Happy Birthday Mac OS X (9 Years Since Launch)

Today, Apple’s Mac OS X is nine years old. Released on March 24, 2001, Cheetah was the very first iteration of Mac OS X, bearing the 10.0 version number. In fact, the X in “Mac OS X” stands for the Roman numeral for “10.” The X is a very prominent part of the Mac OS brand identity.

Since 2002, Apple has been bundling and pre-installing Macintosh computers with Mac OS X. The operating system is actually the successor to Mac OS 9, the final release of the “classic” Mac OS. Apple’s Mac OS X is a Unix-based graphical operating system, built on technologies developed at NeXT between the second half of the 1980s and Apple's purchase of the company in late 1996. Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” marked the moment when Apple gained UNIX 03 certification while running on Intel processors, according to an article on Wikipedia. A list of all Mac OS X versions and their subsequent release dates is available below, courtesy of TUAW.

10.0 Cheetah -- March 24, 2001;
10.1 Puma -- September 25, 2001;
10.2 Jaguar -- August 24, 2002;
10.3 Panther -- October 24, 2003;
10.4 Tiger -- April 29, 2005;
10.4 Intel Tiger -- January 10, 2006;
10.5 Leopard -- October 26, 2007;
10.6 Snow Leopard -- August 28, 2009.

Apple also sells a Server edition of Mac OS X, which, evidently, includes tools to facilitate management of workgroups, and to provide access to network services. The OS is architecturally identical to its desktop counterpart, and includes a mail transfer agent, a Samba server, an LDAP server, a domain name server, and such server-typical tools. Pre-loaded on Apple's Xserve systems, the OS can be run on virtually every Mac the company sells.

Operating systems that have stemmed from Mac OS X are also known to exist. Evidently, those too are also Apple’s, but they don’t come pre-loaded on Macintosh computers, nor can they be installed on these systems (except for those supported under simulators / emulators, which are provided by Apple itself to developers). We are talking about the iPhone OS, the Apple TV operating system, and, most recently, the operating system employed by the iPad, which is an enhanced version of the original iPhone OS. All of these adjacent OSes are actually stripped-down versions of the graphically pleasant Mac OS X.

Softpedia wishes Apple a happy day in Cupertino, since we can’t say “Happy Birthday” to a graphical user interface. May the company amaze us forever with newer versions of its breathtaking OS.