X-Nico

29 unusual facts about Mac OS


About box

The concept of the about box originated with the first Macintosh Classic operating system, where About program name was typically the first item in the Apple menu.

Appearance Manager

In pre-Mac OS X versions of the Macintosh operating system, the Appearance Manager controlled the overall look of the Mac GUI widgets and supported several themes.

Digital distribution in video games

In 2004 the Valve Corporation released the Steam platform for Windows computers (later expanded to Mac OS and Linux) as a means to distribute Valve-developed video games.

Double-click

In the original Mac OS, which originated this technique, moving the mouse after the first click would immediately highlight the name.

Game Sprockets

Game Sprockets is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) supporting gaming on the classic Mac OS.

Icon design

One of the early professional icon designers was Susan Kare, who designed many of the icons contained within the original Mac OS.

Jeremy Lewis

Peter Jeremy Lewis (born March 22, 1969) was the president and CEO of Big Fish Games, a developer, producer and distributor of casual games on a number of platforms, including PC, Mac, Facebook, iPhone, iPad and Nintendo DS.

MacTCP

MacTCP was the standard TCP/IP implementation for the Macintosh operating system through version 7.5.1.

Melesta Games

Nowadays it develops games across multiple platforms like PC, iOS, Android, Windows phone, Mac, social, Video game console etc.

Menu bar

In the Macintosh operating system, the menu bar is a horizontal "bar" anchored to the top of the screen.

Menu blinking

Only in Classic Mac OSes there have been preferences for Menu Blinking where you can control how many times the selection rectangle blinks.

MetaTrader 4

While there is no official MetaTrader 4 version available for Mac OS, some brokers provide their own custom developed MT4 variants for Mac OS.

Nicola Pellow

She left CERN at the end of August 1991, but returned after graduating in 1992, and worked with Robert Cailliau on MacWWW, the first web browser for Mac OS.

Packard Bell Navigator

This is similar to the design of Microsoft Bob, which ran on top of Windows, and At Ease, which ran on top of Mac OS Finder.

Pajama Sam In: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside

Pajama Sam: No Need To Hide When It's Dark Outside is a 1996 children's point-and-click adventure game originally released for PC and Mac.

Pandora FMS

They run on any type of platform (Microsoft, AIX, Solaris, Linux, IPSO, Mac OS or FreeBSD), also SAP, because the agents can communicate with the Pandora FMS Servers to send data in XML using SSH, FTP, NFS, Tentacle (protocol) or any data transfer means.

Plus500

In 2010, the company rolled out its browser version for Mac OS and Linux users.

PowerPlant

PowerPlant is an object-oriented GUI toolkit, application framework and set of class libraries for Mac OS, created by Metrowerks.

QuickDraw 3D

For obvious reasons the APIs were also tightly integrated with the Mac OS, allowing the developer to bring up an interactive 3D view in a window with little code.

QuickTime for Java

In practice, it allows Java applications on Mac OS, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows to support the capture, editing, playback, and export of many different media formats and codecs.

Services menu

Even in Mac OS X, there is an alternative system called the context menu handler, which is carried over from classic Mac OS.

Shane's Chess Information Database

Shane's Chess Information Database (Scid) is a popular free UNIX, Windows, Linux, and Mac application for viewing and maintaining huge databases of chess games.

Sound Manager

The Sound Manager is a part of the classic Apple Macintosh operating system, in Classic Mac OS.

Stacking window manager

Mac OS was one of the earliest commercially successful examples of a GUI which used stacking windows.

Text box

Pressing Home/End keys (Microsoft's Windows OS) or Command-left arrow/Command-right arrow (Apple's Mac OS) moves the caret to the beginning/end of the line;

The Art of Unix Programming

The author utilizes a comparative approach to explaining Unix by contrasting it to other operating systems including desktop-oriented ones such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS to ones with research roots such as EROS and Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

Tooltip

Another system, on old Mac OS versions, that aims to solve the same problem, but in a slightly different way, is balloon help.

Windows 3.0

The Control Panel, previously available as a standard-looking applet, was re-modeled after the one in Mac OS.

WindowShade

WindowShade was a control panel extension for the Mac OS that allowed a user to double-click a window's title bar to "roll up" the window like a windowshade.


Andy Hertzfeld

Working for Bud Tribble alongside Bill Atkinson and Burrell Smith, Hertzfeld became a primary software architect of the Macintosh Operating System, which was considered revolutionary in its use of the graphical user interface (GUI) where Jef Raskin also made contributions.

Appearance Manager

There is an Apple Platinum file in the themes folder in the System Folder which acts as a stub, but no functional theme elements are embedded into it.

David Nagel

Before joining AT&T, he was senior vice president at Apple, where he led the worldwide research and development group responsible for Mac OS software, Macintosh hardware, imaging and other peripheral products development.

Den Store Danske Encyklopædi

The text of the paper encyclopedia was also published, but without illustrations, on CD-ROMs for Microsoft Windows in 2004 and for Mac OS in 2005.

Dominant design

When a new technology emerges (e.g. computer GUI operating systems) – often firms will introduce a number of alternative designs (e.g. MicrosoftWindows, Apple Inc.Mac OS and IBMOS/2).

DVD-RAM

Many operating systems like Mac OS (Mac OS 8.6 up to Mac OS X), Linux and Microsoft Windows XP can use DVD-RAM directly, while earlier versions of Windows require device drivers or the program InCD.

Exult

The current graphics code uses the SDL library, which has led to Exult being ported for Mac OS, Microsoft Windows, Sharp Zaurus, Microsoft Windows Mobile, and other operating systems aside from the original "free *NIX" platforms (such as FreeBSD and GNU/Linux).

Lempel–Ziv–Oberhumer

Various LZO implementations are reported to work under Win32, AIX, ConvexOS, IRIX, Mac OS, Palm OS, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Wii, Solaris, SunOS, TOS (Atari ST), Linux and VxWorks.

Net Daemons Associates

NDA's services included performing large scale network administration for UNIX, Linux, Windows and Mac networks; assisting companies in getting onto the Internet and setting up their websites; custom programming and network automation through scripting; security audits, penetration testing; and assisting companies in moving their computer networks.

Object Pascal

Currently, FPC can generate code for x86, x86-64, PowerPC, SPARC, and ARM processors, and for various operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS and Mac OS X (with an Xcode integration kit).

Open Transport

Based on code licensed from Mentat's Portable Streams product, Open Transport was built to provide the Mac OS with a modern TCP/IP implementation, replacing MacTCP.

PGPLOT

It is known to run on many operating systems, including most Unix-like systems, Mac OS, and Microsoft Windows.

PICAXE

AXEpad is a cross-platform application recommended for Linux and Mac users.

Plain text

Many other computer programs are also capable of processing or creating plain text, such as countless commands in DOS, Windows, Mac OS, and Unix and its kin; as well as web browsers (a few browsers such as Lynx and the Line Mode Browser produce only plain text for display).

Robert Sayre

He wrote "Atom: The Standard in Syndication," an article published in the July/August 2005 issue of the journal IEEE Internet Computing, and is a former developer of a Mac client for the Soulseek file-sharing service.

RobotWar

RoboWar is a similar game that was released later on the Macintosh, and is now available for both Mac OS and Windows.

Strategic Conquest

Though the game has not been updated since 1998, it is fully compatible with Macintosh System Software from 6 to 9, and is also playable under the Classic environment included with PowerPC versions of Mac OS X up to Mac OS X v10.4.

The Institute for End User Computing

Its coordinating goal is to develop a new open source platform that is a simple, yet state of the art alternative to Windows, Unix, Linux, and the Mac OS.

The Legend of Lotus Spring

Mac OS System 7.5
90 MHz PowerPC
16 MB RAM
10 MB hard disk space
8x CD-ROM drive
640x480 display
thousands of colours

THINK C

THINK C was an extension of ANSI C for Mac OS developed by THINK Technologies; although named Lightspeed C in the original mid-1986 release, it was later renamed THINK C.

Transbase

The wide use of Transbase, especially as basis for repair part management and documentation systems in the automobile industry soon led to a considerable number of ports to diverse operating systems, such as UNIX derivatives, Linux, Windows, VMS, and Mac OS.

Windowing system

Operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS (version 9 and earlier), and Palm OS, contain a windowing system which is integrated with the OS.