As the Ars team convenes for two days of meetings in Chicago, we're reaching back into the past to bring you some of our favorite articles from years gone by. This story originally ran in January 2010.

The latter half of the 1990s was a dark time for the company then known as Apple Computer, Inc. Windows 95 had dashed any remaining hopes of mass-market desktop dominance for Apple. The big profits of the earlier part of the decade had given way to some huge annual losses. The future of the entire company was in doubt.

Like injured animals, corporations are adept at hiding the true magnitude of their injuries. As grim as things appeared from the outside, few Apple enthusiasts knew at the time just how close the company came to fiscal ruin. But the software picture was always crystal-clear—clear, and terrifying.

The Mac operating system lacked two important features essential to remaining competitive past the end of the decade: memory protection and preemptive multitasking. Over the course of many years, Apple made several abortive attempts to create a modern successor to the classic Mac operating system, all of which crashed and burned before the horrified eyes of Mac fans everywhere. Regardless of its financial issues, it was clear to the geeks that Apple was on the road to technological ruin.

Apple made its final play for salvation in 1997 when it purchased NeXT and, after one more false start, announced at WWDC 1998 what would be, blessedly, its last next-generation operating system strategy: Mac OS X.

By all rights, the Mac faithful should have been, if not ecstatic, then at the very least relieved at this turn of events. Finally, a modern operating system for the Mac. But there was another, equally common reaction: fear. As a body of code, Mac OS X was not an evolution or enhancement of the Mac operating system that we knew and loved. It was an entirely different—albeit not exactly new—operating system to which the Mac name and, presumably, user experience were to be retroactively applied.

Fear of just how badly this undertaking could turn out is a big part of what motivated me to not only learn as much as I could about the future of Mac OS, but also to write about it. As a freshly-minted Unix nerd, I couldn't help but be somewhat excited at the marriage of my two favorite operating systems. But laid over that optimism was a blanket of mild hysteria regarding every part of the project above the core OS.

Now here we are, a decade later, and Mac OS X has matured into a fine product. This ten-year marker presents an opportunity to do something technology writers usually avoid. I'm going to look back at some of my hopes and fears from the early days of Mac OS X's development and compare them to the reality of today. Was I right on the money, shrewdly warning of future disasters that did, in fact, come to pass? Or do my predictions now read more like the ravings of a gray-bearded lunatic? It's judgment day.

1999: Mac OS X DP2

The path to the Mac OS X project was littered with broken technological promises and missed ship dates. As it turns out, Apple was about to turn the corner and start actually hitting its dates and keeping its promises. But in 1999, I still had my doubts.

The current party line has Mac OS X on store shelves some time in 2000. I fearlessly predict that it will not appear until 2001 at the earliest.

("Nailed it"…though predicting that a software product will be late isn't exactly a tough call.)

It wasn't really fair to make any sort of judgement about Mac OS X based on the second "developer preview" release, which Apple acknowledged upfront existed only to help developers begin their work and did not represent the final user interface. That's a good thing, because my evaluation of DP2 was not kind.

Actually using DP2 is akin to logging into a demented Xterm running a poorly designed window manager theme meant to look something like Mac OS. Launch a Cocoa application and you feel like you've been warped into NEXTSTEP, again running that funny window manager. Run a classic applications and it's like being in a slightly odd version of Mac OS 9, with that alternate NeXT universe still visible in the background. Pull up the command line and you start to think that all of this is one big facade running on top of good old Unix.

Given how far the final Mac OS X user interface diverged from the one in DP2, this harsh criticism hardly seems relevant. But none of us knew what 10.0 would look like back then. Something called Mac OS X Server 1.0 did exist as a shipping product in 1999, and it and looked a hell of a lot like Mac OS X DP2. It was not beyond the bounds of reason to imagine that the final Mac OS X user interface might be a cleaned up, refined version of this very same interface—and that would have been a bad thing.

Ever looking for the silver lining, I went on to opine that "I'd much rather be stuck using Mac OS X DP2 on a daily basis than Mac OS X Server. They both completely fail the 'Mac-like' litmus test, but DP2 is closer to that goal." Reading that now, it's clear to me just how desperate I was to find something good to say about the UI of this new OS.

The image below is a good distillation of my already slightly desperate attitude towards the Mac OS X user experience. Practically speaking, it compares the mouse movement allowed by Mac OS (green) when selecting an item from a sub-menu to the movement required by Mac OS X DP2 (orange). (Following the green path in DP2 caused the sub-menu to immediately disappear.)

The subtext was this: "Hey, NeXT guys. This is just one example of the kinds of things we Mac users appreciate—nay, expect—in an operating system that bears the Mac name. Slapping a Platinum coat of pixels on your existing NeXT code base is obviously not going to cut it. User interface design is not just what it looks like; design is how it works."

Internals intrigue

The technical underpinnings of Mac OS X were considerably more interesting. Even ten years ago, I couldn't help but dwell on the possibility of an x86 future.

The OpenStep APIs are cross platform. Mach is cross-platform. WebObjects is cross-platform. x86 builds of Rhapsody, Mac OS X Server, and Mac OS X inside Apple have been all but confirmed. Rumor has it that Apple routinely synchronizes all changes to Mac OS X across both PowerPC and x86 builds of the OS. Clearly, Apple's choice of where to deploy its new operating system is not limited by the technology. If they decided to try releasing a version Mac OS X for x86 processors, it would be technologically within their means.

Before you congratulate me for my amazing prescience, consider the next two sentences I wrote: "But will they do it? I seriously doubt it." If you'd asked me to place money on the question, I'd have bet heavily against Apple moving to x86. But I now realize I would have been betting with my heart, not my mind. My brain did get in the final word, however:

The cross-platform card is something to watch for. For the first time, the only thing keeping Apple off of the "PC" platform will be its business plan. And hey, with Steve Jobs calling the shots, anything is possible.

It's interesting to note that only two short years after his return to Apple, Jobs had already (re)cemented his reputation as a fearless and often unpredictable leader. Age had not slowed him down one bit.

File system metadata (which I was then calling "meta-information," for some reason) was also tickling my brain, though mostly in a positive way, believe it or not. I was intrigued by the concept of bundles, especially their use of this shiny new "XML" data format. But while storing metadata in separate flat files within bundles could work for applications, the future of plain file metadata was still in doubt.

How will Mac OS X identify the file type and creator of "regular" files? By file name extension, that concept so alien to traditional Mac OS? Or will HFS/HFS+-dependent type/creator meta-information soldier on into the future? Time will tell.

Note the blithe dismissal, the seemingly complete lack of concern. "Oh well, time will tell." Indeed it would.