The Macintosh operating system was originally known as the System Software or more simply System. With the release of System 7.6, the official name became Mac OS. From 2001, the “classic” Mac OS was phased out in favor of the new BSD Unix-based Mac OS X. Apple had offered another UNIX system, A/UX, for its Macintosh servers earlier, but without much success. The Mac OS operating system is widely considered one of the main selling points of the Macintosh platform, and Apple heavily touts its releases with large release-day special events. Apple has generally chosen to stick with some loose user-interface elements in all of its releases, and many similarities can be seen between the legacy Mac OS 9 and the modern Mac OS X.
Mac OS was the first widely used operating system with a graphical interface. No versions of the “classic” Mac OS featured a command line interface. It was originally a single-tasking OS with limited background execution ability, but optional co-operative multitasking was introduced in System Software 5. The next major upgrade was System 7 in 1991, which featured a new full-color design, built-in multitasking, AppleScript, and more user configuration options. Mac OS continued to evolve up to version 9.2.2, but its dated architecture—though retrofited a few times (for example, as part of the PowerPC port, a nanokernel was added and later in Mac OS 8.6 was modified to support Multiprocessing Services—made a replacement necessary.
In March 2001, Apple introduced Mac OS X, a modern and more secure Unix-based successor, using Darwin, XNU, and Mach as foundations. Mac OS X is directly derived from NeXTSTEP, the operating system developed by Steve Jobs’ company NeXT before Apple bought it. Older Mac OS programs can still run under Mac OS X in a special virtual machine called Classic, but this is only possible using Apple software on Macintoshes using PowerPC processors; Macintoshes using Intel processors need third party software to run older code. A program similar to Classic called “Rosetta” will allow PowerPC programs to run on Intel machines. Mac OS X remains the most common UNIX-based desktop operating system, and even though Mac OS X was never originally certified as a UNIX implementation by The Open Group, Apple is currently working on full UNIX compliance and certification for its next server release. Mac OS X is currently at version 10.4 (released on April 29, 2005), code-named Tiger. The next version, Mac OS X v10.5, code-named Leopard, is scheduled to be released in the spring of 2007.
Non-Apple operating systems for today’s Macintoshes include Linux, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. With the release of Intel-based Macintosh computers, the potential to natively run Windows-based operating systems on Apple hardware without the need for emulation software such as Virtual PC was introduced. In March of 2006, a group of hackers announced that they were able to run Windows XP on an Intel based Mac. The group has released their software as open source and has posted it for download on their website. On April 5, 2006 Apple announced the public beta availability of their own Boot Camp software which will allow owners of Intel-based Macs to install Windows XP on their machines. Boot Camp will be a standard feature in Leopard.
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