Games - Apple Macintosh

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	Games - Apple Macintosh

The Macintosh, or Mac, line of personal computers is designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. Named after the McIntosh apple, the original Macintosh was released on January 24, 1984. It was the first commercially successful personal computer 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 its mid-range server, the Xserve. Macintosh systems are mainly targeted towards the home, education, and creative professional markets; more recently, the Xserve G5 server has enabled Apple to gain entry to the corporate market. 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, the same method used in gaming consoles (the original IBM PC was conceived as a vertically integrated platform but in a key decision, Microsoft was able to retain the rights to its software).

The original Macintosh operating system underwent many major revisions. However, the final version, Mac OS 9.2.2, still lacked many modern operating system features. In 2001, Apple introduced the new BSD Unix-based Mac OS X, featuring improved stability, multitasking and multi-user capability, while supporting older "Classic" applications by providing a "Classic" compatibility layer. The current version of Mac OS X is Mac OS X v10.4 ("Tiger"), which is sold preinstalled in all Macs. (The Xserve comes with Mac OS X Server.) To complement the Macintosh, Apple has developed a series of digital media applications (collectively the iLife suite), two applications that are geared towards productivity (the iWork suite), and software aimed at the creative professional market, including Final Cut Pro, Shake, and Aperture.

Current product line

History

1979 to 1984: Development and introduction

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 given permission 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 the 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 hired 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 design was built to Raskin's specifications: it had 64 kilobytes 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", 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 made it faster, bumping it from 5 to 8 Megahertz, a 60% clock speed increase; this board also had the capacity to support a 384 × 256 bitmap display. Smith’s design used fewer RAM chips than the Lisa, and because of this, production of the board was significantly more cost-efficient. At this time in December 1980, Smith's Macintosh (personally wire-wrapped by hand by Smith himself) was the only one in existence, though Brian Howard and Dan Kottke had already begun wire-wrapping their own. By this time Tribble had already written a boot ROM which filled the screen with the proverbial "hello", a 32 pixel-wide bitmap which demonstrated the Macintosh's sharp video. The final Mac design was self-contained and had far more programming code in ROM than most other computers; it had 128 KB of RAM, in the form of sixteen, 64 Kbit RAM chips soldered to the logicboard. Though there were no memory slots, it was expandable to 512 KB of RAM by means of soldering sixteen 256 Kbit RAM chips in place of the factory-installed chips. This was thanks to Burrell Smith's clever work: he routed a few extra lines on the PC board, making the 256 Kbit chips on the horizon useable in the Mac. This meant adventurous Mac users could upgrade their "Mac 128K" to 512 KB of RAM without buying a whole new machine. Steve Jobs was utterly against this at the time (because he didn't want people "mucking around inside the Mac" and because he wanted them to buy the 512K Mac after it came out), but Burrell slipped it in quickly and no one told Jobs, to the benefit of Macintosh owners.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Apple Macintosh ]

Games - Apple Macintosh

Current product line

History

1979 to 1984: Development and introduction

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