Talk:Classic Mac OS

message: An interesting thing to add to the tables describing each OS version is the footprint each takes.  How many megabytes did an operating system take back then, how many now?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.170.228.122 (talk) 16:16, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Footprint 

message: Some dates for the various releases would be nice. Dan100 16:59, Apr 10, 2005 (UTC)
:I agree, I opened this page to suggest it, and found it already had been... anyone out there have a reliable source for these? I'm happy to add them to the article. Graham 05:08, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Can someone help me with System 3 in that regard (per my most recent comment)? Michael Sheflin (talk) 03:27, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dates 

message: The section of "System 5" is I believe is technically inaccurate. No system named "System 5" was ever released by Apple. 
What has been referred to as System 5 was only ever referred to as "System Software 5.0" by Apple. It combined System 4.2, Finder 6.0 and MultiFinder 1.0. I think this section should be rewritten to clarify this situation. It does seem though that some people refer to System Software 5.0/5.1 as System 5, though I can find no instance where Apple ever used the name. As such it probably should be made clear that their was no system kernel version 5. --Cab88 18:16, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, the same applies to System 6. It only started to get called that when System 7 was on the horizon, and as far as I know not by Apple, but only by users. Apple released system releases as e.g. 'System 6.0.3' which included various different system and Finder versions, but this was no different from the earlier System 5 releases. However it's a convenient term to use in retrospect anyway. Graham 04:57, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: System 5 did not technically exist

message: I seem to have stumbled across an image of an Atari port of Mac OS 2. I can't find any more information about this, though. --StuartBrady (Talk) 14:21, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: As I understand it, Amigas and Ataris were able to run fairly speedy Mac emulators because they used the same CPU architecture.  What you saw is probably not an official port, but Standard Mac OS running under some sort of emulation.  You usually needed a card for the Mac ROMs to make these things work.  See, for example:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_GCR -- Forkazoo 21:28, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

text: You can see the Spectre GCR cartridge plugged in on the left in that picture, and its hookup to the disk controller port. Not so much a port as a completely unofficial third party hack. Basically MagicSac/Spectre GCR worked by taking real Mac ROMs and patch the hell out of them, basically patching in "drivers" for all the Atari ST hardware. Standard Mac OS was then booted on top of it. Spectre GCR also included some special disk controller hardware so you could use actual Mac formatted disks, where the earlier MagicSac couldn't. (The Atari ST used PC-compatible MFM encoding, and can't normally read Mac 400/800k disks for the same reason PCs can't) There's a history hidden behind a bad link here: http://www.geocities.com/clu-da-bard/gcrintro.html 24.179.139.229 (talk) 07:19, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Atari port? 

message: At present, the OS X section starts with "While it technically retains the same name as its predecessors, Mac OS X is largely independent."  The name of the product, from 7.6 to 9.2 was "Mac OS".  From 10.0 onward, it is "Mac OS X" (The server version has a proper name of "Mac OS X Server".)  Then there is a version number, sometimes the version number is appended directly to the end of the name, sometimes it has "version" between the name and the number, this varies by version.  This is a similar name, not the same.  (As others have mentioned, before 7, the proper name was "Macintosh System Software" with a version number, then from 7.0 to 7.5.5, it was "System 7", which could be modified with the version number.)  In addition, starting with 10.2, the 'cat' name became an official part of the name of that version number.  The main product is "Mac OS X", the version number is, in the latest as of this writing, 10.4.10, and the name of the version is Tiger.  That makes it Mac OS X Tiger, version 10.4.10.  Also, 7.5.1 was the first version to say "Mac OS" on startup, but the name of the OS wasn't officially changed until 7.6.
So, as examples, we have "Macintosh System Software version 6.0.7", "System 7 Pro, version 7.1.1", "Mac OS 8.1", "Mac OS X Server version 1.0", "Mac OS X Panther 10.3.5" (Note that the Rhapsody releases were not 10.x numbers, "Mac OS X Server" was the name, and 1.0 was the version number.)  Ehurtley 01:30, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Mac OS X" is not the same 'name' as "Mac OS". 

message: :Image:Mac OS X Leopard free.png is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.
Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.
If there is  other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page.  Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.
BetacommandBot 04:42, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Fair use rationale for Image:Mac OS X Leopard free.png

message: :Image:MacOS 152mm 4c.png is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.
Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.
If there is  other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page.  Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.
BetacommandBot 04:57, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Fair use rationale for Image:MacOS 152mm 4c.png

message: The Macintosh XL stands as a curious departure, having been sort of an internal clone in a way.  However, the Mac OS history article makes no mention of the Macintosh XL at all, and the Lisa only as a historical precursor (or co-development, by certain implication).  Since the Lisa actually was grafted into the Macintosh lineage at some point, it becomes a historical point for Mac OS.  Should we not then include it somewhere?  -- Scott Swanson 15:49, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. MacWorks is an important footnote in the operating system as it was the first time that both the Macintosh ROM and System were emulated on another computer. A major precursor to the infamous "Pink" port onto IBM PCs as well as subsequent third party emulators and ultimately Apple's own port of Classic into OS X and OS X's eventual cross-compatibility with PCs.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Woodwynlane (talk • contribs) 16:46, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Wasn't the Lisa/MacXL the required development platform for early Macs?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.248.248.11 (talk) 16:24, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

text: I don't think the Mac XL has much place in a Mac *OS* history. MacWorks basically just made the Lisa look like a Mac, by loading Mac ROMs into RAM and booting them. From that point it was just running plain standard Mac OS. It belongs in a Mac *hardware* history. 24.179.139.229 (talk) 06:54, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Macintosh XL? 

message: Why are there no links on this Wiki page, like every other Wiki page out there and encourage by "Wikipedia:The perfect article"? There are some excellent external links that help clarify the information here. Before I waste my time, I would like to confirm that they are welcome, given the age of this article.--Woodwynlane 16:51, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why No Links? 

message: :Image:Mac OS 9 screenshot 2.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.
Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.
If there is  other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page.  Note that any fair use images lacking such an explanation can be deleted one week after being tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.
BetacommandBot (talk) 07:01, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Fair use rationale for Image:Mac OS 9 screenshot 2.jpg

message: This is an excellent candidate for a split notes/references system as on this article Alcibiades.
Basically this introduces a letter system for indicating additional informational notes and the standard numerical system for source references. As this article expands, there is relevant ancillary info the should be included, but would otherwise be distracting or detract from the focus of the primary article. The notes are then organized in one section which make for stand-alone additional reading within the article (with back-references to the main sections) and keeps the source references which are otherwise not intended for additional reading, but expanding on source citations, in a separate easily skipped section.--Mac128 (talk) 19:28, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notes/References 

message: I'm gonna go ahead and claim Mac OS 8 is non neutral. It seems to be written by someone who focuses very much on the underlying OS, e.g. implying very few significant new features. Who defines significant? To most of Apple's fanbase, Mac OS 8 was VERY significant. It showed that Apple could create innovative ideas. That they could produce a dramatic facelift. And that their new development was getting somewhere. Mac OS 8, had many significant new features. Take the ability to use a picture as a desktop background; this was something Windows 3.1 & 95 had, that Mac OS 7.6 didn't. Mac OS 8 did, and to an average user, putting a pic of your favorite band on the desktop is significant. Same with contextual menus, spring-loaded folders, or even new appearance controls. It made the Mac OS new. Sure, the core was still the same, but who knew about the core? It just did stuff in the background.Ryaxnb (talk) 20:49, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mac OS 8 non-neutral 

message: The image :Image:Macintosh System 7.5.3 screenshot.png is used in this article under a claim of fair use, but it does not have an adequate explanation for why it meets the requirements for such images when used here.  In particular, for each page the image is used on, it must have an explanation linking to that page which explains why it needs to be used on that page.  Please check
:* That there is a non-free use rationale on the image's description page for the use in this article.
:* That this article is linked to from the image description page.
This is an automated notice by FairuseBot. For assistance on the image use policy, see Wikipedia:Media copyright questions. --11:36, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Image copyright problem with Image:Macintosh System 7.5.3 screenshot.png

message: Hello, the links in the timeline at the bottom of the page don't work. They lead me to a page that says "This wiki does not exist". Does anybody know how to fix this? Thank you.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by LovesMacs (talk • contribs) 07:46, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Timeline links don't work 

message: IF this article is about the history of the OS including it's development rather than a catalog of old OS versions don't development efforts that did never made it into production under their own names deserve mention?  
Examples include but are not limited to: 
Copland, Gershwin, Nukernel, TalOS, OpenDoc, etc. 
Note that bits and pieces of some of these did find their way into production system software.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.248.248.11 (talk) 16:35, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Interesting development work that didn't make it? 

message: The images on the right and left of the section "Systems 1,2,3, and 4" float above the table at the bottom at the section. Any ideas on how to improve this without removing any of the images?
Corbin Davenport (talk) 19:59, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intruding images on section: Systems 1,2,3 and 4 

message: I would like to propose the creation of a section about credits and easter eggs in Mac OS software releases.  It would describe the traditional presence, and eventual removal of credits upon the second coming of The Steve, and it would list as many contributors as we can find.  I'd start with those for whom I've found wikipedia pages.  This section could be linked to, from Easter egg (media)#Software and credits, with screenshots and movies of the easter eggs.  I'll start a draft here, because I haven't looked for citations yet, but I know that they have existed.  Maybe we could try to restore that cultural tradition, because there were countless minor contributors to Apple's software (quality assurance, etc) but which don't warrant mention in a book or in a distinct wikipedia article.  Names can be culled from folklore.org, from Template:Apple_celeb, and from source code and mailing lists for Darwin.  It could be a table format, with headings for their job title, year range, and product name.  Steve Jobs could be at the end.
Apple's history of software development has seen a rich internal corporate tradition of the recognition of the contributing personnel, usually located directly inside of the software.  Some forms of recognition existed in the form of easter eggs which were hidden at the risk of reprimand due to their extraneous exacerbation of the quality control process.  Others were a straightforward list of credits which could often be found in the form of a text banner located, for example, in an About box.  The legendary so-called "Secret About Box" was one prominent example of such cultural tradition of Easter eggs.  One Secret About Box featured an entire video game -- a clone of Breakout, a game upon which Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had collaborated prior to forming Apple.  Another featured a toy which demonstrated the 3D graphics library called QuickDraw 3D.  Another Easter egg series was comprised entirely of textual credits of the Blue Meanies, a former engineering group for the Mac OS 7 series.
Soon after Steve Jobs's return to Apple, the tradition was deemed a risk to the company, whereby foreign technical recruiters would be easily able to identify and target Apple's significant contributors to be recruited away from Apple.  Thus, the tradition of individual personnel credits in software was officially ended under severe terms.  Countless credits and stories may be found at Folklore web site.
Credits for the software engineering, management, quality assurance, documentation, and countless other roles of the production of Mac OS include the following: Darin Adler, Andy Hertzfeld, Bud Tribble, Bill Atkinson, Jef Raskin, Burrell Smith (citations of software contribution?), Dave Hyatt, Maciej Stachowiak, Lew Cirne?, Steve Wozniak?, Steve Jobs.
Smuckola (talk) 04:53, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposal for credits and easter eggs

message: I'm not sure exactly how to do this, but I have System 3 running on a Mac SE.  I (obviously) can't take a usable in-screen screenshot, but would a screenshot (the About does say January 1986) qualify as a citation and if so how would I post it?  Wikimedia Commons?
Michael Sheflin (talk) 03:27, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citation for System 3 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on History of Mac OS. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20090530001035/http://images.apple.com:80/macosx/pdf/MacOSX_UNIX_TB_v2.pdf to http://images.apple.com/macosx/pdf/MacOSX_UNIX_TB_v2.pdf
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.
Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 20:35, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Please follow this link for the discussion about the restructuring of the "Mac OS" and "Classic Mac OS" pages and continue the discussion there to help us keep it in one place. Thank you! —Samvscat (talk) 20:44, 23 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: "Mac OS" and "Classic Mac OS" pages

message: The chart under "System 1, 2, 3 and 4" lists the "Macintosh System Software" version, but that's an artifact retroactively (and incorrectly) created by Apple. See The 'develop' CD and its spawn. The chart should look something much more like the one at Macintosh software releases. I'd change it myself, but I fear it would just get reverted unless there's consensus.  -- Calion | Talk 23:33, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Reliable sources and neutral presentation will gain their own consensus.  What you're proposing is surely going to be fine given that it's actually true, but it's going to take some thoughtful wording to communicate the ideas clearly.  I suggest also looking for other resources beyond the one site you've linked to, preferably from the time period in question. There were a lot of Macintosh magazines and books in the 1980s and early 1990s, e.g., that could add a lot of strength to the information presented on the site you've linked.  Most of the links in that site are now dead, BTW, as Apple has reorganized their support site and all the old article numbers have been retired.  Thanks, Apple.  Warren -talk- 03:33, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Macintosh System Software" 

message: On my computer, I'm seeing a large gap between the title/hatnote and the start of the article. It seems to be related to the template I recently added/created: :template:Classic Mac OS sidebar. To fix the problem, I tried mushing all the templates together onto one line, which seemed to at least reduce the gap, but this change was reverted by Guy Harris, who said  Any idea what's causing the problem, and is there another, better, solution to getting rid of it? WanderingWanda (talk) 23:51, 23 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Nevermind, figured it out. The problem, of course, was extra spaces in the template itself. WanderingWanda (talk) 00:14, 24 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Weird spacing 

message: IIRC, the size of the system installer—concretely, the number of disks that the system installation was spread out over—"exploded" somewhere in the 7.5.x series of releases due to (it was claimed) the introduction of the Open Transport networking system. Notably: not at 7.5.0, but slightly after (IIRC). Since the physical size of the stack of install disks is something very tangible for people who dealt with it at the time, it should deserve some mention—maybe not in the main body text, but at least in the table of all the patch releases. 95.199.30.253 (talk) 07:49, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Open Transport? 

message: I think the Qemu emulator is missing in the wiki as this one is very good now in emulating Mac OS (including 9.2.2 and up to 10.4).
--Roemeeeer (talk) 14:57, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Qemu Emulator 

message: The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion:
* 
You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 14:23, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion 

message: As the title says: when / by which version starts support of PowerPC-Macs with "New World Rom" by the Classic Mac OS? I can not find this Information, not here and not in the Articles about the "New World ROM". Thanks for any helpful answer!Erik --2003:ED:F7FF:377D:352A:E82F:72EA:5DD1 (talk) 15:19, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  when / by which version starts support of PowerPC-Macs with "New World Rom"? 

message: I added a short sentence that mentions MAE, which was an odd system that ran an emulated 68K processor on a Solaris or a HP/UX workstation. I feel this is significant as in some ways it was the predecessor of the classic environnement on Mac OS X. Should MAE be added to the time-line? thias (talk) 13:33, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: To which timeline are you referring? Guy Harris (talk) 21:26, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  MAE (Macintosh Application Environnement)  

message: idk,despite Mac system 4 and 5 shared the same version number,can anyone explain why? Fireyneedshelp 301 (talk) 13:47, 1 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Can anyone explain why Mac system software 4 had to Category same as Mac system 1 to 3,and not 5 despite Mac system 4 and 5 uses same system version of 4,with 4.0,4.1,4.2 and 4.3