The Macintosh is one of the oldest mainstream computing platforms still in use. Its operating system has had to evolve through multiple difficult transitions to stay relevant. In this episode we discuss the history of the Mac's operating system. Or perhaps we should use the plural "operating systems," since the Mac has really been through two distinct eras with very different operating systems.

From 1984 to 2001 the "Classic Mac OS" evolved, with difficulty, from supporting a machine with an 8 MHZ processor and 128 KB of RAM to Internet era multimedia machines. In 2001 it was replaced by Mac OS X built from the foundations of NeXTStep, an operating system that could trace its history to 1989, and the even older Unix, circa 1969. Today Mac OS X has evolved into iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and macOS 11.

All of this and much more in this special episode for #MARCHintosh, a movement by creators to celebrate the history of the Macintosh.

Show Notes

• Episode 29: Why was the Original Macintosh Significant?
• Episode 23: The Mac's Instruction Set Architecture Transitions
• Episode 32: What is Unix?
• Episode 21: How have UIs Evolved?
• A/UX via Wikipedia
• Taligent via Wikipedia
• Copland via Wikipedia
• BeOS via Wikipedia
• NeXTStep via Wikipedia
• Mac OS 9 Funeral with Steve Jobs via YouTube

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