Not sure why they name them after cats but generally they change the
major version number after a rearchitecture of the system software. To
broadly oversimplify, in the past System 6 was primarily tied to the
reasonably fast Motorola 68K processor black and white macs. System 7
seemed to focus more on the new color macs with expansion slots and
such. System 8 was another rewrite that was focused a lot on cleaning up
the transition to PowerPC chips along with all the other usual
enhancements. There were some failed attempts at writing another OS
which sucked up some time and so System 8 started getting pretty
unstable. So they pretty much redid everything for OS9 and had a very
nice stable platform for some time. That was what sustained Mac users
while OS10 or OSX was getting going. If I did my googling right OSX was
first let out of the labs in 99 while OS8 was still the best available
production OS. One new twist is that when they transitioned from PowerPC
to Intel, OSX didn't go to 11. Maybe that's just a sign of how good the
new architecture is that it handled this substantial change more or less
in stride. It's probably also related to finally being on Unix which has
been around for ages so hardware transitions are pretty much taken in
stride. Prior to System 6 I was an Apple II user so I'm not as familiar
with the strengths or transition points. MacOS 1 came out in 1984 and
they pretty much put out a new revision each year up through System 6,
which hung around from 1988 through 1991.
You can find more info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_OS
Hope this helps.
CB
VaShaun Jones wrote:
Hey does anyone know why the OS release name is dedicated to cats? Is
it in their mission statement or does Jobbs have a love for big cats?
Will we still get updates for Tiger or just the applications? How long
does Apple support previous OS releases? It feels like they change the
name but continue with the number i.e 10.4, 10.5. Why don't they just
say Leopard 1.0 or something. Just trying to get a feel for Apple and
the way they treat their operating systems.
