Mac OS: Difference between revisions
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The [[Apple Macintosh]] System Software (known as '''Mac OS''' after version 7.5) is the software that makes a Mac a Mac, more or less. Its common user-visible parts are the ''Finder'', a file management shell; the ''Desktop'', a metaphor for a real desktop managed by the Finder; the ''Apple menu'', a parking spot for small mini-applications called ''desk accessories'' (arguably succeeded by the Konfabulator-like ''Dashboard'' under OS X) and, starting with System 7, shortcuts to anything you like (mostly handed over to the ''Dock'' in OS X); and the ''Control Panel'' ("System Preferences" in OS X), where various system settings are managed.
Disks and files appear on the Desktop as ''icons'', representing what they actually look like in the case of drives (for example, a floppy disk will show up as a small picture of a 3.5" disk, and a hard disk will show up as, well, a hard disk), and representing what application created them in the case of documents. (If all of this sounds [[Seinfeld Is Unfunny|horribly trite]], there's a reason for it: The Mac pretty much started it all.)
The first Macs had the majority of their OS stuffed into 64 kilobytes of [[Read Only Memory|ROM]], a huge amount for the time, to help conserve the machines' tiny 128 kilobytes of system [[Random Access Memory|RAM]]. [[Magnetic Disk|Floppy disks]] were the only media supported, folders weren't actually supported (the original Macintosh File System faked them using some OS trickery), and only one application could run at a time. It ran on Motorola's powerful 32-bit [[Central Processing Unit|68000 CPU]], but between the extremely limited RAM and the 16-bit-wide data bus, it was not very fast. [[Rule of Cool|They sure looked cool, though.]] The later 512k upgrade made things less painful.
Starting in 1986, the Mac got its first signs of becoming a usable PC. The Mac Plus added new, larger ROMs and a SCSI bus for hard drives and scanners. The Mac II was a workstation-class machine with full 32-bit addressing and massive expansion capabilities. All this required a new Mac OS, and the new code added things like color support and the Hierarchical File System (still in use in one form or another to this day). Later, MultiFinder made it possible to run more than one application at once, but most Mac users (especially on the Plus and its follow-on, the SE) didn't have the memory to use it well.
Apple started a project in the late 1980s to completely revamp the Mac OS. According to legend, the "easy" ideas were written on blue index cards, and the "hard" ideas were written on pink index cards, thus fueling rumors about a new object-oriented OS called "Pink". While the details of Pink were worked out, Apple set about updating the existing Macintosh System Software with most of the ideas from the blue cards, and the result was Macintosh System Software version 7 (or System 7 for short), released in May 1991.
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Apple also experimented with porting the Mac OS to other architectures for the first time with the "Star Trek" project, which more-or-less successfully moved the entire OS to an IBM-compatible PC. They also entered into discussions with longtime nemesis IBM and CPU supplier Motorola on the subject of revamping the Macintosh architecture, an agreement that became the "AIM alliance". The first order of business for AIM was making "Pink" a reality, and a new company called "Taligent" was founded to manage the project. Taligent didn't last long; conflicts between Apple, IBM, and Novell (the latter two of which had managed to get several projects of their own merged into "Pink") meant that the company had no product to show for many years. Taligent never released a full OS by the time it was shuttered, and what was developed went back to IBM and was used in their VisualAge IDE products. A few of the ideas from "Pink" made it into later revisions of System 7.
AIM's second task was a project to move the Mac to a RISC architecture, which culminated in the combination of Motorola's 880x0 and IBM's POWER architectures to produce the PowerPC RISC architecture. Its first appearance was in 1994 with the introduction of the Power Macintosh, a line of three new Macs running the brand new PowerPC 601 CPU. The new machines were not much different from their 680x0-based ancestors on the outside, but inside, the increases in speed the RISC architecture provided were breathtaking, especially considering that 68k code had to be emulated. Using several neat tricks, including hiding a microkernel inside the Power Mac ROM, Apple managed to make the Power Macs nearly 100% software compatible with the previous Quadra range, which in turn made porting Mac OS (which was still largely in 68k code) much easier.
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In 1995, Gil Amelio took over control of Apple, and one of the first things he did was clean up the R&D division. The new management decided that it would be best to buy another OS and build a new Mac OS around it, rather than attempt another from-scratch rewrite.
After a six-month search, and briefly considering using BeOS, Solaris, or even Windows NT, Apple decided to buy NeXT in late 1996, bringing founder Steve Jobs back into the fold and giving Apple a platform that was in far better shape than anything Apple had been working on internally, and (most importantly) had room to grow. OS development work turned to improving NeXTStep, updating its older parts using code from [[UNIX|FreeBSD and NetBSD]], making the interface more Mac-like, and writing new graphics handling code (due to Adobe restrictions on using Display PostScript). The new OS was years away, however, and something had to be done right away to make the current Mac OS salable.
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1999 also saw the release of Mac OS 9.0. 9.0 also added better text handling (including, finally, 255-character file name and Unicode support), the Disc Burning subsystem, and more. It would be the last major version of an OS that, by this time, had remained practically unchanged at its core for well over a decade.
Finally, by late 2001, OS X was usable to the point where it was able to replace most of the old Mac OS's functionality with the release of OS X 10.1. This prompted Apple to [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl7xQ8i3fc0 perform a mock funeral ceremony] for OS 9 at the 2002 Worldwide Developers Conference, thus officially dropping support for it and casting OS X as the future. 10.1 still had some rough edges and was a bit slow, but it was quite usable for the time. Application support was still a problem, as many long-time Apple developers were still in the process of porting to Carbon then, and vast swathes of OS X were still unfinished or being rewritten until OS X gelled with the arrival of 10.3.
At the 2005 WWDC, Apple dropped a bombshell on the Mac community: The Mac was moving to the
This was met with some concern from some longtime Mac users, especially after years of Apple advertising touting the RISC-based PPC CPUs over the "snail-like"
Things were somewhat harder on developers, though; quite a bit of older Mac OS code had been written with outside or outdated tools (such as Macintosh tools like Think, CodeWarrior, and Apple's MPW or PB; or non-Mac tools like Microsoft Visual Studio) for the Carbon API. The most common, easiest way to write
== The Apple Silicon transition ==
Roughly a decade after the transition to x86-64, Apple made another transition to Apple silicon, or CPUs designed by Apple in California based on the ARM architecture.
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[[Category:How Video Game Specs Work]]
[[Category:Mac OS]]
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