A few weeks ago, Krazy Ken from the Computer Clan made a video about a beta version of Snow Leopard, provided to developers on two DVDs. The video is interesting, but one detail caught my attention.
While watching the video, I thought, « Hey, that’s funny, I have the same disc. » But when I checked mine, I realized that wasn’t the case. The disc he presents is from WWDC 2009 (build 10A380), whereas mine is from WWDC 2008, with a much older build (10A96). Interestingly, this older build is still compatible with PowerPC, something I’ll probably talk about another day.
The 2009 sleeve, which is shiny (screenshot from the video)
My 2008 sleeve, which is not shiny
My disc
The idea of distributing Mac OS X betas on physical discs seems a bit strange in 2022, but we have to remember that in 2008 and 2009, almost all Macs still had optical drives, and internet speeds weren’t yet fast enough to download multi-gigabyte disk images in just a few minutes like we can today. In fact, Snow Leopard was never distributed online, and the version available on a USB stick (the same as Lion) is rare, reserved only for the Mac of that era without an optical drive (the MacBook Air).
So, I grabbed a MacBook (black, not midnight) to test it out. First hurdle: the Mac wouldn’t boot from the CD—its optical drive clearly hasn’t aged well (sixteen years old, after all). Using an external USB drive, the installation worked. I had tried just before in a virtual machine with VMWare Fusion… with mixed success (see screenshot).
Once installed, there wasn’t much to say—it’s an early version of Snow Leopard, contemporary with Leopard, with mostly the same features. In fact, many of Snow Leopard’s (small) new features aren’t even present yet, such as the improved Finder or QuickTime 10 (this version still has 7.6). The version presented in Krazy Ken’s video is, in a way, more interesting: it includes features that made it into the final release, but with a sometimes different look (like QuickTime, for example).
The old QuickTime
An error if the current date is kept
A preview related to Exchange
