources as time goes by, but that depends a lot on the desktop manager used).

One of the most notorious features of Mac OS X, when talking about the eye candy, is the Aqua theme, with soft edges, translucent colors and pinstripes, just like the hardware design of firs iMacs, but this is on the outside...

...on the inside, pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection improved the system's ability to simultaneously run a bunch of programs, without the fear that these applications would corrupt each other or suffer a serious performance hit, as it happens when using cooperative multitasking.

Now, let's move on and talk about what should we expect to become officially available in a couple of hours...

Prepare for the Leopard!

With over 300 new features, one of the first things that jumps up in Leopard is the new desktop, with a very nice 3D-dock that introduces a new feature called "stacks", which is practically a hierarchy of items that opens up when you click an icon from the dock.
The new OS from Apple

I won't tell you anything else now about the new features, because we'll talk a lot about them in the coming days. Now, I hardly wait to see what happens and I expect to see the first impressions of the users, as they start using the new system from Apple.Available on one disc, Leopard supports both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs, being priced at $129, a single pack. Since the price doesn't look bad at all, all we need to see is how the world will react to the new Finder and all the other goodies available in the system.There are less than 3 hours remaining, and the clock is ticking... If you are really in a hurry, you can check the guided tour available on Apple's site, here. In the meantime, I'll do the same, and prepare to get back with the latest updates on the subject tomorrow, so stay tuned!