Mac OS X 10.0

Mac OS X 10.0 (code named Cheetah) is the first major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system. It was released on March 24, 2001, for a price of $129 after a public beta.

Mac OS X was Apple's successor to the classic Mac OS. It was derived from NeXTSTEP and FreeBSD, and featured a new user interface called Aqua, as well as improved stability and security due to its new Unix foundations. It introduced the Quartz graphics rendering engine for hardware-accelerated animations. Many technologies were ported from the classic Mac OS, including Sherlock and the QuickTime framework. The core components of Mac OS X were open sourced as Darwin.

Boxed releases of Mac OS X 10.0 also included a copy of Mac OS 9.1, which can be installed alongside Mac OS X 10.0, through the means of dual booting (which meant that reboots are required for switching between the two OSes). This was important for compatibility reasons; while many Mac OS 9 applications could be run under Mac OS X in the Classic environment, some, such as applications that directly accessed hardware, could only run under Mac OS 9.

Six months after its release, Mac OS X 10.0 was succeeded by Mac OS X 10.1, code named Puma.

Features

New and updated features

• The features of the release include the Dock which was a new way of organizing one's Mac OS X applications on a user interface, and a change from the classic method of application launching in previous Mac OS systems.
• It included Terminal, a terminal emulator that provides access to Mac OS X's Unix command-line interface; the classic Mac OS had previously had the distinction of being one of the few operating systems with no command line interface.
• The new Mail email client included the ability to configure the software to receive all of a user's email accounts in one list, the ability to file emails into folders, the ability to search for emails, and the ability to automatically append signatures to outgoing emails.
• The Address Book was a new application which had features including exporting and importing cards to and from vCard format, API to interface with other applications, change of address notifications, contact groups, auto-merge when importing vCards, customizable fields and categories, the automatic formatting of phone numbers.
• TextEdit replaced the SimpleText application with new features.
• PDF support was added; it allows the user to create PDFs from any application.
• The OS introduced the new Aqua UI.
• Several features of Mac OS 9 were ported to Mac OS X, including the Sherlock desktop and web search engine.

Removed features

• File-sharing client: The system can only use TCP/IP, not AppleTalk, to connect to servers sharing the Apple Filing Protocol. It cannot use SMB to connect to Windows or Samba servers.
• File-sharing server: As a server, the system can share files using only the Apple Filing Protocol (over TCP/IP), HTTP, SSH, and FTP.
• Optical media: Neither DVD playback nor burning CDs or DVDs is supported. However, audio CD burning was added in the Mac OS X 10.0.2 update, roughly two months after initial release.

Architecture

Mac OS X is built on Darwin, a Unix-like operating system derived from FreeBSD. Darwin includes a new kernel, XNU, derived from Mach and BSD, as a replacement for the Mac OS nanokernel used in classic Mac OS.

Unlike Mac OS 9, Mac OS X has protected memory and preemptive multitasking. This means that if an application's memory becomes corrupted due to a bug, the application will crash without the entire system crashing and needing to be rebooted.

Mac OS X also had support for OpenGL, AppleScript, and the Carbon and Cocoa APIs.

Release History

User Interface