Macs

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Current revision as of 15:16, 6 March 2007

Apple's latest iMac.

The Macintosh, or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Inc. Named after the McIntosh variety of apple, the original Macintosh was released on January 24, 1984. It was one of the first commercially successful personal computers to use a graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse instead of the then-standard command line interface. The current range of Macintoshes varies from Apple's entry level Mac mini desktop, to a mid-range server, the Xserve. Macintosh systems are mainly targeted at the home, education, and creative professional markets. Production of the Macintosh is based upon a vertical integration model in that Apple facilitates all aspects of its hardware and creates its own operating system that is pre-installed on all Macintoshes. This is in contrast to PCs pre-installed with Microsoft Windows, where one vendor provides the operating system and multiple vendors create the hardware. (In both cases, the hardware can run other operating systems; modern Macintoshes, like PC's, are capable of running operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD and Windows.)

Original Macintosh computers used the Motorola 68k family of microprocessors, but later models switched to Motorola and IBM's PowerPC range of CPUs in 1994. Apple began a transition from the PowerPC line to Intel's x86 architecture in 2006, which for the first time allowed Macs to run native operating system binaries for the x86 architecture. Current Macintoshes use the Intel Core, Intel Core 2 and Intel Xeon 5100 series microprocessors. All current models of Macintosh come pre-installed with a native version of the latest Mac OS X, which is currently at version 10.4.8 and is commonly referred to by its code name of "Tiger". Apple will be releasing Mac OS X v10.5, codenamed "Leopard", in Spring of 2007.

History

1979 to 1984: Development

The Macintosh project started in early 1979 with Jef Raskin, an Apple employee, who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer. In September 1979, Raskin was authorized to start hiring for the project, and he began to look for an engineer who could put together a prototype. Bill Atkinson, a member of Apple's Lisa team (which was developing a similar but higher-end computer), introduced him to Burrell Smith, a service technician who had been hired earlier that year as Apple employee #282. Over the years, Raskin assembled a large development team that designed and built the original Macintosh hardware and software; besides Raskin, Atkinson and Smith, the team included Chris Espinosa, Joanna Hoffman, George Crow, Jerry Manock, Susan Kare, and Andy Hertzfeld.

Smith’s first Macintosh board was built to Raskin’s design specifications: it had 64 kibibytes (KiB) of RAM, used the Motorola 6809E microprocessor, and was capable of supporting a 256×256 pixel black-and-white bitmap display. (The final product used a 9-inch, 512x342 monochrome display.) Bud Tribble, a Macintosh programmer, was interested in running the Lisa’s graphical programs on the Macintosh, and asked Smith whether he could incorporate the Lisa’s Motorola 68000 microprocessor into the Mac while still keeping the production cost down. By December 1980, Smith had succeeded in designing a board that not only used the 68000, but bumped its speed from 5 to 8 megahertz (MHz); this board also had the capacity to support a 384×256 bitmap display. Smith’s design used fewer RAM chips than the Lisa, which made production of the board significantly more cost-efficient.[1] The final Mac design was self-contained and had far more programming code in ROM than most other computers; it had 128 KiB of RAM, in the form of sixteen, 64 kilobit (Kb) RAM chips soldered to the logicboard. Though there were no memory slots, its RAM was expandable to 512 KiB by means of soldering sixteen 256 Kib RAM chips in place of the factory-installed chips.

The innovative design caught the attention of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. Realizing that the Macintosh was more marketable than the Lisa, he began to focus his attention on the project. Raskin finally left the Macintosh project in 1981 over a personality conflict with Jobs, and the final Macintosh design is said to be closer to Jobs’s ideas than Raskin’s.[2] After hearing of the pioneering GUI technology being developed at Xerox PARC, Jobs negotiated a visit to see the Xerox Alto computer and Smalltalk development tools in exchange for Apple stock options. The Lisa and Macintosh user interfaces were partially influenced by technology seen at Xerox PARC and were combined with the Macintosh group's own ideas.[3] Jobs also commissioned industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger to work on the Macintosh line, resulting in the "Snow White" design language; although it came too late for the earliest Macs, it was implemented in most other mid- to late-1980s Apple computers.[4] However, Jobs’s leadership at the Macintosh project was short-lived; after an internal power struggle with new CEO John Sculley, Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, went on to found NeXT, another computer company, and did not return until 1997. Sculley undermined what the Mac team had been trying to do with the price of the Macintosh, when he artificially inflated the Mac’s price from US$1,995 to US$2,495.

1985 to 1989: The desktop Publishing Era

In 1985, the combination of the Mac, Apple’s LaserWriter printer, and Mac-specific software like Boston Software’s MacPublisher and Aldus PageMaker (superseded by Adobe InDesign) enabled users to design, preview, and print page layouts complete with text and graphics, an activity known as desktop publishing. Desktop publishing was unique to the Macintosh, but eventually became available for PC users as well. Later, programs such as Macromedia FreeHand, QuarkXPress, and Adobe Illustrator strengthened the Mac’s position as a graphics computer and helped to expand the emerging desktop publishing market.

The limitations of the first Mac soon became clear: it had very little memory, even compared with other personal computers in 1984, and could not be expanded easily; and it lacked a hard drive and the means to attach one easily. Although by 1985 the Mac’s base memory had increased to 512 KB, and it was possible, although inconvenient and difficult, to expand the memory of a 128 KB Mac, Apple realized that the Mac needed improvement in these areas. The result was the Macintosh Plus, released on January 10, 1986 for US$2,600. It offered one mebibyte (MB) of RAM, expandable to four, and a then-revolutionary SCSI parallel interface, allowing up to seven peripherals—such as hard drives and scanners—to be attached to the machine. Its floppy drive was increased to an 800 KB capacity. The Plus was an immediate success and remained in production until October 15, 1990; on sale for just over four years and ten months, it was the longest-lived Mac in Apple's history.

The Macintosh II, the first expandable Macintosh.Other issues remained, particularly the low processor speed and limited graphics ability, which had hobbled the Mac’s ability to make inroads into the business computing market. Updated Motorola CPUs made a faster machine possible, and in 1987 Apple took advantage of the new Motorola technology and introduced the Macintosh II, which used a 16 MHz Motorola 68020 processor. This marked the start of a new direction for the Macintosh, as now, for the first time, it had open architecture with several expansion slots, support for color graphics and a modular break out design similar to that of the IBM PC and inspired by Apple’s other line, the expandable Apple II series. Alongside the Macintosh II, the Macintosh SE was released, the first compact Mac with an internal expansion slot (a processor direct slot specific to the machine. The SE shared the Macintosh II's “Snow White” design language, as well as the new Apple Desktop Bus mouse and keyboard that had first appeared on the Apple IIGS some months earlier.

With the new Motorola 68030 processor came the Macintosh IIx in 1988, which had benefited from internal improvements, including an on-board MMU. It was followed in 1989 by a more compact version with fewer slots (the Macintosh IIcx) and a version of the Mac SE powered by the 16 MHz 68030 (the Macintosh SE/30). Later that year, the Macintosh IIci, running at 25 MHz, was the first Mac to be “32-bit clean,” allowing it to natively support more than 8 MiB of RAM, unlike its predecessors, which had “32-bit dirty” ROMs (8 of the 32 bits available for addressing were used for OS level flags). System 7 was the first Macintosh operating system to support 32-bit addressing. Apple also introduced the Macintosh Portable, a 16 MHz 68000 machine with an active matrix flat panel display. The following year the 40 MHz Macintosh IIfx, starting at about US$9,900, was unveiled. Apart from its fast processor, it had significant internal architectural improvements, including faster memory and a pair of dedicated 6502 CPUs for I/O processing.

Timeline of Macintosh Models

Notes about Macintosh Computers

For many years Apple Macintoshes have fought against PCs about which operating system is the best. Also PCs have claimed to be cheaper than macs, however in a survey in the MacFormat magazine macs are better value for money as they do not crash or have viruses.