Features
The Mac OS has gone through several major revisions so far, with each version having many more features than the one before it. No discussion of the Mac OS would be complete without
a brief discussion of the major releases of the Mac OS:
System 1 When the original Macintosh was released in 1984, the Mac OS interface (simply called the Finder in those days) was pretty bare (similar to Figure 5.4). It contained the basic elements
of the current Mac OS, but in non-color form. It had no support for color, but it did have a very powerful graphical user interface (GUI) that made many people go out and buy it.
System 6 System 6 was introduced around 1986 and quickly made the Macintosh world even more exciting with the introduction of color to the operating system. Depending on the video
card, a Mac with System 6 could display thousands, even millions, of colors. This was very exciting stuff for the time.
System 7 As good as System 6 was, it didn’t have good support for multitasking. (It could switch between programs using a product known as Multifinder, but it wasn’t great.) Macintosh
System 7, therefore, gave Mac users the ability to run multiple programs at once. In addition, it gave users support for TrueType fonts (automatically scalable fonts) and the ability to
share out a disk onto the network so that other Mac users could access it. It also gave users the ability to use virtual memory (using a portion of the hard disk as memory).
FIGURE 5 . 4 The basic Macintosh GUI
Mac OS 8 In 1997, Apple made a few changes with the operating system. First of all, it now actively promoted the fact that the Macintosh system software was to be known as Mac OS. Also, due to a partnership with Microsoft (and an infusion of capital from the same), Internet Explorer was installed as the default browser. Apple also increased its cross-platform connectivity with the introduction of an updated version of its PC Exchange product, which now had support for Windows 9 x long filenames. Finally, the OS contained its own Java Virtual Machine for running Java applications.
Mac OS 9 With Mac OS 9, Apple brought the Mac OS up to speed with Microsoft’s multiuser offerings. It was now possible to specify different settings and environments for multiple users of the
same Macintosh. Along with that, Apple introduced the Keychain, which stored the various online passwords for a user so that only one password was required when a user went online. Finally, it
included a network browser so that a user could browse the network easily for a network server.
Mac OS X (OS 10) Amid much hoopla, Apple introduced OS X, the current version and first major rewrite of the Mac OS in years, in 2001. The basic interface still looks the same; however,
the use of color, graphics, and moving graphics is much improved over previous versions (as shown in Figure 5.5). Also, it is based on a UNIX kernel (BSD with a Mach Kernel), which makes it more stable, more scalable, and generally more powerful than previous versions. Windows “fly” open and get “squished” onto a bar (called the Dock) when minimized. Also, for the first time, you can save directly to PDF format in most applications. This new OS, in addition to being extremely powerful, is also extremely user- and Internet-friendly.
FIGURE 5 . 5 Mac OS X
