Apple Macintosh

From Wikinfo

The Macintosh, commonly called the Mac, is a family of personal computers manufactured by Apple Computer, based in Cupertino, California, USA.

Launched in January, 1984 with a famous Super Bowl commercial, it was the first computer to popularize the graphical user interface (GUI, pronouced "gooey").

The operating system, simply called the System Software or System, officially became known as the Mac OS as of version 7.6. In March 2001, Apple introduced a modern and secure Unix-based successor, Mac OS X.

From its inception, the Macintosh has introduced or popularized a number of innovations adopted later by other PCs and operating systems:

• A graphical user interface, icons, a desktop, etc
• The use of a mouse or other pointing device in personal computing (later, the standardization of an optical mouse on all desktop machines)
• WYSIWYG text and graphics editing ("what you see is what you get")
• Long file names (originally 31 characters, now 255)
• The PostScript laser printer
• Desktop publishing
• The SCSI interface
• Audio (both speakers and microphone) as a standard feature
• A CD-ROM drive as a standard feature
• Windows that may span multiple monitors
• Ethernet support as standard feature
• USB
• FireWire, also known as IEEE 1394 or iLink (Sony)
• AirPort wireless networking, also known as IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11g
• The introduction of the 3.5" floppy disk as a standard feature (Macintosh, 1984)
• The abandonment of the floppy disk (iMac and Power Macintosh Blue & White, 1998)
• A modern RISC-based architecture in the form of the PowerPC processor, developed jointly by Apple, IBM and Motorola (Power Macintosh 6100, 1994)
• Aesthetic and ergonomical industrial design

Contents 1 History 2 Software 3 Models 4 External links 4.1 References

History

It is thought by many that Apple's main innovations were done after their famous visit to Xerox PARC, even though in reality work on the Macintosh project started long before that, and the Macintosh operating system ended up working and looking quite different from the programs at PARC. (GUIs had been an active area of research since the late 1960s; Jef Raskin's thesis was written in 1967.) Apple added the menubar, overlapping windows and icons representing objects instead of actions, for instance.

The Macintosh was introduced on January 22, 1984, with a famous Super Bowl commercial featuring a female athlete throwing a hammer through a giant image of a dictator ("Big Brother", vaguely reminiscent of the dominant computer maker at that time: IBM). The Macs went on sale two days later.

Although the Mac garnered an immediate enthusiastic following, it was too radical of a departure for most. Since the machine was entirely designed around the GUI, existing command-line programs had to be redesigned and rewritten, a challenging undertaking that many software developers shied away from, which initially led to a lack of software for the new system.

In 1985, the combination of the Mac and its GUI with Adobe PageMaker and Apple's LaserWriter printer enabled a low-cost solution for designing and previewing printed material, an activity that came to be known as desktop publishing. Interest in the Mac exploded, and it has continued to be the standard platform for publishing and printing houses.

By the early 1990s, the Motorola 68000 CPU of the original Macs was no longer keeping up with computing demands. Apple's alliance with IBM and Motorola resulted in the RISC-architecture PowerPC. Apple then had the tricky task of designing a system that used the new chip and yet was backward-compatible. The new Power Macintosh machines used an emulator that was accurate enough to run existing 68000 programs unchanged.

In 2000, the Macintosh made a second fundamental change, this time in its operating system, by switching to the BSD Unix-based Mac OS X.

See List of Macintosh models grouped by CPU.

Software

• iDVD
• iMovie
• iPhoto
• iTunes
• Safari web browser
• Darwin Mach-based core OS
• SimpleText
• TextEdit

Models

• iBook
• iMac
• Mac II
• PowerBook
• PowerBook G3
• PowerBook G4
• Power Macintosh
• Power Macintosh G3
• Power Macintosh G4
• Power Macintosh G4 Cube
• Power Macintosh G5
• Xserve

See also:

• AirPort networking
• Cocoa programming
• Firewire
• .Mac
• Macworld Conference & Expo
• WYSIWYG
• HyperCard

External links

• Articles from Jef Raskin about the history of the Macintosh

References

• Adapted with the Wikipedia article, "Apple Macintosh" http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Macintosh August 3, 2003