The OS also-rans

The story of the Mac’s operating system intertwines with other operating systems, including the one that powered the Alto, an experimental personal workstation developed by Xerox at the Palo Alto Research Centre in 1973.

The Alto and its more commercial successor, the Star, were among the first computers to use an early version of the desktop metaphor in their mouse-driven bitmap graphical user interface. It was this that Steve Jobs saw on a tour of PARC in 1979. (He also saw an object-oriented programming environment and networking, but was unimpressed with either – even though Apple would later adopt both.) Xerox had invested in Apple so the visit (and Apple’s development of the GUI) were above board. One of the reasons Macintosh engineer Jef Raskin was so keen for Jobs to visit PARC was to convince him not to axe the Macintosh programme by showing him how strong a concept the GUI was.

But while the Macintosh in 1984 is the most famous and obvious descendent of the Alto, before the Mac was the Lisa, a hugely expensive but also hugely advanced personal computer, and the Lisa OS pioneered many of the things we take for granted now.

Fast forward to the early ’90s and Apple is struggling to make Copland, its major reworking of its OS, actually ship. Ultimately, it was ditched, and Apple bought in NeXT, the company Steve Jobs founded after he was ousted from Apple. The NeXT OS, OpenStep, was ported to run on Apple hardware in the Rhapsody project; even though Rhapsody had been ‘skinned’ to look like classic Mac OS, it was completely different underneath. Ultimately, Rhapsody morphed into the OS X we use today.