Larry, John, Steve, and Bruce
If you click on the About menu item under System 6, on the right you can see a list of names: Larry, John, Steve, and Bruce. These are the names of the developers of this version of the Finder, the interface of the Macintosh
At the time Apple still used to give credit to developers by allowing them to appear in the info boxes of the software they had created. Usually their names appeared in full, sometimes even with pictures, but here all we have are the first names. Let’s see who these four are.
The last two, are the easiest to guess: they are of course Steve Capps and Bruce Horn.
Horn is the creator of the original Finder, a task in which he had the crucial assistance of Capps, who later had a key role in the Newton.
Larry is Larry Kenyon, longtime Apple and Mac developer. Kenyon, among other things, worked on Multifinder, the version of the Finder that starting from System 5 allowed Macintosh users to keep open many applications and switch between them bringing their windows to the front.
John is John Meier, who also worked on the Newton project and would keep on being a developer of subsequent versions of the Finder, the only one of the four names to do so.
It’s just OS X
At the World Wide Developer Conference of 2008 Apple made a small but significant move in the naming of its operating systems, removing the “Mac” prefix from Mac OS X. In its promotional material at the annual developers’ gathering Apple referred to the iPhone’s OS as “OS X iPhone” and to Mac OS X 10.5 as “OS X Leopard”.
The change was pretty much evident if one took a look at pictures of WWDC banners from 2006 and 2007
and compared them to the new 2008 ones featuring both the Mac and iPhone operating systems
This was clearly done to unify the branding since the OS was now running on a wide gamut of devices that included not only desktops and portables but also mobiles and the Apple TV set-top.
The change was also evident in a press release in May referring to the Developers’ Conference.
Altough the title “Apple Executives to Showcase Mac OS X Leopard and OS X iPhone Development Platforms at WWDC 2008 Keynote” still featured a distinction in the following text one could read
This year’s WWDC will showcase two revolutionary development platforms, the ground-breaking innovations of OS X Leopard® and OS X iPhone™, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system.
and also
WWDC 2008 will offer over 150 information-rich sessions and labs where Apple engineers will go in-depth on the innovative technologies that power OS X iPhone and OS X Leopard.
On the other hand the footer stating that:
Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications.
had been already Mac-less at least since the 7th July of 2004.
The other new features of Mac OS 9
The most touted feature of Mac OS 9 was the new Sherlock 2 but there were lots of other new features, mostly related to the development and coming of the NeXT generation operating system, Mac OS X.
Mac OS 9 had multiple users, Voiceprint password, Keychain, automatic updating, encryption, Internet File Sharing, Internet AppleScript, and Network Browser. Many of these were direct equivalents of Mac OS X features which were concurrently developed or even backported.
The reason was of course to make the Mac OS more powerful and more modern but also to ease the transition to OS X, which at the time was believed to start in less than an year
Image taken from Toastytech.com
Ten years ago: here comes Mac OS 9
On October 22, 1999 Apple launched Mac OS 9, its major new release of the Macintosh operating system.
The last boxed edition of the “classic” Mac OS line carried a retail price of 99 USD (with a 20USD rebate for customers who owned Mac OS 8.5 or 8.6) and featured new Internet tools such as Sherlock 2, which was lauded by CEO Steve Jobs in the press release.
The updated version of Apple’s search tool was explicitly modified with a plugin system so that the new Sherlock could access search engines, websites, services and even follow auctions, helping the users with information retrieval but also shopping and online commerce.
To launch the operating system Apple Authorized Resellers (among which were chains such as CompUsa, Sears and Fry’s) held throughout the following weekend special Mac OS 9 “Midnight Madness” events, Apple Demo Days and in-store promotions.
The “Fat” Mac
On September 1984 Apple released the follow-up to the Macintosh, addressing one of the major complaints of potential buyers.
Sold for USD 3,300 (or 3200, according to some sources), the Macintosh 512K was nicknamed “Fat Mac” for its increased (four-fold) RAM memory but was otherwise identical to the original Macintosh, as one can see from the dual-purpose motherboards.
In an 1984 interview in Byte with three of the original designers of the Macintosh, Jef Raskin actually revealed that the expansion was planned since the beginning and wasn’t an afterthought.
At the question
You started with 64K bytes and it was released with 128K bytes, and there is constant talk of a half-megabyte Mac. When did a half megabyte creep into the design philosophy?
Raskin answered:
Very early on Burrell [Smith, the motherboard designer, nda] pointed out that it’s very easy to make a design, once you had the 68000 in place, where you could just take out 64K-bit chips and put in 256K-bit chips. I’ve always believed that you just simply take the largest chip that is economically feasible to use in terms of the memory, and if they’re bit-wide chips and you use 8 or 16 of them, then that should be the size of your memory. [...] Burrell loves designing for it, software part portion had no trouble handling that, and it was was very clean. When the 256K-bit chips come you just plug in all those and everything runs just about the same.
And things ran just about the same, but better: the 512k greatly improved application usage and even some operations helping avoid issues such as the “Disk Swapper’s Elbow”.
It was discontinued in April 1986, replaced by the 512Ke which had bigger ROMs (128K instead of 64) and used more capacious 800KB floppy disks.
The motherboard in the picture was gently provided by Maurizio Buso