The macOS operating system — earlier called Mac OS X — is turning 20 years of age this Wednesday, March 24, 2021. To celebrate the event, none other than Scott Forstall decided to utilize his Twitter account this evening to congratulate Mac OS X.
In a post on his own Twitter account, which he doesn’t utilize frequently, Forstall praises the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X and remembers when Steve Jobs settled on the name for the 10th version of Apple’s operating system.
“I still remember when we named you. In a small room in IL1. When Steve slashed a large X on the wall and smiled. Look at how far you’ve come from a young Cheetah,” said Forstall. The system was named Mac OS around then, yet Apple had been dealing with a totally new version that came to be Mac OS X.
Long-time Mac clients may remember that the first versions of Mac OS X were named after big cats, however that was simply because Apple utilized “Cheetah” as the codename for Mac OS X 10.0. From that point forward, the organization chose to utilize the big cat names for different versions of OS X, like Puma, Tiger, and Leopard.
Scott Forstall worked for NeXT with Steve Jobs since 1992 and joined Apple in 1997 after the organization was gained. He became SVP of software at Apple in 2003 and was deeply associated with the improvement of iPhone in 2005 — which made Forstall to be viewed as the “father of iOS.” In 2006, he started to lead the pack in the development of Mac OS X too.
Forstall left Apple in 2012 after the Apple Maps debate in which the organization supplanted Google Maps with its own map solution, which was considered incomplete and buggy. He was mostly supplanted by Craig Federighi, who leads Apple’s software engineering right up ’til the present time.
