Mac OS X

What Does Mac OS X Mean?

Mac OS X is a line of Apple operating systems (OS) included in every modern Macintosh (Mac) computer. It is the successor to the classic Mac OS 9. In March 2001, Apple released the first Mac OS X operating system to hit the market: Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah. Mac OS X operating systems are based on UNIX.

Techopedia Explains Mac OS X

The origin of Mac OS X goes back to the NeXTSTEP OS, which was launched by NeXT – a company founded by Steve Jobs. Because its hardware was not as commercially successful as anticipated, focus shifted to its software. Like OS X, NeXTSTEP was an object oriented and multitasking OS. Jobs took the NeXTSTEP model with him when he returned to Apple, which eventually acquired NeXT.

As recently as Mac OS X 6 Snow Leopard, NeXTSTEP icons were used in OS X. For example, when pressing command+shift+4 and the space bar, a NeXTSTEP camera icon appears.

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Margaret Rouse

Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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