What is Mac OS X?

Whether you are new to the Macintosh or a long time users, Mac OS X is a completely different animal than what we have been used to.

History 

The Macintosh was released in the early 1980s as the first commercial operating system to utilize a mouse and a graphical interface for operating the computer. At this time Microsoft was shipping DOS, looking relatively the same as other operating systems of the time, namely Unix which had been around since 1970. The Mac broke ground over these past efforts in ease of use and was quickly adopted by various creative industries as the tool of choice. The other operating systems soon began to copy the Mac interface with Windows for the DOS world and X11 for Unix, but neither was able to achieve the level of polish and refinement at the time.

The computer world moved on. Unix became ever more a multi-user and network-ready operating system while Windows matured to a level that was good enough for most people in the form of Windows 95. At the same time the World Wide Web's invention became the spark that set of massive adoption of computers in people's lives. In many ways Windows had caught up with the ease of use of the Mac and with later years it would start surpassing the Mac in areas of stability and speed. With Windows XP, Windows had moved to a very stable operating system based on their server product Windows NT. Apple performed an even more abrupt change for their operating system. They completely dropped the old Macintosh OS and started over with Mac OS X.

Mac OS X 

Mac OS X is a Unix operating system based on FreeBSD. This gives it the advantage of not being a brand new operating system built in 1999, but one that has been worked on by thousands of people since 1970. At the same time, it does not suffer from the aging problems that the old Mac operating system had. This is due to many reasons, including the fact that Unix was built as a multi-user operating system from the start and also has been network-ready for just as long. Unix is the basis for the structure of the internet, in fact the World Wide Web was invented on a NeXT computer running NEXTSTEP, the previous name for what we now call Mac OS X. Being a Unix operating system, Mac OS X can natively run thousands of program written for Unix. Much of this software is available as Open Source and a good deal is incorporated directly into Mac OS X. Some examples include CUPS the printing engine Mac OS X uses to print everything and Apache, the web server software built into Mac OS X.

Besides Unix software, Mac OS X can also run its own native Mac OS X software. This software is called Cocoa. A good example of a  Cocoa program is Apple's Mail or QuarkXPress. To simplify the migration from Mac OS 9, Apple developed a new type of software for Mac OS X called Carbon. Carbon applications are old traditional Mac OS applications that have had about 10% of their code redone to work natively on Mac OS X. Adobe's Creative Suite is a good example of Carbon applications. A Carbon program can be written to run both on Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 if the developer chooses to do so. In this way Photoshop 7.0 was able to run in both with very good speed in each instance.

Mac OS X can run many more types of applications, including older Mac OS 9 software that was not Carbonized to run natively on Mac OS X. This takes place in a special application called Classic that lets you run Mac OS 9.2.2 within Mac OS X. There is no speed penalty for this and in fact, you might find things run faster. Fonts can be used in both Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 applications. You can even copy and paste between the two! Some examples of Classic applications would be QuarkXPress 4.11 or 5.0.1. Any application that could run in Mac OS 9.2.2 will run in Classic, with the exception of software that has low level drivers such as for running a scanner. Unfortunately Classic is not supported on Intel Macs, only on the older PowerPC Mac systems.

Java is a another important type of software you can run on Mac OS X. Java applications are written so they can run on any computer that can run Java applications. This means a develop doesn't have to spend time to write a special Mac version of their software. Java applications on Mac OS X look very much like a normal Mac OS X applications. Some examples include Gallery Remote for the Gallery web image hosting solution.

In addition to the standard Unix software we mentioned earlier, Mac OS X can run X11 software. X11 was developed for Unix to have a graphical user interface like the Macintosh, and now the Mac can run this software itself! Some X11 examples include GIMP, an image editor similar to Photoshop and OpenOffice a suite of office software compatible with Microsoft Office.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the software you can run on Mac OS X as there are many types of scripting languages that Mac OS X can run including Applescript, Javascript, PHP, Perl, Ruby, TCL, Unix Shell Scripts, and more! The amount of software available for Mac OS X alone dwarfs what was possible on Mac OS 9.

In the next section we will discuss the other benefits of the Mac OS X operating system.