So today is 10×10 or … ten years of OS X 10.0

I know that is confusing, but the 1.0 version of OS X was released in 1999. I should have saved the receipt, but I still have the box.

It does go without saying that OS X changed apple, as it FINALLY integrated the NeXTSTEP OS onto the consumer level machines, and propelled Apple to the #1 spot for the Unix market. Yeah take a step back with me here, and look at the market like this. Apple ships more computers in any given year then HP/SUN(Oracle)/IBM ship that come preloaded with a UNIX. Not to mention Apple also loads their UNIX is the core of the iPhone, iPad, and some of the iPods. Wow imagine that, Apple brought UNIX everywhere. And made it so buried under a UI 99% of the users don’t even know it’s there.

That’s pretty snazzy, isn’t it?

So 10 years ago today, Apple finally shipped 10.0.0 . And let me tell you it was rough around the edges. I had an iMac and at the time I LOVED it. In between the 1.0 & the 10.0 I had bought a G4 and was disappointed that 1.0 wouldn’t run on my beloved G4. I had no intention of running OS 9, but that’s all it could run. So in those fleeting months I managed to run windows 95 on SoftPC (SLOW!) and even got my hands dirty on OpenBSD for the PowerPC.

OS X really made a splash with usable applications that shipped with the OS. I know the nerds hate iTunes, but damn, it’s something a user can use. Same with Mail, and even Microsoft Internet Explorer.

So enough with the reminiscing, I’m sure you want to see it run under some kind of emulation, right?
Well the best (if not only) emulator for running PowerPC Macintosh stuff is PearPC. And version 0.4 is about as good as it gets. Mostly because of Stefan Weyergraf’s untimely death.

Which is sad, however I did find with a little playing around, 10.0.0 can boot single user mode from the CD.

One thing was for sure, at the time, 10.0.0 was so.. rough around the edges Apple did give everyone a free copy of 10.1 . And that version certainly better then 10.0! And it runs on PearPC!

The boot screen, notice the old style mac.

And the progress bar, just like NeXTSTEP. The more things change the more they stay the same..

And welcome to the desktop.

Well since it does run in single user mode, maybe it could be possible to manually place a 10.0 dump on the disk, but that may take a bunch of time… So for now enjoy 10.1!