It was a big improvement over earlier versions, offering more stability, virtual memory support, cooperative multitasking through MultiFinder, and the AppleScript scripting language. Of all of the original System releases, I remember System 7 as being the most long-lived. System 6 also brought support for the Motorola 68030 CPU and the 1.44MB SuperDrive floppy. That bootable diskette was a direct ancestor of the Disk Utility we still use today. One of these diskettes, “Disk Utilities 1”, came with Disk First Aid and HD SC Setup. For $49, users got three manuals and four diskettes. System 5 and 6Īpple began charging for operating system upgrades with System 5. ADB also worked with adapters to connect Macs to AppleTalk networks. It also supported Apple Desktop Bus, used for many years to connect keyboards, mice, and other devices. System 4.1 was notable in that it supported the Motorola 68020 CPU, expansion slots, and color display of the Macintosh II. System 3 brought 800K startup drives, SCSI for connectivity to scanners, printers, and storage, AppleShare (early networking and file sharing). For example, System 2 brought multiple folders and screenshots (Command – Shift – 3), while System 2.1 added support for the Apple Hard Disk 20 (that’s 20MB, not GB…). System 1 through System 4 (1987) offered a few enhancements along the way.

Overlapping, resizable windows the Finder, folders, a mouse-controlled pointer, the Trash can, and the top menu bar anchored by the Apple icon. In the two years that the Lisa was on the market, it sold only 10,000 units.Īs crude as the System 1 desktop looks in the screenshot above, it introduced many concepts that still exist in macOS today. Apple had released the Lisa with a GUI in 1983, but it was ridiculously expensive ($9,995, equivalent to almost $26,000 in 2020 dollars), slow, and used unreliable floppy disks coupled with a 5 MB hard disk drive. It was the first popular consumer OS to use a graphical user interface. For those of us who were around at the time the first Mac was released, System 1 was a revolutionary operating system. On that day, twenty years ago, Apple introduced the next generation of the Mac operating system – Mac OS X 10.0 “Cheetah.” The introduction was no small matter, as it marked a change in how Macs work that remains up to this day with macOS 11 “Big Sur.” Let’s take a look at the history of Mac operating systems from 1984 until now, starting with the “Classic” operating system introduced in 1984 and ending with Big Sur.Īt the beginning (1984), there was System 1.

March 24, 2001, was a banner day for Mac users.

Mac os gui interfaces names