The week that was five years ago: Apple finishes OS X and Napster makes waves

Posted on 10 Mar 2006 at 13:59

As Microsoft prepared to release Office XP, oh the excitement, and Apple was putting the finishing touches to the very first version of OS X, it was Napster that was grabbing the headlines five years ago this week.

The original file sharing network's days were numbered and it was eagerly courting partners to launch what would then have been a pioneering digital music service. To think we might never have heard of the iTunes Music Store.

Universal Music, scourge of p2p then and now, said that it may be willing to talk to Napster about the new subscription music service it was planning.

The record companies are back in the driving seat we speculated and then along came Kazaa, Grokster, Limewire, BitTorrent....

In the end Napster was sold to Roxio, which then sold off its software business and set itself up as Napster, a legal but struggling digital music service. Things might have been more interesting if the original owners had taken up 21-year-old Matt Goyer's offer of five years ago. The Canadian wanted to move the business to Sealand an unrecognised nation of the coast of Suffolk where it would be out of reach of the record industry.

These days all the talk in the Mac world is about the switch Intel chips and the availability of universal applications that will run on the new Macs as well as the old PowerPC machines. Five years ago things were not that different; all the talk was of switching to OS X and the availability of carbon applications that would run on the new operating system as well as the OS 9 that it was built to succeed.

In January Apple announced that the new OS would be released at midnight on 23/24 March and this week confirmed that the gold master version has been sent to CD pressing factories for duplication. Philip Schiller, then Apple's vice president of worldwide marketing, revealed that QuickTime 5 was finished and that the company's free suite of online services, iTools, would be tightly integrated into the system. A clever move, since getting all those OS X users to sign up to mac.com email accounts made it much easier to sell them a .Mac account 16 months later, when it replaced the free service.

OS X 10.0 was also set to reintroduce much-loved features of OS that were absent from the OS X beta. These included the ability to store files on the Desktop and the Apple Menu. No DVD playback however; that was to come later.

Back in the wider world and it was a sad day for fans of 'the world's oldest Internet star'. Scientists working in Cambridge University's computer lab were so fed up with climbing the stairs to get a cup of coffee only to find the pot empty that they decided to install a webcam to check on its status. At one stage the website displaying the pot attracted up to 2.4 million viewers - there wasn't so much to look at on the Web in those days - but when the lab moved the webcam had to go to, though the page that made it famous is still hanging around.

For more wanderings down memory lane visit our News Archive.

Author: Simon Aughton