Apple Macintosh Architecture History Models See Also

The operating system, originally called the System Software or System, officially became known as the Mac OS as of version 7.6 (although strictly speaking, version 7.5.1, being the first to display the Mac OS logo, is the first version of the Mac OS under that name). In March 2001, Apple introduced a modern and more secure Unix-based successor, Mac OS X (the X is pronounced "ten", being a roman numeral).

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

2 History

The Macintosh project started in early 1979 with Jef Raskin, who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer. His ideas were collected into The Book of Macintosh . Notable is Raskin's insistence on using meta-keys, rather than a mouse, to act as a pointing device.

Raskin, in September 1979, was given permission to start hiring for the project and was, in particular, looking for an engineer that could put together a prototype. Bill Atkinson, a member of the Lisa team, introduced him to Burrell Smith, a service technician who had been hired earlier that year. Smith had already impressed Atkinson with his ingenious solution to a memory overflow problem. Reportedly, Atkinson told Raskin, "Jef, this is Burrell. He's the guy who's going to design your Macintosh for you." [1]

Smith's first Macintosh board design was to Raskin's specifications; it had a 64K memory, used the slow Motorola 6809E microprocessor, and had a 256 by 256 black and white bitmap display. Bud Tribble , a Macintosh programmer, was interested in running the Lisa's graphical programs on the Macintosh and asked Smith if he could incorporate the Lisa's Motorola 68000 microprocessor into the Macintosh while still keeping the cost down. By December 1980 Smith had succeeded in inventing a board design that not only utilized the 68000, but speeded it up from 5 MHz to 8 MHz; it also had a 384 by 256 bitmap display. Smith's design used fewer RAM chips than the Lisa and consequently was much cheaper. [2]

The innovative design caught the attention of Steve Jobs. Realizing that the Macintosh was more marketable than the Lisa, he began focusing his attentions on the project and its members. In January 1981 he completely took over the project, forcing Raskin to take a leave of absence.

Jobs and a number of Apple engineers visited Xerox PARC in December 1979, three months after the Lisa and Macintosh projects had begun. After hearing about the pioneering GUI technology being developed at Xerox PARC from former Xerox employees such as Jef Raskin, Steve Jobs negotiated a visit to see the Xerox Alto computer and Smalltalk development tools in exchange for Apple stock options. There is debate over the degree of impact that this visit had on Apple's products -- Apple's GUIs ended up working and looking different from the PARC GUIs, and GUIs had been an active area of computing research since the late 1960s -- but it is clear that the Xerox visits were extremely influential on the development of the Lisa and Macintosh. See History of the GUI.

The Macintosh's predecessor, the Lisa computer, was introduced in January 1983 for a price of $9,995.00 with many of the GUI-related innovations later seen on the Macintosh. It was aimed at business customers but was too much of a hard sell at the time; it was not a success for Apple, and the line was discontinued in 1986.

The Macintosh was introduced on January 22, 1984, with a famous Super Bowl commercial featuring a female athlete throwing a hammer through a giant TV screen image of a dictator ("Big Brother", alluding to the tyrant character of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and to the dominant computer maker at that time: IBM, colloquially known in the industry as "Big Blue"). The Mac went on sale two days later for a price of $2,495.00.

Although the Mac garnered an immediate enthusiastic following, it was too radical for some. Since the machine was entirely designed around the GUI, existing text-mode and command-driven 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 Aldus 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, it was thought by some that RISC-architecture CPUs would soon dramatically outpace the speed increases occurring over the same time in CISC CPUs such as the Macintosh's Motorola 68000 series and Intel's x86 series. The AIM alliance of Apple Computer, IBM, and Motorola was announced to create a series of RISC CPUs called the PowerPC. Existing Macintosh software that had been written for the 68000 series CPUs -- including some large sections of the Mac OS -- were made to run with a software emulator. The PowerPC remains the Macintosh CPU to date, although the architectural benefits and speed differences of RISC versus CISC remain controversial.

In 1995, Apple started the Macintosh clone program in order to regain lost market share in the desktop computer market. This program has since been cancelled.

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

3 Models

4 See also

5 External links

Personal computers Macintosh computers

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1 Architecture