A Study Of Macintosh Operating System Computer Science

Mac OS, which is the abbreviation for Macintosh Operating System, is one of the operating systems available in the market nowadays. Unlike Windows, Mac OS is a graphical user interface-based (GUI) operating system specially designed only for Macintosh computers. It was the first operating system in the world developed by Apple Incorporation in 1984 (Mac OS, n.d.). Although the existence of Windows had grabbed the computer users' first choice from Mac OS, the latter is publicly known as the biggest rival of the former. This situation can be seen as the population of Mac users gradually increases day by day.

By using Mac OS, users can experience several advantages. First of all, Mac OS appears to be more user-friendly and it is suitable for all new computer learners in different stage due to its high reputation on GUI (Parsons & Oja, 2008). Instead of Windows' complex command-line operating system, Mac users can produce a command with just a point and click GUI (Parsons & Oja, ).

Moreover, Mac OS is much more secure compare to other operating systems. This is because most of the viruses and adware are Window-based, and they will not run on Mac (Daniels, n.d.). The main purpose of hackers or cyberpunks creating a virus is to spread them as fast as possible to obtain the users' information; therefore, designing a virus for Mac will not benefit the virus writers since the population of Windows users is higher than Mac (Daniels, n.d.).

Besides PowerPC microprocessor produced by IBM, Macintosh computers can also support Intel microprocessor after the release of Mac OS X. This feature allows Macintosh to switch between Mac OS and Windows with the help of dual boot utility (Parsons & Oja, 2008). In addition, virtual machine technologies also enable Macintosh computers to run both Mac OS X and Windows at the same time (Parsons & Oja, 2008). Although the performance speed of the computer might be slowed down, this is helpful when Mac users want to run some programs that are only supported by Windows.

However, there are also some disadvantages using Mac OS. The limitation of programs seems to be the biggest problem faced by the Mac users (Parsons & Oja, 2008). Mac users may find it troublesome when most of the programs and software especially games available in Windows are not supported by Mac OS (Daniels, n.d.). Besides, the price of Macintosh computers is also one of the factors that make the computer users not to purchase it.

Furthermore, Mac OS uses resource forks. Resource fork is a companion file used by Mac OS to store information of a data such as file type, icon and so on (Parsons & Oja, 2008). The existence of resource forks has made the file transfer from Mac to other platforms such as Windows more difficult (Parsons & Oja, 2008). In order to solve this problem, the assist of resource editor such as ResEdit is needed to convert it to other platforms' readable version data fork (Resource fork, n.d.).

History and Background

System 1.0 GUI.jpg MAC_OS_X_GUI.jpg

Desktop of System 1.0