Macos Serial Number

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Cándida Jolie

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Aug 3, 2024, 5:02:59 PM8/3/24
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The history of macOS, Apple's current Mac operating system formerly named Mac OS X until 2011 and then OS X until 2016, began with the company's project to replace its "classic" Mac OS. That system, up to and including its final release Mac OS 9, was a direct descendant of the operating system Apple had used in its Mac computers since their introduction in 1984. However, the current macOS is a UNIX operating system built on technology that had been developed at NeXT from the 1980s until Apple purchased the company in early 1997.[1]

Although it was originally marketed as simply "version 10" of Mac OS (indicated by the Roman numeral "X"), it has a completely different codebase from Mac OS 9, as well as substantial changes to its user interface. The transition was a technologically and strategically significant one. To ease the transition for users and developers, versions 10.0 through 10.4 were able to run Mac OS 9 and its applications in the Classic Environment, a compatibility layer.

Lion was referred to by Apple as "Mac OS X Lion" and sometimes as "OS X Lion"; Mountain Lion was officially referred to as just "OS X Mountain Lion", with the "Mac" being completely dropped. The operating system was further renamed to "macOS" starting with macOS Sierra.

Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1 were given names of big cats as internal code names ("Cheetah" and "Puma"). Starting with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, big-cat names were used as marketing names; starting with OS X 10.9 Mavericks, names of locations in California were used as marketing names instead.

After Apple removed Steve Jobs from management in 1985, he left the company and attempted to create the "next big thing", with funding from Ross Perot[7] and himself. The result was the NeXT Computer. As the first workstation to include a digital signal processor (DSP) and a high-capacity optical disc drive, NeXT hardware was advanced for its time, but was expensive relative to the rapidly commoditizing workstation market. The hardware was phased out in 1993; however, the company's object-oriented operating system NeXTSTEP had a more lasting legacy as it eventually became the basis for Mac OS X.

NeXTSTEP was based on the Mach kernel developed at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University)[8] and BSD, an implementation of Unix dating back to the 1970s. It featured an object-oriented programming framework based on the Objective-C language. This environment is known today in the Mac world as Cocoa. It also supported the innovative Enterprise Objects Framework database access layer and WebObjects application server development environment, among other notable features.[citation needed]

All but abandoning the idea of an operating system, NeXT managed to maintain a business selling WebObjects and consulting services, only ever making modest profits in its last few quarters as an independent company. NeXTSTEP underwent an evolution into OPENSTEP which separated the object layers from the operating system below, allowing it to run with less modification on other platforms. OPENSTEP was, for a short time, adopted by Sun and HP.

On February 4, 1997, Apple Computer acquired NeXT for $427 million, and used OPENSTEP as the basis for Mac OS X, as it was called at the time.[9] Traces of the NeXT software heritage can still be seen in macOS. For example, in the Cocoa development environment, the Objective-C library classes have "NS" prefixes, and the HISTORY section of the manual page for the defaults command in macOS straightforwardly states that the command "First appeared in NeXTStep."[citation needed]

Meanwhile, Apple was facing commercial difficulties of its own. The decade-old Macintosh System Software had reached the limits of its single-user, co-operative multitasking architecture, and its once-innovative user interface was looking increasingly outdated. A massive development effort to replace it, known as Copland, was started in 1994, but was generally perceived outside Apple to be a hopeless case due to political infighting and conflicting goals. By 1996, Copland was nowhere near ready for release, and the project was eventually cancelled. Some elements of Copland were incorporated into Mac OS 8, released on July 26, 1997.

Apple expected that developers would port their software to the considerably more powerful OPENSTEP libraries once they learned of its power and flexibility. Instead, several major developers such as Adobe told Apple that this would never occur, and that they would rather leave the platform entirely. This "rejection" of Apple's plan was largely the result of a string of previous broken promises from Apple; after watching one "next OS" after another disappear and Apple's market share dwindle, developers were not interested in doing much work on the platform at all, let alone a re-write.

Apple's financial losses continued and the board of directors lost confidence in CEO Gil Amelio, asking him to resign. The board asked Steve Jobs to lead the company on an interim basis, essentially giving him carte blanche to make changes to return the company to profitability. When Jobs announced at the World Wide Developer's Conference that what developers really wanted was a modern version of the Mac OS, and Apple was going to deliver it[citation needed], he was met with applause.

Over the next two years, a major effort was applied to porting the original Macintosh API to Unix libraries known as Carbon. Mac OS applications could be ported to Carbon without the need for a complete re-write, making them operate as native applications on the new operating system. Meanwhile, applications written using the older toolkits would be supported using the "Classic" Mac OS 9 environment. Support for C, C++, Objective-C, Java, and Python were added, furthering developer comfort with the new platform.[citation needed]

During this time, the lower layers of the operating system (the Mach kernel and the BSD layers on top of it[10]) were re-packaged and released under the Apple Public Source License. They became known as Darwin. The Darwin kernel provides a stable and flexible operating system, which takes advantage of the contributions of programmers and independent open-source projects outside Apple; however, it sees little use outside the Macintosh community.[citation needed]

During this period, the Java programming language had increased in popularity, and an effort was started to improve Mac Java support. This consisted of porting a high-speed Java virtual machine to the platform, and exposing macOS-specific "Cocoa" APIs to the Java language.[citation needed]

Despite this, Mac OS X maintained a substantial degree of consistency with the traditional Mac OS interface and Apple's own Apple Human Interface Guidelines, with its pull-down menu at the top of the screen, familiar keyboard shortcuts, and support for a single-button mouse. The development of Aqua was delayed somewhat by the switch from OpenStep's Display PostScript engine to one developed in-house that was free of any license restrictions, known as Quartz.[citation needed]

With the exception of Mac OS X Server 1.0 and the original public beta, the first several macOS versions were named after big cats. Prior to its release, version 10.0 was code named "Cheetah" internally at Apple, and version 10.1 was code named internally as "Puma".

After the code name "Jaguar" for version 10.2 received publicity in the media, Apple began openly using the names to promote the operating system: 10.3 was marketed as "Panther", 10.4 as "Tiger", 10.5 as "Leopard", 10.6 as "Snow Leopard", 10.7 as "Lion", and 10.8 as "Mountain Lion". "Panther", "Tiger", and "Leopard" were registered as trademarks.

Apple registered "Lynx" and "Cougar", but these were allowed to lapse.[34] Apple started using the name of locations in California for subsequent releases: 10.9 Mavericks was named after Mavericks, a popular surfing destination; 10.10 Yosemite was named after Yosemite National Park; 10.11 El Capitan was named for the El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park; 10.12 Sierra was named for the Sierra Nevada mountain range; and 10.13 High Sierra was named for the area around the High Sierra Camps.[35]

In 2016, OS X was renamed to macOS. A few years later, in 2020, with the release of macOS Big Sur, the first component of the version number was incremented from 10 to 11, so Big Sur's initial release's version number was 11.0 instead of 10.16, making the version numbers of macOS behave the way the version numbers of Apple's other operating systems do.[36] All subsequent major releases also increased the first component of the version number.

On September 13, 2000, Apple released a $29.95[37] "preview" version of Mac OS X (internally codenamed Kodiak) in order to gain feedback from users.[38] It marked the first public availability of the Aqua interface, and Apple made many changes to the UI based on customer feedback. Mac OS X Public Beta expired and ceased to function in spring 2001.[39]

On March 24, 2001, Apple released Mac OS X 10.0 (internally codenamed Cheetah).[40]The initial version was slow, incomplete, and had very few applications available at the time of its launch, mostly from independent developers. Critics suggested that the operating system was not ready for mainstream adoption, but they recognized the importance of its initial launch as a base to improve upon. Simply releasing Mac OS X was received by the Macintosh community as a great accomplishment, for attempts to completely overhaul the Mac OS had been underway since 1996, and delayed by countless setbacks. Following some bug fixes, kernel panics became much less frequent.

Mac OS X 10.1 (internally codenamed Puma) was released on September 25, 2001.[41]It has better performance and provided missing features, such as DVD playback. Apple released 10.1 as a free upgrade CD for 10.0 users. Apple released a US$129 upgrade CD for Mac OS 9.

On August 23, 2002,[43]Apple followed up with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, the first release to use its code name as part of the branding.[44]It brought great raw performance improvements, a sleeker look, and many powerful user-interface enhancements (over 150, according to Apple[45]), including Quartz Extreme for compositing graphics directly on an ATI Radeon or Nvidia GeForce2 MX AGP-based video card with at least 16 MB of VRAM, a system-wide repository for contact information in the new Address Book, and an instant messaging client named iChat.[46]The Happy Mac which had appeared during the Mac OS startup sequence for almost 18 years was replaced with a large grey Apple logo with the introduction of Mac OS X 10.2.

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