I think the critics may have a point about the music world, but I suspect the type of group energy and exploration that was once directed at Exile on Main Street has found another locus, one closer to the revolutions of the current age. Two weeks ago, Apple began shipping the beta version of its next generation operating system, OS X, and immediately, all across the world, thousands of people began the collective process of exploring, tweaking, troubleshooting, and benchmarking the new system, all the while reporting back via the Web to their fellow OS X early adopters. Within days of the launch, the message boards at popular Mac discussion sites like Macaddict and MacNN were subjected to an onslaught of first reactions, queries, hosannahs, and flames. Apple’s transition to a UNIX base has fueled debates on Slashdot and Macaddict every bit as intense as the debates over Dylan going electric, and the new Aqua interface has been dissected with a precision that brings to mind the furious annotating that greeted the Sgt. Pepper cover photo-montage.

I confess to being one of those early adopters, and I also confess to suffering from the strange lack of proportion that a software event like this induces. This fixation has got me thinking about the cultural status of operating systems, and particularly the introduction of a genuinely new system like OS X. In an industry that likes to roll out pre-packaged paradigm shifts every quarter, it’s instructive to remember how few major operating system rollouts we’ve experienced since the personal computer became a mainstream consumer device. If you restrict yourself to the major desktop platforms, you can count the significant breakthroughs on one hand: the original Mac operating system from 1984; Windows 3.0/3.1, launched six years later; IBM’s ill-fated OS-2; Windows 95; the stealth emergence of Linux in the past three years. And now OS X, the first soup-to-nuts overhaul of the Mac system in sixteen years.

So on purely technical grounds, the release of the Public Beta is a big deal. But what kind of cultural event is it? This is the question I’ve been wrestling with for the past two weeks, exploring Aqua’s lush tableau, burrowing through the system’s startling UNIX plumbing. If there’s anything the last ten years of the digital revolution have taught us, it’s that computers have become a central part of the cultural sphere, and that operating systems — what they look like and who controls them — are essential to the world of computers. (They are the ”ultimately determining instance” of that world, as the Marxists used to say.) The original Mac interface was what got me into computers in the first place — pulling me first towards the world of desktop publishing and interactive design, and then towards the Web itself, when it finally appeared on the scene. It’s probably fair to say that no cultural product had a greater impact on my life than the original Macintosh system, at least in terms of the professional and intellectual avenues it opened up for me.

But a new operating system doesn’t arrive with the immersive fury of a long-awaited Hollywood blockbuster, or the pageantry of a newly elected political regime. It’s more substantive than the latest fashions from Paris and Milan, but less complete and less authoritative than a new novel. Like the underlying software that powers the new operating system, the cultural experience is a mix of the familiar and the strange — and its importance necessitates that we think seriously about the ways we describe that experience. Computer interfaces have long relied on metaphors to make sense of complicated functions. But what is the right metaphor for a new operating system?

I SUSPECT THAT if you asked Steve Jobs, the analogy he’d make would be to June 1, 1967 — the release date of Sgt. Pepper. Jobs’s natural flair for showmanship has driven him to create products that trigger ”where-were-you-when-you-first-saw-it” conversations years later, even when those products are commercial failures. (I remember friends eagerly reporting first sightings of the NeXT Cube in my college days.) Jobs has been rightly commended for the design sense evidenced in Apple’s recent hardware offerings — although the latest creation, the G4 Cube, hasn’t exactly been flying off the shelves — but I think that Jobs also deserves some credit for another key insight, which is that our software interfaces are increasingly media experiences, and demand a kind of consistency and fluidity that we expect from other media products. Compare the start-up sequence of OS X to that of Windows 98: on my Dell PC, Windows runs through an alarming C prompt that might as well be a relic left over from 1981, then a jarring full-screen Dell logo that looks nothing like the rest of Windows, then a couple of flashes as the video drivers reset the screen — and only then does the familiar Windows desktop appear. OS X, on the other hand, begins with the timeless ”Happy Mac” screen, and then offers up a sign-in box in OS X’s elegant, semitransparent design (whose subtle ridged effects mirror the hardware design of Apple’s recent monitors). After entering a user ID and password, the vivid iconography of the Aqua dock rises up on the bottom of the screen, and the system is ready to go.

Behind the scenes, of course, a bewildering series of BSD UNIX routines have been launched, but OS X keeps those entirely hidden from view, and what you’re left with is a seamless visual experience, pulling you into the new environment without presenting any elements that might seem foreign to that world. This is no great achievement, mind you: Practically every other cultural product on the market obeys the same rules. (We wouldn’t tolerate it if Survivor began with color bars and a sync clock in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.) But somehow the importance of design continuity has been lost on other software creators — particularly those in Redmond. It’s like the Beatles beginning Sgt. Pepper with the sound of George Martin getting the mic levels right and adjusting the EQs, instead of the crowd murmurs and orchestral tunings of the actual record.

The one place where OS X suffers from continuity problems is its ”Classic Mode” — an emulation layer that enables users to run older Mac software that hasn’t been updated for the new system. While you needn’t reboot your computer to run Classic applications, these programs run with the more prosaic interface conventions of OS 9. Because only a handful of apps have been rewritten for the new system, users who make the transition to OS X are likely to spend a great deal of time switching back and forth between the two interfaces. I think there is a larger point to be made about this limitation: It showcases where the Sgt. Pepper analogy falls apart. New operating systems are, in the last analysis, a potential cultural experience, not a fully realized one. A new album, movie, or novel arrives in the world as a complete product: You can interpret it any way you choose, but its core components are all in place when it shows up on the shelves. A new operating system, on the other hand, is more like a preview of coming attractions: Once someone actually writes some new code for this thing, you think to yourself, it’s really going to be cool. In the meantime, though, the old regime persists. Highway 61 Revisited and Bitches Brew may have changed the way music was made after their release, but those effects were more indirect, and the music itself remained frozen in place, save the occasional digital remastering. An encounter with a new operating system, on the other hand, is all about its potential for change and adaptation; what we encounter is closer to an embryo than a fully-grown organism. It’s a kind of ghost of interfaces to come.

YOU CAN SEE all of this as an opportunity if you think about operating systems using another metaphor: the OS-as-ecosystem conceit employed by the bioeconomics crowd. A significant new operating system is guaranteed to define — for a decade, if not more — the space of possibilities that can be explored by other software makers, and a radical shift can be like a sudden climate change in an otherwise stable environment, killing off some species that thrived in the old world, and providing new opportunity to species that quickly adapt to the new rules. There’s something healthy and energizing about that transformation, even if it can make life difficult for end-users who prefer to remain faithful to their original applications. Microsoft has yet to announce an OS X-native version of its Office suite, which is even more dominant on the Mac platform than it is on the PC. This means that for the great bulk of the Mac community, using a word processor will entail shifting back to the Classic mode, even after the final version of OS X is released early next year. That’s bad news for consumers, but it’s great news for any enterprising software company who can put together a compelling OS X-native word processor in the next six months. For years, the Mac platform has been effectively a one-horse town when it comes to word processing; the rise of OS X may finally give the platform a bigger stable.

You can also think of a new OS in purely design terms, as so much high-tech fashion. Seeing a brand new interface — particularly an interface from Apple — is a little like seeing the new Audi TT, or the latest Alessi home appliance: You know you’re going to be seeing these shapes and colors emulated for years to come. (Here too the future weighs heavily on the present experience.) Think of how much of the look-and-feel of the original graphic interface escaped into the larger culture: the deliberate bit-mapped typefaces of the late 1980s Émigré school; the ubiquitous pull-down menu bars tethered absurdly to the top of television ads; the pointer icon integrated into a thousand logo designs. If you’ve lived through one of those visual diasporas, you can’t help think of the migrations to come while exploring OS X. Much attention has been paid to the Dock’s minimize effect, wherein an open window is ”slurped” into a smaller icon at the bottom of the screen, but I suspect the visual effect that will have the most lasting impact will be the Dock’s magnification rollover, which is arguably OS X’s most perfect marriage of form and function. Moving a mouse over the smaller icons contained within the Dock causes the icon directly below the point to expand in size, with the icons on either side expanding to a lesser extent. This gives the user an ”expanded view” focal point on the Dock, but it also creates a hypnotic, wavelike effect as the pointer is moved back and forth across the bottom of the screen. This is the one visual effect in the OS X toolbox that guarantees oohs and ahhs from first-time viewers, and, watching it on the screen, you can’t help but think that that subtle rippling feel will be mimicked by countless designs over the next few years.

MORE THAN ANYTHING else, though, the release of a new operating system is a community event. Already, the Mac devotee sites are teeming with links to apps — both commercial and shareware — that have been ported over to the new format, and there are probably thousands of posts and pages titled, ”My first 24 hours with OS X.” (The installation log is the confessional genre of the operating system world.) A new OS is partly an occasion for solitary contemplation, like the first listen to Sgt. Pepper was thirty years before, but it is also a fodder for endless conversation between total strangers, united only by their obsession with this strange new text — sharing links, tips, workarounds, and other observations.

Two days into using OS X, I noticed that the subtle shadows drawn beneath open windows — one of OS X’s many lovely transparency effects — were actually growing or shrinking in size depending on where the window was on the screen. The top-most window cast the largest shadow, while the windows behind it cast smaller shadows. Bringing a new window to the foreground would instantly change the width of the shadow, creating a striking sense of depth, and adding to the focus placed on the top-layer information. My first impulse was to think to myself, ”That’s very cool.” My second was to share my discovery with the rest of the world. Was I the first to notice this? I scoured the boards at MacNN and Slashdot, and scanned through the reader reports at Macintouch. And then I thought to myself, ”What the hell am I doing here?” I’d noticed a quarter of an inch difference between the drop shadows on some windows in OS X, and here I was acting like I was the first person to decode the ”Paul is dead” hidden messages. Had I completely lost my mind?

Maybe — but then again, a little passing insanity is what Major Cultural Events are all about. In the case of OS X, I think what has happened is the convergence of three things: a product designed with such attention to detail that the drop-shadows do grow and shrink as you move the windows around; an audience that has so fetishized the product that the shadows actually seem like a big deal to them; and a web of communication that enables people to share their excitement with thousands of other people before that excitement wears off. In some ways, that mix echoes the components that went into other epochal cultural events, and in some ways, it represents an entirely new breed.

The intensity of that description may sound odd to the many people out there for whom the primary ”communal experience” associated with a new operating system is a visit from the tech support guy. But to a certain generation of computer users, software releases like OS X have far more weight to them. We spend so much time ranting about those drop-shadows and magnification effects because they let us experience for the first time the data filters we’ll be relying on for the next ten years. A new interface is a new way of seeing. It may not offer a vista of tangerine trees and marmalade skies, but knowing what we know about the impact of past interface revolutions, who wouldn’t want a glimpse of that future?