Apple Company (MacOS)

1647 words [ 8 Pictures ] [ 1 Weblinks ] - Last update: 2023-12-22 Page created: 2004-04-03 [SB]

 


Apple Company

Website 2007 Apple computer was founded by Steve Jobs with 21 years and Stephen G. Wozniak with 26 years in Palo Alto/California in 1976. As many other company legends in the USA everything started in a garage where the technique freaks developed and produced the first operating Apple I computer circuit board. The first buyer of 50 Apple I circuit boards was Paul Terrel, owner of the Byte shop for computer systems. Steve Wozniak is an engineer, Steve Jobs a businessman. Steve Wozniak therefore put the first computers together, he had gained experience at Hewlett-Packard with the construction of pocket calculators and a computer with keyboard and coloured monitor screen. Steve Jobs concentrated on the business part.

The Apple I stood for 666.66 dollars in the Byte shops for sale as of May 1976. With "Byte into an Apple" (an explanation: "Byte" is 8-bits which sounds like-bite) the sales advertisement advertised "the first cheap microcomputer system with display screen port and 8 kilobytes of RAM on one single PC board". With this sales advertisement, such an statement, the layout was also born for today's Apple logo, the rainbow colored apple with-bite. After further development the Apple II came in 1977, the successor Apple III 1980 to the shops. The Apple III was presented on the National Computer Conference (NCC) in California on 1980-05-19, the Sophisticated Operating System is developed as closed source and has a monolithic kernel. The hardware consists of a 2 mhz 8 bit MOS CPU, 2 kbyte of ROM and 128 kbyte of main memory on board. Apple was one of the first commercial pioneers which offered with Lisa Computer and Lisa OS an operating system with a graphical user interface together with symbols and menus in 1983. Lisa set at this time the features which are standard today, a graphic user interface with the mouse for the operation. As standard applications are LisaCalc (calculation program), LisaGraph for presentation graphic, LisaDraw (drawing program), LisaWrite for the text processing, LisaProject for the net plan method, LisaList as file management system and LisaTerminal included.

The operating system Apple ProDOS 1.0 based on SOS was published in October 1983. ProDOS was split off in ProDOS 8 and ProDOS 16 for 8 bits and 16 bits processors later. On January 24th, 1984 the success of the Macintosh computer and Mac OS operating system started with the market announcement by Steve Jobs. The synthetic voice output of a text was euphorically taken by the audience at the public preview of the performance features. With the provocative commercial spot "1984" the leader position of IBM is symbolically be broken by an athletic women through a thrown hammer. Within three months over 70,000 systems were sold. The continual improvements of the operating system by Apple increased the superiority in the area of graphic and simple user interface. The MAC (Mouse Activated Computer) was introduced in 1986, the GS/OS (graphic and Sound OS) took ProDOS 16 off, the new graphical 16 bit system increased the efficiency considerably. The booting procedure, the storage disk access and the start time of programmes was much faster now.

After an internal controversy over the enterprise leadership of Apple Steve left the company and founded with other employees the company NeXT in 1985. In 1986 NeXT took the company Pixar Animation Studios which was specialized in computer animations. Animated cartoons like Toy Story (1995), A Bug's Life Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999) were made come true. In 1987 the extended Mac II was presented which was sold in a month 50,000 times. Apple presented the POSIX compatible UNIX with A/UX in 1988. At first it based on 4.2 BSD and AT&T UNIX System V Release 2, it was derived from 4.3 BSD and more current System V versions later. The last version was published with A/UX 3.1.1 in 1995. Mac OS was in competition by the market presence of Windows 3.0. Apple introduced new technologies like multitasking and added functions in the areas of multimedia, communications, speech recognition and video as well as fax/modem. Apple published his first PowerBook notebook computer with high market success in 1991. The product Newton, a personal digitally assistant was published in 1993 which did not really gain acceptance on the market. The last model was named MP2100 and was delivered with Newton OS 2.1 in 1997. Preemptives multitasking and energy saving management.

Companies like AT&T and Kodak were visited with the offer to buy Apple without success in 1993. A offer for the take-over by IBM and later Sun failed. Soon afterwards Apple went to an alliance with IBM and Motorola and published for the first time the PowerPC processor in 1994. The platform was switched over from Motorola to PowerPC processors and used for the Macintosh. The improved efficiency was rewarded by high market acceptance. In 1995 there was a hard time for Apple when Microsoft Windows 95 was released. The profits declined drastically in 1996 and Apple wrote red numbers for a short time, but could recover soon afterwards. Apple surprised the public with the take-over of NeXT for 400 million dollars in winter 1996. Steve Jobs returned to Apple. The take-over of Be was in the conversation before but because of the failed agreement for the selling price it did not happen. The entry offer of Apple was 50 million U.S. dollars. Be still demanded the 5.5-fold of the first Apple offer as the last amount.

NeXT and Apple


In the first quarter of 1997 Apple had to accept losses again, this time about 720 million dollars. Steve Jobs got temporary appointed as CEO again and improved the market situation. On the MacWorld in Boston Jobs spokes about his plans to make Apple successfully again. It started an aggressive advertising campaign with the same company Chiat/Day which had already produced the film "1984". Apple started the operating system project Rhapsody which was possible by the purchase of NeXT software Inc. including NeXTSTEP. Steve Jobs agreed to an alliance with Microsoft which brought 150 million dollars (for voiceless Apple shares) and provided the development of programs by Microsoft within the next 5 years such as Office. Apple accepted the Internet Explorer as a standard in Mac OS os as well as Microsofts Java implementation instead of Suns original.

Apple has recovered again and presented the new Power Mac G3 in 1997. This is like his predecessor faster than comparable Intel processors. Soon afterwards followed the PowerBook G3 and versions of the exotic iMac with transparent cases and compact form. With the new design for computers and the case style Apple disclosed himself new customers for which a normal grey colored PC with all the wires doesn't fits in the living room. Apple continued the work on Rhapsody and united it with Mac OS into Mac OS X. It has a high technology stand and is extremely stable and efficient. The BSD related kernel Darwin was integrated smoothly and provides standard UNIX applications as well. Apple changed his enterprise strategy by the official Open Source support in 1999 which has become an essential part of Apple by now.

Update 06-01-2004 On the Macworld EXPO in San Francisco Steve Jobs in his opening speech public that Mac OS X is used by 9.3 million users which are altogether 40 percent of all installed Mac OS operating systems. In meanwhile 10,000 native applications are for Mac OS X available.

In January 2005 Apple released the Mac mini to the market. The computer system is offered without display screen, keyboard or mouse depending on the system model starting from € 489. The particularly small dimensions of 16.51 cm x 5.08 cm x 16.51 cm (WxHxD) and his low weight of less than 1.4 kg are an unusual feature. Furthermore are included: G4 CPU with 1.25 ghz, DVD ROM/CD-RW drive, 256 mbyte DDR-SDRAM, ATI Radeon 9200 graphic board, 10/100 base-T ethernet, 56-K modem, DVI/VGA port, USB 2.0, FireWire 400, audio output, Mac OS X 10.3 and other software.

At the beginning of the WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) 2005 Steve Jobs published the change to the Intel x86 platform. Reasons for the change was that Apple is dissatisfied with IBM as a supplier for PowerPC CPUs because these are not available in 3 ghz and faster variants. The change is started in the middle of 2006 and shall be completed by the end of 2007. At this time Intel x86 CPUs surpass the processor performance per watt the one of PowerPC CPUs by lengths.

An interesting detail in the talk of Steve Jobs was that since the introduction of Mac OS X in the year 2000 a x86 version was compiled by Apple internally parallel to every release. Apple provides the software XCode 2.1 for the porting of PowerPC applications to the new platform for developer. With XCode created Mac software have a large part of the available software. For applications these could be ported not or only heavily, the emulator Rosetta helps at the execution of PowerPC applications on the x86 architecture. Of course this has losses in the execution speed as consequence.

So no one with an x86 PC can use Mac OS X in future, this operating system shall be only operational with mainboards and chip sets of Apple mentioned as Mactel systems. Mac computers and Mac OS shall remain inseparable. Mac OS X 10.3 is used by approx. 14 million users. Mac OS X 10.5 (leopard) shall appear at the end of 2006.

- Newton PDA and Newton operating system
- PageMaker (Publisher Software)
- Apple Quicktime
- iTunes
- iDVD
- iMovie2
- AppleWorks
- DVD Studio Pro
- Final Cut Pro
- Sophisticated Operating System (SOS)
- Mac OS X
- A/UX
- ProDOS
- iPod, released in Oct., closed source operating system from Pixo (Pixo kernel)
This list does not lay any claim to completeness. Thumbnail pictures are not true to scale. Source: Apple

 


Pictures

Apple Company (MacOS) screenshot 1Apple Company (MacOS) screenshot 2Apple Company (MacOS) screenshot 3Apple Company (MacOS) screenshot 4
Apple CubeApple iMacApple Powerbook G4Apple Powermac G4
Apple Company (MacOS) screenshot 5Apple Company (MacOS) screenshot 6Apple Company (MacOS) screenshot 7Apple Company (MacOS) screenshot 8
Mac OS X 10.0Mac MiniMac OS X 10.4iPod


Weblinks

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