Classic Mac

Macintosh PC

The Macintosh Project

In 1979, Jef Raskin wanted to develop a low cost computer that was easier to use for the common man and thus initialised the Macintosh project. Steve Jobs revolutionised the idea of the operating system for the Macintosh when he took charge of the project in 1981. At the time, the Graphical user interface (GUI) technology was being developed in the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) for the XEROX Alto. Jobs offered XEROX, a share of Apple and in return was allowed to use GUI for the Macintosh Personal Computer. Apple created some new features for the GUI to be used in the Macintosh PC, such as the menu-bar and developed the idea of being able to drag and drop files to move them which are key features that remain in Macs even to this day.

The System & The Finder

GUI in the First Macintosh PC

The System Software, also known as the System was the operating system used by the Macintosh PC when it was first released in 1984. Before, joining the Macintosh Project, Steve Jobs was involved in the Apple Lisa project and some features of the System Software were inspired from the Lisa operating system.

The main reason behind the rapid popularity of the System was that unlike other operating systems at the time which used a command line interface, it was completely based on GUI. The Finder was another feature of the Macintosh which was not seen before in Personal Computers. The Finder was basically an application used for file management and displayed the desktop.

Development of the Operating System

When it was first released in 1984, the System used a flat file system where all files would be saved under one single directory. This was a chaotic way of storing files, and in 1985, A second version of the System was released which used a Hierarchical File System, which used the tree structure to organise files in directories. It should be noted, that at this time, the System and Finder were being developed and versioned separately, so in 1985, the Finder was already at version 4, and now included the Mini Finder, used to quickly launch applications.

In 1987, the System 5 was released and it now included the Multifinder, which allowed users to run several programs at once. At this time, the Finder and the System were still being versioned seperately, and it was getting difficult to remember the right version number for the System and Finder. Therefore, in 1988 the first version of the operating system was provided where a single version number was provided for both the System and the Finder (Version 6). Finally in 1991, the System was renamed as the Mac OS, and this is the way the operating system is called to date.