I recently came across a stash of old Apple press releases, and this one jumped out at me:
At a financial conference in Monterey, Calif., on October 30, 1996, Dr. Gilbert F. Amelio, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Apple Computer, Inc., spoke about the general future of operating systems. Contrary to the claims made in several media reports, he did not announce a new operating system strategy for Apple, nor make any new statements about microprocessor or product line direction.
The release goes on to include four points:
- Dr. Amelio was speaking in general terms about how operating systems will evolve in the future. At no point did Dr. Amelio signal a change in direction for Apple’s Mac OS strategy.
Apple did not announce a new operating system strategy. Apple has stated that it will release incremental upgrades to the Mac OS and is in the process of finalizing its long term operating system strategy and will announce this by early 1997.
Apple’s strategic hardware direction is focused on the PowerPC. Apple has no current plans to migrate the Mac OS to other microprocessors.
Technologies previously worked on in the Copland project will be integrated into future releases of the Mac OS. It is wrong to characterize Apple’s current OS development efforts as “starting from scratch.”
October 1996 was near the bottom in terms of hope for Apple and its future. In December, the company would announce its acquisition of NeXT. In a press release outlining what the deal meant, this text appears:
NEXTSTEP’s maturity, networking, customer and developer acceptance, multi-tasking, protected memory, scalability from portable to server-level products, information linking, and powerful object-oriented architecture – will provide the Mac OS the underpinning it needs to provide differentiated multimedia and Internet leadership moving forward. Apple is also confident that compatibility with existing applications will be strong in Mac OS as it evolves.
I guess Gil was more right than he knew.