Weird Mac OSX Developer Previews

here's a few extra facts for y'all:
- DP4 & PB are mostly similar but PB adds a toggle to switch between the DP3 & DP4 app name/icon on the title bar (will you try PB on this monster of a machine one day?)

- DP3's dock is actually a folder and you can put any number of icons you want in it, there's no limit and the dock can show icons that are 1px big at minimum. It also was part of the Finder app. Came DP4, the Dock got completely rewritten and was its own separate app (it still is to this day).
- DP3 is still compatible with assets from DP2, meaning you can have the DP3 interface with the platinum look.
- Wallpapers are hardcoded in the appearence files of DP2 & DP3, not sure about dp4, but you can change it in the public beta.
- The public beta allowed the user to change the wallpaper by going into the preference option of the Desktop app. This behavior was retained in the final 10.0 release where the wallpaper option was in the Finder preference tab. This got moved to the settings app came 10.1

I thought that OS X was made from Next Step and not from OS 8 or 9.

Thanks for this

I had a G4 that was a floor model at a Best Buy (so we got a discount). It dual booted to OS9 and X. But I almost exclusively used 9 until the computer died, so this limited what I could do, haha. All of my friends ripped CDs to iTunes and there was almost 2 weeks worth of music before the Mac crashed.

You should have tried opening the OSX chess game like from the release

nice video.. I have them archived on my backup drives along with boxed copies of of the original OS X releases.. I was there at the time when these came out.. it was an exciting time to see apple finally becoming a real machine again. Really miss Jobs.

I had trrouble with 10.0 clicking stuff in finder and it just dissapeared if it was made in a newer version. 10.1 fixed it

There was an Easter egg with one of these previews that featured quotes from the then contemporary The Matrix.

The "big bang" with Aqua was a mixed bag when OSX 10.0 came on the scene, it probably didn't help that the UI worked differently to Platinum, was resource intensive and of course the early versions of OS X were missing many user facing features provided by OS 9. In hindsight, perhaps Apple should have kept using Platinum (or offered it as a fallback) in the early versions of OS X to help users transition to the new OS? Mind you that would probably go against Steve's entire ethos!

Ciao, my first Powermac was a PM 7200, and much later a blue-white G3 with OS X 10.4, i loved the Aqua UI..AS for today i'm using Debian Linux 12, many greetings from Brunswick in Germany and please stay safe 🙂

Aqua felt like peak Apple skeumorphism because it was real enough to look good but vague enough to not have to make sense

The Blue and White G3 was my first Apple Mac… after having owned a Power Computing PowerWave 604|120. I had a Zip drive kit with the Bondi Blue bezel. I think Power Computing did some shenanigans with the clock timing of their systems to get more speed. That came at the cost of compatibility. The Blue G3 was a lot more compatible with the PCI cards I had.

These early Mac OS X versions were so interesting. I didn’t get on the Mac train until 10.2 ‘Jaguar’ but was mesmerised by all the magnification goodness in early aqua screenshots.

I liked the iMac ox 9 and 9.2 after that I didn't like the machines anymore. I bought a new iMac in 2019 and thought it would be like the older versions of iMac nope and then it has been sitting in the closet not being used since 2020.

I wonder if DP1 had a beta version of some changes to the file system, thus the weird characters and failing to work on the premade partition.

i love your shirt!!

Back in the day I was more of a windows since it was much cheaper and easily accessible. These days I’m all in on mac. Wish I would’ve never touched windows

This is really cool. I like seeing the process of how they decide what to implement in their os

Doug lol

I have a MAC at work that we recycled in that looks like this it's a G4 Power Mac seperate tower/monitor. It dual boots OS 9 and OSX!!! It's so cool! Seeing the classic mac os makes me feel like i'm in 2nd grade playing mouse practice on an even older macintosh. I even reloaded OS 9 from a CD to get it cleaner (took me 5 minutes to figure out how to wipe the os 9 partition but I got it), as far as OSX it's not the newest version it can be, but I'm leaving it, I just deleted the customer's user and files and made my own! Quite a trip down memory lane! I've got instructions to boot it from USB and put a newer OSX on, but I'm not bothering it works fine already. To get the files off for the customer, since the USB ports are so slow, I had remove the HDD to DD the hard drive with linux, then plug what I cloned to into my newer work imac then I read everything fine.

I remember this operating system on my Mac G4 Cube and I left Windows and I stuck with Apple ever since

it is amazing to see how much DP3 still has NextStep's legacy in the GUI.

That Cheetah version was the interface that I fell in love with, and spent so much time changing it in Windows and Linux to mimic even the slightest way.

BlastApp differently did make it in. I remember playing it on 10.3. It was somewhere in the xcode sample folder

I love those little ide drives! Never saw those before

On Rhapsody, there were some terminal commands that would restore the NeXTStep/OpenStep floating menus. Was that possible under the developer previews?

I clearly remember when the ad agency I was working for got their first B&W G3. We nerds were in awe of how the whole side opened down to reveal the entire motherboard and hard drives. I had a beige G3 which was a tank, but that B&W had me hooked. I'll have one in my collection at some point. So innovative.

Bah! It'll never catch on..

I love your videos because I love retro stuff.
I hope you can answer a question.
I want to be able to run Diablo 2, Civilization 3 Complete, Command & Conquer on a Mac and still have it boot into OS 9.
Could you recommend what kind of Imac I could buy to be able to do both ?
I do not want a slot cd drive on an Imac G3 because they die too often.
I've had those, an Imac DV and the lamp Imac as well but all had issues with the cd/rw drives.
I miss my clamshell Ibook.
I wish there were a version of it today.
The G3's and lamp Imac were incredibly cool.

Apple learned their lesson 23 years ago that the logo in the center looks awful. Windows 11 on the other hand.....

I remember every one of them. I remember having mixed feelings about this new “OS X” while apple was dying 😆

About icons in DP4 - icons on macOS never was (and are) vector graphics, they were always raster ones, but with very high (for the time) resolution - I think even 15 years ago it was 512x512.

Fun fact: first SVG specification was barely released roughly in time of Mac OS X 10.0

There was a version of OS X Server before the one we all know and mostly love. I retired as an IT engineer from a local community college and we purchased a G3 server that came with its own version of OS X. It was nothing like what we know as OS X. It would only run the server apps that came with the OS and no other Mac software, especially our QuarkXPress license software and dongle. We wound up purchasing OS 9 Server to run on it until the "real" OS X Server OS was released.

This is just the most beautiful of Apple design language eras. The collectible, colorful computers, to OG Aqua... It's STILL gorgeous.

Interesting they bundled the Fetch ftp client, a third party product instead of writing their own

Imagine how these devs would have reacted to seeing modern Mac OS Ventura running on an M2 Ultra with a ProMotion display and all the touch gestures

You got a copy of panther for x86?

Still with the exceptionally annoying hand waving 😤

your arms are dirty

I had a B&W G3 that had every Apple OS it was capable of booting on separate partitions for a while until the hard drive died, and I never put the effort into redoing it.

Awesome video, Sean! The Kodiak DP releases are really fun to play around with. If anyone is interested in trying these out yourselves but don't have access to a compatible Mac, the QEMU PPC emulator is capable of installing and running these betas virtualized on modern OSes.

Interesting video. Never played with the developer previews back in the day, but I did run the public beta on my at the time spanky new indigo iMac. Those were exciting times.

it’s amazing to see the progress made with each preview, thank you for showing us Sean :)

DP1 is very interesting!

So good to see these previews... At times, I do miss the Platinum of old Mac OS. As revolutionary as Aqua was the time, I like the Preview 1, where we see NeXTStep wrapped in Platinum. Good presentation.

Has anyone come up with any of the pre 10.4 Intel builds of OS X? Apple was doing an x86 version side by side with the PPC so they'd be ready really quickly to switch CPUs should PPC run out of steam and/or be able to be made into a lower power use version for Powerbooks. Since the G5 did both, going to Intel wasn't difficult with the Intel build of OS X waiting in the wings for years.

15 year old me loved Aqua when it was first unveiled back in the day but my current, 38 year old self with his huge attention deficit issues would love simple and clean Platinum. They need to bring this back.