OS X El Capitan

Thanks to a tweet from Michael Steeber, I learned that I have the dubious honor of having been the first person to tweet the literal phrase “OS X El Capitan”, which happens to be the name of of Apple’s forthcoming OS X 10.11 operating system.

I did some research of my own and believe this claim is true. I don’t think this is some great victory or proof of my insightfulness, but I do admit to thinking it’s at least moderately cool.

Out of curiosity, I used Twitter’s now-awesome advanced search to zero in on the day when I first tweeted the phrase, June 19, 2013. This must have been in the aftermath of WWDC 2013, shortly after Apple had debuted its new OS naming strategy, after places that are distinctly Californian. People were joking about future code names like OS X Sacramento, OS X Carmel, or gasp!, OS X San Jose. I thought these were all poor choices because they would not be evocative of the spirit of California in the same visceral way that Mavericks was:

I quickly followed with a quip about using OS X El Capitan:

Though to be honest I don’t remember exactly what grammatical pedantry I was alluding to. What’s (not really) important is that I was the first to use the phrase, two years before Apple announced the name of the OS.

And while I’m patting myself on the back, let me give a shout out to Mark Hachman, who while similarly throwing out possible names for future OS releases, managed to make the first ever reference to “OS X Yosemite”:

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, tweet early and often.