Apple, Macintosh Computers

The Macintosh, or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. Named after the McIntosh apple, the original Macintosh was released on January 24, 1984. more...

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It was the first commercially successful personal computer to use a graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse instead of the then-standard command line interface. The current range of Macintoshes varies from Apple’s entry level Mac mini desktop, to a mid-range server, the Xserve. Macintosh systems are mainly targeted towards the home, education, and creative professional markets. Production of the Macintosh is based upon a vertical integration model in that Apple facilitates all aspects of its hardware and creates its own operating system. This is in contrast to PCs, where different brands of hardware run operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or Linux.

Original Macintosh computers used the Motorola 68k family of microprocessors, before switching to Motorola and IBM's PowerPC range of CPUs in 1994. Apple began a transition from the PowerPC line to Intel's processor architecture in 2006, which for the first time allowed Macs to run any x86 operating system natively. Current Macintoshes use the Intel Core, Intel Core 2 and Intel Xeon 5100 series microprocessors. All models of Macintosh are pre-installed with a native version of the latest Mac OS, which is currently at version 10.4 and is commonly referred to by its code name of 'Tiger'. In spring 2007, Apple will be releasing Mac OS X v10.5, 'Leopard'.

Current product line

History

1979 to 1984: Development

The Macintosh project started in early 1979 with Jef Raskin, an Apple employee, who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer. In September 1979, Raskin was given permission to start hiring for the project, and he began to look for an engineer who could put together a prototype. Bill Atkinson, a member of the Lisa team (which was developing a similar but higher-end computer), introduced him to Burrell Smith, a service technician who had been hired earlier that year as Apple employee #282. Over the years, Raskin hired a large development team that designed and built the original Macintosh hardware and software; besides Raskin, Atkinson and Smith, the team included Chris Espinosa, Joanna Hoffman, George Crow, Jerry Manock, Susan Kare, and Andy Hertzfeld.

Smith’s first Macintosh board design was built to Raskin’s specifications: it had 64 kilobytes (KB) of RAM, used the Motorola 6809E microprocessor, and was capable of supporting a 256×256 pixel black-and-white bitmap display. (The final product used a 9-inch, 512x342 monochrome display.) Bud Tribble, a Macintosh programmer, was interested in running the Lisa’s graphical programs on the Macintosh, and asked Smith whether he could incorporate the Lisa’s Motorola 68000 microprocessor into the Mac while still keeping the production cost down. By December 1980, Smith had succeeded in designing a board that not only used the 68000, but made it faster, bumping it from 5 to 8 megahertz (MHz); this board also had the capacity to support a 384×256 bitmap display. Smith’s design used fewer RAM chips than the Lisa, and because of this, production of the board was significantly more cost-efficient. The final Mac design was self-contained and had far more programming code in ROM than most other computers; it had 128 KB of RAM, in the form of sixteen, 64 kilobit (Kb) RAM chips soldered to the logicboard. Though there were no memory slots, it was expandable to 512 KB of RAM by means of soldering sixteen 256 Kb RAM chips in place of the factory-installed chips.

Read more at Wikipedia.org