Looking back 25 years later, even Steve was wrong about Mac OS X

Twenty-five years ago, Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld Expo in San Francisco and unveiled Mac OS X, ushering in a new era for the Mac and the world of desktop computing at large.

That sounds like hyperbole, but after watching the keynote for a second time–the first time was from the front row, thank you very much!–it’s remarkable what an enormous moment this was for Apple and the Mac.

It’s funny. What’s remarkable about the moment is actually how uneventful it seems. When I watch the video back, it’s almost surreal how Steve Jobs keeps doing utterly normal, boring things in Mac OS X while the crowd completely loses its collective mind. Viewed by someone without any historical context, it would seem like a cult being whipped into a frenzy by its leader.

But I was there, and I can tell you that it wasn’t that. This was the moment, after 16 years of classic Mac OS–and let’s face it, the last five of those were pretty rough–when all the failings of the Mac were swept away and replaced with something modern, ready for the challenge of the 21st century.

How did that work out for Apple? The keynote seems so weird now because almost everything in it is just how the Mac works, even 25 years later. Yes, interface styles have changed over time, but that moment on stage in January 2000 redefined the Mac for 25 years and counting.

The thick of it

Let me provide a little of that historical context. The original Mac OS, released in 1984, was revolutionary–but its underpinnings were from the earliest era of personal computers. Its revolutionary graphical interface was famously black and white, and it ran one program at a time. Fifteen years later, it was clear that modern operating systems should have protected memory, solid multitasking, and powerful graphics functionality–but the classic Mac OS had been unable to achieve any of that. Apple had tried a few different OS update projects, but they’d all failed.

The final Hail Mary was buying Steve Jobs’s NeXt, which was struggling–but owned an operating system, NeXtStep, that had all of the features that the Mac didn’t. And hey, Steve Jobs gets to work with Apple again! Not a bad package deal. Worth every penny, if you ask me.

NeXtStep wasn’t Mac OS, though. It had some features you’d recognize today as being Mac-like, but for the most part, its interface seemed quite alien. It was built for a super niche audience, unlike the broad Mac audience that would need to be migrated over for the transition to be successful.

During the three years between Jobs’s return and the unveiling of Mac OS X, Apple’s software effort was devoted to squaring the expectations of Mac users with what could be done with NextStep. At the same time, there was a culture clash, with former NeXtStep developers not necessarily understanding what those expectations were.

The developers and designers at Apple had to go through every feature of both operating systems and decide what would happen: do it the Mac way, do it the NeXt way, let users choose from those two ways, or choose an entirely new path. Each of those decisions had huge consequences. If things weren’t familiar enough for Mac users, switching to Mac OS X would be as alien as switching to Windows–and during the late 90s, Apple couldn’t afford to give any of its customers an excuse to join the rest of the world in giving in to Microsoft. But Apple’s development team couldn’t reach the finish line if it didn’t re-use large portions of what NeXt had built.

Those decisions would affect the path of Mac users for the next quarter of a century.

Lick it

One of the design goals was when you saw it, you wanted to lick it. And so we call it Aqua. And this is the architecture for Mac OS 10.–Steve Jobs

Apple managed to “introduce” Mac OS X numerous times, from the first Steve Jobs appearance on stage at Macworld 1997 through to the ship day of Mac OS X 1.0 in the spring of 2001. That makes it hard to celebrate an anniversary date, but the introduction of Aqua on January 5, 2000, is a pretty good one.

So much of what we take for granted today is there in that initial Steve Jobs demo, getting rapturous applause. The Dock made its debut that day, complete with the “genie effect” for minimizing and maximizing windows. Of course, that Dock was kind of a mess–you could drag files into it, and they disappeared from the Desktop! And you could drag them back off, and they’d reappear on the Desktop. (Files actually lived in the Dock folder in your user folder! But that Dock was rewritten a bunch before it ever shipped.)

The OS X Finder itself was unveiled that day, as well. Some consider this a day that shall live in infamy, but it’s definitely the same Finder we use now! It offers the “classic” Mac icon and list views, as well as a column view imported from NeXt and favored by Steve Jobs. Jobs loved the new feature that let you navigate through your filesystem in a single window, rather than having every double-click of a folder spawn a new window, as well as the addition of a web browser-style back button.

It’s a bit of a head trip to watch Jobs explain how windows now have three buttons in the top left corner, colored “like a stoplight,” with symbols that appear when you roll the mouse pointer over them. Those buttons have become as much symbols of the Mac as the menu bar itself, but this was the first time anyone saw them.

The list goes on. Jobs’s favorite NeXtStep app was an email client, and that explains his glee in introducing Mail, a brand-new (cough) Apple app that would be included free with Mac OS X. He seems especially giddy about the fact that the app knows who you’ve emailed with and will suggest names as you type, something else we’ve taken for granted the last 25 years.

And, of course, underpinning all of this was the open-source Unix base that still runs the base of all of Apple’s platforms. Jobs got applause for things like dropping a menu while video continued to play and running a badly behaved app that crashed without bringing down the whole system. The audience gasps in amazement when a “The app has unexpectedly quit” alert appears, something that today would be a minor inconvenience at best. (Also, an amazing bit of trivia: the QuickTime movie Jobs uses to demo Mac OS X is the trailer for “Mission Impossible 2.” How does Tom Cruise do it?!)

It’s also worth noting the new, mind-boggling features that Jobs introduced that day that went nowhere. There used to be a button on the far right edge of a window’s title bar that entered you into “single-window mode,” to simplify using the Mac. While modern Macs have a full-screen mode that performs that task, placing that mode on a window’s title bar was weird and the feature was removed before OS X 1.0 shipped the following March.

And then there’s the strange case of the Apple logo. In Jobs’s demo, and indeed in the Mac OS X Public Beta released later that year, there was an Apple logo in the center of the menu bar. It didn’t do anything. But by the time Mac OS X 1.0 arrived in 2001, the Apple menu–a standard of classic Mac OS–had been revived and placed at the far left of the menu bar.

However, the new Apple menu was not like the original one. (In the latter days of classic Mac OS, it was essentially a folder full of whatever you wanted to put there.) The new Apple menu more closely resembled the old Special menu in the Finder, which was where you could shut down or restart your Mac. It’s pretty much the same to this day.

Welcome to the future

It’s hard to believe that Mac OS X has been with us for a quarter of a century, a way longer run than the original Mac OS. From the interface design to the technical underpinnings, the longevity of OS X and all the operating systems it has spawned–macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS, even watchOS and tvOS–is a tremendous endorsement of the decisions Apple made in the late 90s and early 2000s.

“This is our foundation for the next decade of Macintosh operating systems, and we are thrilled with it,” Jobs said on stage 25 years ago. He undershot a little bit. What he introduced that day is still the foundation of the Mac… and almost everything else Apple does. No matter what comes next, no matter where Apple and the tech industry go from here, there’s no doubt that Mac OS X has exceeded all of the expectations we had for it back on January 5, 2000.