Games - Mac OS X

	Games - Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a proprietary operating system developed and sold by Apple Computer which is included with all currently shipping Apple Macintosh computers. It is also sold separately as an upgrade for recent existing Macintosh computers that do not have the latest major release of Mac OS X.

Mac OS X Server is architecturally identical to its desktop counterpart but usually runs on Apple's line of Macintosh server hardware. Mac OS X Server includes workgroup management and administration software tools that provide simplified access to key network services, including a mail server, a Samba server, a directory server, and a domain name server.

History

Main article: Mac OS X history

Despite its branding as simply "version 10" of the Mac OS, Mac OS X has a history that is almost completely independent of the earlier Mac OS releases.

Mac OS X is based on the Mach kernel and the BSD implementation of Unix, which were incorporated into NEXTSTEP, the object-oriented operating system developed by Steve Jobs' NeXT company after he left Apple in 1985. Meanwhile, during the years without Jobs at the helm, Apple attempted to create a "next-generation" operating system of its own (see Taligent and Copland) with little success.

Eventually, NeXT's OS -- called OPENSTEP at the time -- was selected to form the basis for Apple's next OS, and Apple purchased NeXT outright. Jobs was re-hired, and later returned to the leadership of the company, shepherding the transformation of the programmer-friendly OPENSTEP into a system that would be welcomed by Apple's primary market of home users and creative professionals, as a project known as Rhapsody. After some missteps which threatened the loyalty of independent developers to Mac OS, and changes of strategy to ease the transition from Mac OS 9 to the new system, Rhapsody evolved into Mac OS X.

Initially, Apple attempted to retain backwards compatibility with existing Macintosh software by including the "Classic" mode of operation which allowed the previous operating system, Mac OS 9, to run within Mac OS X, supporting applications that weren't capable of running natively on Mac OS X. However in January 2006, Apple began shipping Macintosh computers with Intel x86 microprocessors (rather than PowerPC microprocessors). The version of Mac OS X included with these new Intel systems no longer includes the "Classic" backwards compatibility. Apple has incorporated a code translation service named Rosetta which allows PowerPC applications to run on Intel machines. Some of the PowerPC applications run slighty faster than on previous hardware configurations.

Description

Mac OS X is a radical departure from previous Macintosh operating systems as its underlying code base is completely different from previous versions. Mac OS X includes a number of features that are intended to make the operating system more stable and reliable than Apple's previous operating systems. Pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection are intended to improve the ability of the operating system to run multiple applications simultaneously without them interrupting or corrupting each other as was possible under previous versions. Also, the Mac OS X kernel is based on the pre-existing OPENSTEP kernel, which, as well as making Mac OS X easier to maintain than the previous Mac OS, eases the transition from one platform to another (for example, the initial transition to the PowerPC platform after Apple's purchase of NeXT) as it was designed with portability in mind (NEXTSTEP having been ported from the original 68k-based NeXT workstations to PA-RISC/SPARC/x86-based machines).

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Mac OS X ]

Games - Mac OS X

History

Description

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