Ten years ago, on March 24th, 2001, Mac OS X came out. A first, publicly available, one point oh unpolished version of Apple’s ‘next’ (pun intended) operating system. An operating system that Apple had been trying, in one way or another, to create for more than ten years. Remember Pink? Taligent? Copland? Gershwin? Mythical codenames to those that heard of them in the 1990s of either projects that promised amazing experiences compared to Mac OS Classic and that were never finished or released as planned, or spun-off products that died after a few short years. Mac OS X, what finally became a cornerstone of Apple’s platform well beyond the Mac and a catalyst of its success in the 2000s was a reincarnation of NeXTSTEP in Apple’s colours. Fusing NeXTSTEP’s core and frameworks with the Mac OS of old as one product that didn’t exactly know itself. A new skin, the same — amazingly advanced for their time — underpinnings.

In this short article I will describe, in summary, some experiences with Mac OS X from the point of view of a software engineer as opposed to a user, over the past ten years: The initial chaos of integration, Apple’s flirtation and dilemma with Java, the modernisation of Objective-C, the eventual coherence of the APIs and the extension of the system to support Touch in a way that was never achieved before.

NeXTSTEP frameworks used Objective-C. It was a language unknown to 99% of programmers out there in 2001. I had only heard of it while fiddling with GNUStep a few years earlier. In the early 2000s you could still find C++/Corba programmers in major service companies (as opposed to large software houses or systems development divisions) and Java was only starting, slowly but increasingly, to become the preferred platform for enterprise software. I remember meeting amazing and suitably eccentric software engineers — not merely the subpar ‘developers’ that are increasingly common nowadays in service/enterprise environments — that proudly proclaimed ‘Java is for girls!’ and other elitist, sexist jokes like that. Anything less than Alexandrescu and Sutter-class C++ was unacceptable to them. Knowledge of x86 assembly was standard among their friends. How could a person like that appreciate Objective-C? I felt comfortable hanging out with those people because I had gone through the rings of fire of learning, liking and using assembly, ‘high-level’ [insert CPU here] programming (irony!) and C/C++, but I also enjoyed the elegance and simplicity of Objective-C and Cocoa for rapid application development.
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