<
computer> The line of computers manufactured by Apple Inc. "Mac" is not primarily a nickname or an abbreviation, but a brand name and trademark in its own right. Apple currently (2009) refer to the brand as any of "Mac", "iMac" or "Macintosh" (all registered trademarks).
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 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 Mac Plus (January 1986) added expandability by providing an external
SCSI port for connecting hard disks,
magnetic tape, 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 the
Power Mac was launched, and in 1999 the
iMac was introduced. The
SuperDrive appeared in the iMac in 2002.
The
Macintosh Operating System is now officially called "Mac OS". Mac OS X is the successor to Mac OS 9, although its technological parent is the
NEXTSTEP OS from
Next, Inc., founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple the first time. OS X is based largely on the
BSD UNIX system. The core of the OS X operating system is released as free
source code under the project name
Darwin.
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.
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.
See also
Macintosh file system,
Macintosh user interface.
Apple Home .