22.MAC OS 2

Apple was very strong in advertising this new machine. After it was created, they actually bought out all thirty-nine pages of advertisement space in Newsweek Magazine’s November/December, 1984 edition. It worked incredibly well and the investment paid off as Macs began flying off the shelves.

The first version of Mac OS along with subsequent updates were different from other operating systems in that this OS didn’t use command line interface but rather user friendly interface. Many people think that Windows was the first to employ GUI, but Mac had them beat.

Updates to the OS mostly focused on changes to the “finder” which is an application for file management which also displays the desktop. Prior to version 5, the finder could only run one application at a time. When version 5 was released, it contained multi-finder which could run several applications at once.

Time was given to background applications only when the foreground running applications gave it up in co-operative multitasking, but in fact most of them did via a clever change in the operating system’s event handling.

System 5 also brought Color Quick Draw to the Mac II. This significantly altered the extent and design of the underlying graphics architecture but it is a credit to Apple that most users, and perhaps more importantly existing code, were largely unaware of this.

System Software 5 was also the first MAC operating system to be given a unified system software version number as opposed to the numbers used for the system and finder files.

In 1991, System 7 was released. It was the second major upgrade to the Mac OS adding a significant user interface overhaul, new applications, stability improvement, and many new features.

The most visible change was a new full-color user interface. Although this feature made for a visually appealing interface, it was
optional. On machines not capable of displaying color or those with their display preferences set to monochrome, the interface defaulted back to the black and white of previous versions.

Only some interface elements were colorized: scrollbars had a new look but push buttons remained in black and white.