35 years ago, the Mac got an era-defining upgrade (Macworld/Jason Snell)

Multitasking! Aliases! File sharing! System 7 had it all.

A lot of Mac users don’t remember a time before Mac OS X (or macOS, or OS X, depending on the era), but before OS X arrived on the scene, the Mac ran on an entirely different operating system, the classic Mac OS, which was with us from the Mac’s launch in 1984 through the funeral Steve Jobs held for Mac OS 9 in 2002.

The original Mac OS evolved a lot across those 18 years. And perhaps its single most important update, System 7, arrived 35 years ago this month, in May of 1991.

It seems like a footnote now, but so much of what we take for granted on the Mac today was introduced in System 7. Take it from someone who was there—I wanted System 7 so badly, I downloaded a load of floppy disk images across my college computer network so I could install it. And I wasn’t disappointed by what I got. System 7 really did show the way to the future of the Mac.

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