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.
