<
computer> (Mac) The name of a product line and {operating
system}
platform manufactured by
Apple Computer, Inc.,
originally based on the
Motorola 68000 microprocessor
family and a proprietary
operating system. The Mac was
Apple's successor to the
Lisa.
The project was proposed by
Jef Raskin some time before
Steve Jobs's famous visit to
Xerox PARC. Jobs tried to
scuttle the
Macintosh project and only joined it later because
he wasn't trusted to manage the
Lisa project.
The
Macintosh user interface was notable for popularising
the
graphical user interface, with its easy to learn and
easy to use
desktop metaphor.
The
Macintosh Operating System is now officially called
Mac OS.
The first
Macintosh, introduced in January 1984, had a
Motorola 68000 CPU, 128K of
RAM, a small
monochrome
screen, and one built-in
floppy disk drive with an external
slot for one more, two
serial ports and a four-voice sound
generator. This was all housed in one small plastic case,
including the screen. When more memory was available later in
the year, a 512K
Macintosh was nicknamed the "Fat Mac."
The standard
Macintosh screen
resolution is 72
dpi (making
one
point = one
pixel), exactly half the 144 dpi
resolution of the ancient
Apple Imagewriter dot matrix
printer.
The Mac Plus (January 1986) added expandability by providing
an external
SCSI port for connecting
hard disks, {magnetic
tape}, and other high-speed devices.
The Mac SE (March 1987) had up to four megabytes of
RAM, an
optional built-in 20 megabyte hard disk and one internal
expansion slot for connecting a third-party device.
The Mac II (March 1987) used the faster
Motorola 68020 CPU
with a 32-bit
bus.
In 1994
PowerPC based Macs,
Power Macs, were launched, and
in 1999, the
iMac, updated on 2002-01-07. The Power Mac G4
(Quicksilver 2002) was the first Power Mac to clock at 1GHz and
"Superdrives" (combined DVD-ROM, DVD-RW, CD-ROM, CD-RW)
appeared in the iMac in 2002. In mid 2003 the first G5
Power Mac was released, the first Mac to be based on a 64-bit
architecture.
IBM and not Motorola manufactured the CPU for
this new generation of Power Macs. The clock speed was
initially 1.6GHz but a dual 2GHz system was available in
September.
Mac OS X is the successor to Mac OS 9, although its
technological parent is the
NEXTSTEP OS from
Next, Inc.,
founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple the first time. OS
X is based largely on the
BSD UNIX system. The core of the
OS X operating system is released as free
source code under
the project name
Darwin.
If "
Macintosh" were an acronym, some say it would stand for
"Many Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs".
While this was true for pre Mac OS 9 systems, it is less true
for Mac OS 9, and totally incorrect for Mac OS X, which has
protected memory, so even if one application crashes, the
system and other applications are unaffected.
See also
Macintosh file system,
Macintosh user interface.
Apple Home (http://apple.com/).
(2004-07-20)