Classic Mac OS
Mac OS is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The Macintosh operating system is credited with having popularized the graphical user interface concept. It was included with every Macintosh that was sold during the era in which it was developed, and many updates to the system software were done in conjunction with the introduction of new Macintosh systems.
Apple released the original Macintosh on January 24, 1984. The first version of the system software, which had no official name, was partially based on the Lisa OS, which Apple previously released for the Lisa computer in 1983. As part of an agreement allowing Xerox to buy shares in Apple at a favorable price, it also used concepts from the Xerox PARC Alto computer, which former Apple CEO Steve Jobs and other Lisa team members had previewed. This operating system consisted of the Macintosh Toolbox ROM and the "System Folder", a set of files that were loaded from disk. The name Macintosh System Software came into use in 1987 with System 5. Apple rebranded the system as Mac OS in 1996, starting officially with version 7.6, due in part to its Macintosh clone program. That program ended after the release of Mac OS 8 in 1997. The last major release of the system was Mac OS 9 in 1999.
Initial versions of the System Software ran one application at a time. With the Macintosh 512K, a system extension called the Switcher was developed to use this additional memory to allow multiple programs to remain loaded. The software of each loaded program used the memory exclusively; only when activated by the Switcher did the program appear, even the Finder's desktop. With the Switcher, the now familiar Clipboard feature allowed copy and paste between the loaded programs across switches including the desktop.
With the introduction of System 5, a cooperative multitasking extension called MultiFinder was added, which allowed content in windows of each program to remain in a layered view over the desktop, and was later integrated into System 7 as part of the operating system along with support for virtual memory. By the mid-1990s, however, contemporary operating systems such as Windows NT, OS/2, NeXTSTEP, BSD, and Linux had all brought pre-emptive multitasking, protected memory, access controls, and multi-user capabilities to desktop computers. The Macintosh's limited memory management and susceptibility to conflicts among extensions that provide additional functionality, such as networking or support for a particular device, led to significant criticism of the operating system, and was a factor in Apple's declining market share at the time.
After two aborted attempts at creating a successor to the Macintosh System Software called Taligent and Copland, and a four-year development effort spearheaded by Steve Jobs's return to Apple in 1997, Apple replaced Mac OS with a new operating system in 2001 named Mac OS X. It retained most of the user interface design elements of the Classic Mac OS, and there was some overlap of application frameworks for compatibility, but the two operating systems otherwise have completely different origins and architectures.
The final updates to Mac OS 9 released in 2001 provided interoperability with Mac OS X. The name "Classic" that now signifies the historical Mac OS as a whole is a reference to the Classic Environment, a compatibility layer that helped ease the transition to Mac OS X.
Initial concept
The Macintosh project started in late 1978 with Jef Raskin, who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer. In September 1979, Raskin began looking for an engineer who could put together a prototype. Bill Atkinson, a member of the Apple Lisa team, introduced Raskin to Burrell Smith, a service technician who had been hired earlier that year.Apple's concept for the Macintosh deliberately sought to minimize the user's awareness of the operating system. Many basic tasks that required more operating system knowledge on other systems could be accomplished by mouse gestures and graphic controls on a Macintosh. This would differentiate it from its contemporaries such as MS-DOS, which use a command-line interface consisting of terse, abbreviated textual commands.
In January 1981, Steve Jobs completely took over the Macintosh project. Jobs and a number of Apple engineers visited Xerox PARC in December 1979, three months after the Lisa and Macintosh projects had begun. After hearing about the pioneering GUI technology being developed at Xerox PARC from former Xerox employees like Raskin, Jobs negotiated a visit to see the Xerox Alto computer and Smalltalk development tools in exchange for Apple stock options. The final Lisa and Macintosh operating systems use concepts from the Xerox Alto, but many elements of the graphical user interface were created by Apple including the menu bar, pull-down menus, and the concepts of drag and drop and direct manipulation.
Unlike the IBM PC, which uses 8 kB of system ROM for power-on self-test and basic input/output system, the Mac ROM is significantly larger and holds key OS code. Much of the original Mac ROM code was written by Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the original Macintosh team. He was able to conserve precious ROM space by writing routines in assembly language code optimized with "hacks", or clever programming tricks. In addition to the ROM, he also coded the kernel, the Macintosh Toolbox, and some of the desktop accessories.
The icons of the operating system, which represent folders and application software, were designed by Susan Kare. Bruce Horn and Steve Capps wrote the Macintosh Finder, as well as a number of Macintosh system utilities. In 2025, Kare's classic Mac icons from this period were included in Pirouette: Turning Points in Design, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art featuring "widely recognized design icons highlighting pivotal moments in design history." This work is also held in the museum's design collection.
Apple aggressively advertised their new machine. After its release, the company bought all 39 pages of advertisement space in the 1984 November/December edition of Newsweek magazine. The Macintosh quickly outsold its more sophisticated but much more expensive predecessor, the Lisa. Apple quickly developed MacWorks, a product that allowed the Lisa to emulate Macintosh system software through System 3, by which time it had been discontinued as the rebranded Macintosh XL. Many of the Lisa's operating system advances would not appear in the Macintosh operating system until System 7 or later.
Architecture
Compatibility
Early versions of Mac OS are compatible only with Motorola 68000-family Macintoshes. As Apple introduced computers with PowerPC hardware, the OS was ported to support this architecture. Mac OS 8.1 is the last version that could run on a 68k processor.In systems prior to PowerPC G3-based systems, significant parts of the system are stored in physical ROM on the motherboard. The initial purpose of this is to avoid having the OS use up most of the 128KiB RAM of the initial Macintosh—the initial ROMs were 64KiB. This architecture also allows for a completely graphical OS interface at the lowest level without the need for a text-only console or command-line mode: boot time errors, such as finding no functioning disk drives, are communicated to the user graphically, usually with an icon or the distinctive Chicago bitmap font and a Chime of Death or a series of beeps. This is in contrast to MS-DOS and CP/M computers of the time, which display such messages in a mono-spaced font on a black background, and require the use of the keyboard rather than a mouse, for input. To provide such niceties at a low level, early Mac OS depends on core system software in ROM on the motherboard, which also ensured that only Apple computers or licensed clones can run Mac OS.
Mac clones
Several computer manufacturers over the years made Macintosh clones that were capable of running Mac OS. From 1995 to 1997, Apple licensed Macintosh ROMs to several companies, notably Power Computing, UMAX and Motorola. These machines normally ran various versions of Classic Mac OS. Steve Jobs ended the clone-licensing program after returning to Apple in 1997.Support for Macintosh clones was first exhibited in System 7.5.1, which was the first version to include the "Mac OS" logo, and Mac OS 7.6 was the first to be named "Mac OS" instead of "System". These changes were made to disassociate the operating system from Apple's own Macintosh models.
File systems
The Macintosh originally used the Macintosh File System, a flat file system with only one level of folders. This was quickly replaced in 1985 by the Hierarchical File System, which had a true directory tree. Both file systems are otherwise compatible. An improved file system named HFS Plus was announced in 1997 and implemented in 1998.Files in most file systems used with DOS, Windows, Unix, or other operating systems have only one "fork". By contrast, MFS and HFS give files two different "forks". The data fork contains the same sort of information as a file in other file systems, such as the text of a document or the bitmaps of an image file. The resource fork contains other structured data such as menu definitions, graphics, sounds, or code segments that would be incorporated into a program's file format on other systems. An executable file might consist only of resources with an empty data fork, while a data file might have only a data fork with no resource fork. A word processor file could contain its text in the data fork and styling information in the resource fork so that an application that does not recognize the styling information can still read the raw text.
On the other hand, these forks would challenge interoperability with different operating systems. In copying or transferring a Mac OS file to a non-Mac system, the default implementations would strip the file of its resource fork. Most data files contained only nonessential information in their resource fork, such as window size and location, but program files would be inoperative without their resources. This necessitated such encoding schemes as BinHex and MacBinary, which allowed a user to encode a dual-forked file into a single stream, or inversely take a single stream so-encoded and reconstitute it into a dual-forked file usable by Mac OS.