MAC

September 2nd, 2005

Mac OS, which stands for Macintosh Operating System, is Apple Computer’s name for the first operating systems for Macintosh computers. The original Mac OS was the first commercially successful operating system which used a graphical user interface. The Macintosh team included Bill Atkinson, Jef Raskin and Andy Hertzfeld.

There are a variety of views on how the Macintosh was developed and where the underlying ideas originated. While the connection between the Macintosh and the Alto project at Xerox PARC has been established in the historical record, the earlier contributions of Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad and Doug Engelbart’s On-Line System are no less significant.

Apple deliberately played up the existence of the operating system in the early years of the Macintosh to help make the machine appear more user-friendly and to distance it from other systems such as MS-DOS, which were portrayed as arcane and technically challenging. Apple wanted Macintosh to be portrayed as a system “for the rest of us”.

Entry Filed under: Mac