Thursday marked ten years since Apple left System 9 and moved on to OS X.
Mac OS X is based on a range of technologies developed by NeXT, a company that was founded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and bought by Apple in 1996, which was also the mark of Steve Jobs’ return to Apple. Since its original launch, Apple introduced seven major versions, all of which were named after big cats (Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard). Mac OS X 10.7, code-named Lion, was first shown at an Apple event in October 2010. Lion is currently available as a developer preview.
The PowerPC-Intel transition, announced in June 2005, was the biggest change in the operating system’s history so far. All Mac OS X version up until Leopard (10.6) support the PowerPC architecture. Snow Leopard was the first to exclusively run on x86 processors.
