MAC OS

History and introduction of MAC Operating System

Apple is a leading American multinational corporation, which is well-known for its creation of Macintosh Operating System. Mac OS is advanced OS developed in 1984, which is immensely popular for its graphical user interface.

In the early years of the Macintosh, efforts were made by Apple to make users find it easy to use and to distinguish it from other operating systems. During this stage, system software was actually stored in ROM. As a result, Apple dealers provided its updates, free of charge on floppy disk. As a result, the requirement for storing advanced GUI OS in the ROM was eliminated with its mounting disk storage capacity and performance.

Some of the advanced applications added in this operating system are audio and video editing, professional graphic, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, MacWrite, 3D games and so on. Even, wide choice of browsers is offered with this application software, which includes Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, iCab and Netscape.

History Of Apple OS

Mac was introduced starting with System 3.0. It officially uses the filesystem HFS without any different between uppercase and lowercase letters.

The integrated MultiFinder was found in the System 5.0.

In 1988, the first version namely System 6 was introduced in the market. It required RAM of 1MB that can be extended up to 8MB and hard disks up to 2 GByte with 65,536 files. It includes applications like multi Finder, MacWrite II, WriteNow and Microsoft Word 4.0.

System 7 appeared in May 1991. It needed minimum of 2 MB RAM. It had a direct support for networks with AppleScript used as scripting language, for file exchange and display of colors

System 7.5 was available in 1994 with a requirement of at least four MB RAM.

With the release of System 7.6 in 1997, Apple changed the name of this OS to Mac OS.

Versions Of Mac OS

The Mac OS Classic family: It is a graphical OS, which is well recognized for its user-friendly interface and multitasking feature. Some of its drawbacks are lack of protected memory, limited memory management and susceptibility to conflicts among extensions. This extension creates trouble while loading in a particular order and results as a time-consuming process. It contains structured data such as graphics, sounds, menu definitions or code segments; data forks including the text of a document, the bitmaps of an image file and many more.
The Mac OS X: This new Apple OS is officially designed as simply "version 10" of the Mac OS. It is a successor to "classic" Mac OS and Mac OS 9. It is a Mac OS 9 based on the NeXTSTEP and makes use of the BSD code base.

Earlier, Mac OS X was criticized because of its difficult interface and lack of certain features like scanners, tablets and printers. Due to which the users of classic Mac OS, do not prefer buying the new version of Apple. However, by 2005, maximum users were running Mac OS X and only a small group of users was still running the classic Mac OS.

Star Trek

In 1992, Apple started work on Star Trek with the main objective to run version of MacOS on Intel-compatible X 86 personal computers. Novell, Inc. initiated this project.

68000 emulation

The project on Star Trek was never released. With the effort of emulators, such as vMac, Basilisk II, and Executor, the classic Mac OS started running on Intel-based PCs. It was limited to 68000 series of processors and for this PowerPC processor was required. Apart from these requirements, a Mac ROM image or a hardware interface with a real Mac ROM chip was also required for operating this software. It offered excellent performance that improved exponentially as modern x86 processors.

PowerPC emulation

Development of PowerPC support was difficult at the time of 68000-emulator, where wide performance overhead of an emulated PowerPC architecture vs. a real PowerPC based Mac.

A/UX

UNIX is the first OS released by Apple in 1988. It is an A/UX OS, which has the same feel and look of Mac OS. Due to much development in UNIX market, it did not prove to be much competitive.

MAE

Apple Computer introduced a software package namely Macintosh Application Environment (MAE) in 1994 to run Apple Macintosh application software.

MKLinux

It is an open source computer Operating System, announced at the 1996 World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC). From February 1996 to 1998, the OSF Research Institute and Apple Computer initiated it to port Linux to the PowerPC platform.