Search in: Word
Vietnamese keyboard: Off
Virtual keyboard: Show
Computing (FOLDOC) dictionary (also found in English - English (Wordnet), )
Macintosh
Jump to user comments
computer (Mac) A range of single user, 32-bit personalcomputers manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc., originally
based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor family and a
proprietary operating system. The Mac was Apple's successor
to the Lisa.
The project was proposed by Jef Raskin some time before
Steve Jobs's famous visit to Xerox PARC. Jobs tried to
scuttle the Macintosh project and only joined it later because
he wasn't trusted to manage the Lisa project.
The Macintosh user interface was notable for popularising
the graphical user interface, with its easy to learn and
easy to use desktop metaphor.
The Macintosh Operating System is now officially called
Mac OS.
The first Macintosh, introduced in January 1984, had a
Motorola 68000 CPU, 128K of RAM, a small monochrome
screen, and one built-in floppy disk drive with an external
slot for one more, two serial ports and a four-voice sound
generator. This was all housed in one small plastic case,
including the screen. When more memory was available later in
the year, a 512K Macintosh was nicknamed the "Fat Mac."
The standard Macintosh screen resolution is 72 dpi (making
one point = one pixel), exactly half the 144 dpi
resolution of the ancient Apple Imagewriter dot matrix
printer.
The Mac Plus (January 1986) added expandability by providing
an external SCSI port for connecting hard disks, magnetictape, and other high-speed devices.
The Mac SE (March 1987) had up to four megabytes of RAM, an
optional built-in 20 megabyte hard disk and one internal
expansion slot for connecting a third-party device.
The Mac II (March 1987) used the faster Motorola 68020 CPU
with a 32-bit bus.
In 1994 PowerPC based Macs, PowerMacs, were launched, and
in 1999, the iMac, updated on 2002-01-07. PowerMacs clocked
at over 1GHz were planned for 2002-01-22, to be followed by
dual 1GHz processors and "Superdrive" (combined DVD-ROM,
DVD-RW, CD-ROM, CD-RW).
If "Macintosh" were an acronym, some say it would stand for
"Many Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs".
While this was true for pre Mac OS 9 systems, it is less true
for Mac OS 9, and totally incorrect for Mac OS X, which has
protected memory, so even if one application crashes, the
system and other applications are unaffected.