Write a birthday greeting to a computer operating system? What an odd thing to do. What a hopelessly geeky thing to do. What a nonsensically sentimental, rabidly fan-ish, depressingly don’t-you-have-anything-better-to-do thing to do.
It’s worth celebrating anyway, since without OS X I never would have returned to the Mac fold after a long sojourn in that [ahem] other platform. I started out on the Mac back in the 1980s — System 5 on a MacSE, no less — and so it was nice to return to the platform once OS X had come along and Apple had the solid, modern operating system that had been lacking for some years. I’ve been on OS X since 10.3 "Panther", and have moved steadily up through subsequent cats: Tiger, Leopard, and now Snow Leopard. From the first moment I turned on my new impulse-buy iMac running 10.3, my days as a Windows NT user were numbered.
So Bon Anniversaire, OS X! May you live long and prosper — and may Apple never run out of cat names.
Here’s a nice article in Wired about OS X’s birthday, another in TUAW ("The Unofficial Apple Weblog), another on FairerPlatform.com, and a particularly nice one on MacDailyNews, which reproduces the original press release.
Two OS X’s: Cheetah (10.0) and Snow Leopard (10.6)