Apple and the enterprise: A complicated relationship
When Microsoft shipped Windows 2000 and Active Directory, Apple didn’t really have a solution for identity management or for linking Macs to an enterprise network. The company was just beginning the transition from its classic Mac OS—the first version of which had shipped on the first Mac in 1984—to OS X. Although Apple did ship a public beta of OS X in second half of the year, the final release didn’t arrive until March 2001.
The classic Mac OS was not for multi-user systems. It offered limited user account creation and management for file sharing between Macs, but there was no built-in mechanism for logging into an individual Mac—it booted right to the desktop, where you had full access to the entire file system and all installed software.
Apple did make a couple of attempts to create a multi-user system, however. In the early 1990s, the company shipped At Ease, which provided some multi-user support, first on a single Mac and later for multiple Macs on a network. But At Ease never gained much traction beyond some pockets of the education market for it which it seemed to be designed.
In planning the transition to the true multi-user environment of OS X, Apple added a modicum of multi-user functions in Mac OS 9 that allowed each Mac to support multiple users with basic file permissions, individual user settings and preferences, and limited account-based restrictions. Apple also created Macintosh Manager, which redirected Mac OS 9’s multi-user functions to a server-based data store and copied certain settings and configuration files from that data store to an individual Mac. It wasn’t really an enterprise-grade solution, even when incorporated into the first few releases of OS X Server, but it was a functional pre-OS X stop-gap.
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