BetaWiki:Featured article/2024-10
macOS is a series of operating systems developed by Apple for their Macintosh platform. It was first introduced together with the original Macintosh in 1984. The system from the very beginning made use of a graphical interface, similar to the one used by the earlier Lisa. In its early versions, it only supported running a single application at a time, although it was later extended with cooperative multitasking support via MultiFinder.
Shortly after Apple bought NeXT in 1997, Apple gained NeXT's object-oriented operating system called NeXTSTEP based on Unix. The Unix core of NeXTSTEP was renamed to Darwin, released as open source and in the following years, it was modernized partially by using code from FreeBSD and other projects. Building off from the kernel, the classic Mac OS was eventually succeeded by Mac OS X in 2001 with the release of Mac OS X Cheetah. Since then, the system went through several architecture transitions, first from PowerPC to Intel x86 in 2006. In 2020, Apple began another transition, this time from x86 to the ARM-based Apple silicon.