Apple

Last month marked 10 years since the release of the first public beta of Apple’s Mac OS X. The trial version of the forthcoming operating system was released on September 13, 2000, carrying a box price of $29.99.

In March of 2010, the first final version of the OS, Cheetah, will turn 10 years old. It’s hard not to get a little nostalgic thinking about how far Apple’s plucky little operating system has come — particularly in light of yesterday’s OS X 10.7 announcement preview. It looks like we’ll be seeing a lot of Lion very shortly.

In honor of next week’s announcement, we thought it would be fun to take quick trip down memory lane and hit on some of the milestones of OS X’s first 10 years.

1985: Forced out of the company he co-founded, Steve Jobs launches NeXT, a hardware and software company, partially funded by future presidential candidate, Ross Perot. The hardware part didn’t pan out particularly well, so the company ultimately turned its focus to the software side of things, and ultimately developed a programming standard called OpenStep.

December 1996: Apple buys NeXT for $429 million. The company plans to use the software as the basis of a major upgrade to the current Mac operating system. The project is first known as Rhapsody. Soon it will be renamed OS X.

March 1999: Apple releases OS X Server 1.0 — the first major fruit of the company’s OpenStep acquisition. The software is really just a preview of what Apple will offer in the coming years. Aesthetically, the OS is indebted to older versions’ Platinum layout.

September 2000: It’s a bear! Apple releases a public beta of OS X, codenamed Kodiak. Priced at $29.95, this preview is aimed at software developers, though early adopters who didn’t mind a little bugginess were also invited to join the party. This preview traded in the Platinum look for the now more familiar Aqua U — with other features like the system dock, this version is a lot closer to the OS of today.

March 2001: The first of the big cat operating systems enters the wild with Cheetah. The new OS is a huge advance over OS 9 (featuring an entirely different code base, doing a number on software compatibility). But this early version of the OS is plagued by bugs and negative user feedback.

September 2001: Six months after the release of Cheetah, Apple releases 10.2, Jaguar. Many of its predecessor’s shortcomings are addressed, but the consensus is that Apple still has a ways to go with its new operating system.

May 2002: Jobs takes the stage alongside a coffin at Apple’s annual World Wide Developer Conference — a less than subtle way of announcing the death of OS 9.

August 2002: Version 10.3 Panther, announced at the aforementioned WWDC, hits the streets. The version is much more stable than its predecessors. For the first time, the big cat code name becomes an integral part of Apple’s ad pitch.

August 2005: OS X 10.4 Tiger is released. The operating system is the first of Apple’s built to support the company’s new Intel-based systems.

August 2008: OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is released, becoming the first version of OS X to drop support for older PowerPC systems. It’s the first Apple OS since System 7.1.2 to not support that architecture