Mac OS 8 is an

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

that was released by Apple Computer on July 26, 1997. It includes the largest overhaul of the classic Mac OS experience since the release of

System 7 System 7, codenamed "Big Bang", and also known as Mac OS 7, is a graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers and is part of the classic Mac OS series of operating systems. It was introduced on May 13, 1991, by Apple C ...

, approximately six years before. It places a greater emphasis on color than prior versions. Released over a series of updates, Mac OS 8 represents an incremental integration of many of the technologies which had been developed from 1988 to 1996 for Apple's overly ambitious OS named Copland. Mac OS 8 helped modernize the Mac OS while Apple developed its next-generation operating system,

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

(renamed in 2012 to OS X and then in 2016 to macOS). Mac OS 8 is one of Apple's most commercially successful software releases, selling over 1.2 million copies in the first two weeks. As it came at a difficult time in Apple's history, many

pirate Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods. Those who conduct acts of piracy are called pirates, v ...

groups refused to traffic in the new OS, encouraging people to buy it instead. Mac OS 8.0 introduces the most visible changes in the lineup, including the

Platinum Platinum is a chemical element with the symbol Pt and atomic number 78. It is a dense, malleable, ductile, highly unreactive, precious, silverish-white transition metal. Its name originates from Spanish , a diminutive of "silver". Pla ...

interface and a native PowerPC multithreaded Finder. Mac OS 8.1 introduces a new, more efficient file system named

HFS Plus HFS Plus or HFS+ (also known as Mac OS Extended or HFS Extended) is a journaling file system developed by Apple Inc. It replaced the Hierarchical File System (HFS) as the primary file system of Apple computers with the 1998 release of Mac OS ...

. Mac OS 8.5 is the first version of the Mac OS to require a PowerPC processor. It features PowerPC native versions of

QuickDraw A quickdraw (also known as an extender) is a piece of climbing equipment used by rock and ice climbers to allow the climbing rope to run freely through protection such as a bolt anchors or other traditional gear while leading. A quickdr ...

AppleScript AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control over scriptable Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in all versions of macOS as part of a package of system aut ...

, and the Sherlock search utility. Its successor, Mac OS 9, was released on October 23, 1999.

Copland

Starting in 1988, Apple's next-generation operating system, which it originally envisioned to be "System 8" was codenamed Copland. It was announced in March 1994 alongside the introduction of the first PowerPC Macs. Apple intended Copland as a fully modern system, including native PowerPC code,

intelligent agent In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent (IA) is anything which perceives its environment, takes actions autonomously in order to achieve goals, and may improve its performance with learning or may use knowledge. They may be simple or ...

s, a

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

, a customizable interface named Appearance Manager, a

hardware abstraction layer Hardware abstractions are sets of routines in software that provide programs with access to hardware resources through programming interfaces. The programming interface allows all devices in a particular class ''C'' of hardware devices to be acce ...

, and a relational database integrated into the Finder. Copland was to be followed by Gershwin, which promised

memory protection Memory protection is a way to control memory access rights on a computer, and is a part of most modern instruction set architectures and operating systems. The main purpose of memory protection is to prevent a process from accessing memory that h ...

spaces and full

preemptive multitasking In computing, preemption is the act of temporarily interrupting an executing task, with the intention of resuming it at a later time. This interrupt is done by an external scheduler with no assistance or cooperation from the task. This preemp ...

. The system was intended to be a full rewrite of the Mac OS, and Apple hoped to beat Microsoft

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturi ...

to market with a development cycle of only one year. The Copland development was hampered by many missed deadlines. The release date was first pushed back to the end of 1995, then to mid-1996, late 1996, and finally to the end of 1997. With a dedicated team of 500 software engineers and an annual budget of $250 million, Apple executives began to grow impatient with the project continually falling behind schedule. In August 1996, Apple chief technology officer

Ellen Hancock Ellen Mooney Hancock (April 15, 1943 – April 19, 2022) was a technology manager from the United States who worked for IBM and Apple, among others. Early life and education Hancock was born April 15, 1943 in the Bronx, New York City, and raised ...

froze development of Copland and Apple began a search for an operating system developed outside the company. This ultimately led to Apple buying

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and developing Rhapsody which would eventually evolve into

in 2001 (now named macOS). At the

Worldwide Developers Conference The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is an information technology conference held annually by Apple Inc. The conference is usually held at Apple Park in California. The event is usually used to showcase new software and technologies in t ...

in January 1997, Apple

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especial ...

(CEO) Gil Amelio announced that, rather than release Copland as one monolithic release, Copland features would be phased into the Mac OS following a six-month release cycle. These updates began with Mac OS 7.6, released during WWDC. Mac OS 8.0, released six months later, continued to integrate Copland technologies into the Mac OS.

Mac OS 8.0

Developed with the

codename A code name, call sign or cryptonym is a code word or name used, sometimes clandestinely, to refer to another name, word, project, or person. Code names are often used for military purposes, or in espionage. They may also be used in industrial c ...

"Tempo", Mac OS 8.0 was announced on July 22, 1997, and released on July 26. The early beta releases of the product which were circulated to developers and Apple internal audiences, were branded as Mac OS 7.7, superseding the then-current release, Mac OS 7.6. The software was renamed Mac OS 8 before final release. Major changes in this version included the Platinum theme, a Finder which was PowerPC-native and multithreaded, and greater customization of the

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

. Other features introduced in Mac OS 8.0 include the following: *Customization of system fonts and increased use of the user-set accent color. *Pop-up

context menu A context menu (also called contextual, shortcut, and pop up or pop-up menu) is a menu in a graphical user interface (GUI) that appears upon user interaction, such as a right-click mouse operation. A context menu offers a limited set of choic ...

s, accessed via ctrl-click with a one-button mouse. *Pop-up (or tabbed) windows in the Finder. *Spring-loaded folders. *Live scrolling. *WindowShade widget in window titlebars. *Multithreaded Finder — file copy operations run in a separate thread and don't block the Finder UI. *Redesigned color picker. *Desktop Pictures control panel, allowing photographs to be set as the desktop background; not only tiled patterns. *Simple Finder, an option which reduces Finder menus to basic operations, to avoid overwhelming new users. *Relocation of the 'Help' menu from an icon at the right end of the menu bar to a standard textual menu positioned after the application's menus. *A faster Apple Guide, featuring

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

help pages. *Native support of

Apple Filing Protocol The Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), formerly AppleTalk Filing Protocol, is a proprietary network protocol, and part of the Apple File Service (AFS), that offers file services for macOS and the classic Mac OS. In Mac OS 9 and earlier, AFP was ...

over IP. *Performance improvements to

virtual memory In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a very ...

, AppleScript execution and system startup times. *Faster desktop rebuilding.

Mac OS 8.1

Released on January 19, 1998, Mac OS 8.1 was the last version of the Mac OS to run on

Motorola 68000 series The Motorola 68000 series (also known as 680x0, m68000, m68k, or 68k) is a family of 32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and ...

processors. It addressed performance and reliability improvements. It introduced a new file system named

HFS+ HFS Plus or HFS+ (also known as Mac OS Extended or HFS Extended) is a journaling file system developed by Apple Inc. It replaced the Hierarchical File System (HFS) as the primary file system of Apple computers with the 1998 release of Mac OS 8.1 ...

, also named Mac OS Extended, which supported large file sizes and made more efficient use of larger hard drives via using a smaller block size. To upgrade, users must

reformat Disk formatting is the process of preparing a data storage device such as a hard disk drive, solid-state drive, floppy disk, memory card or USB flash drive for initial use. In some cases, the formatting operation may also create one or more new fil ...

the hard drive, which deletes the entire contents of the drive. Some third-party utilities later appeared that preserved the user's data while upgrading to HFS+. The 68040 systems do not support booting from HFS+ disks; the boot drive must be HFS. Mac OS 8.1 was the first system to have a

Universal Disk Format Universal Disk Format (UDF) is an open, vendor-neutral file system for computer data storage for a broad range of media. In practice, it has been most widely used for DVDs and newer optical disc formats, supplanting ISO 9660. Due to its design ...

(UDF) driver, allowing for

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...

support on the Mac for the first time. It also shipped with the new

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

runtime (JDK 1.13). Mac OS 8.1 also included an enhanced version of

PC Exchange PC Exchange was a utility program for Apple Macintosh computers. It was a control panel for the classic Mac OS that lets the operating system mount FAT file systems and mapped file extensions to the user-defined type and creator codes. It was ...

, allowing Macintosh users to see the long file names (up to 255 characters) on files that were created on PCs running Microsoft Windows, and supporting

FAT32 File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. It is often supported for compatibility reasons by ...

. Mac OS 8.1 is the earliest version of the Mac OS that can run

Carbon Carbon () is a chemical element with the symbol C and atomic number 6. It is nonmetallic and tetravalent—its atom making four electrons available to form covalent chemical bonds. It belongs to group 14 of the periodic table. Carbon mak ...

applications. Carbon support requires a PowerPC processor and installation of the CarbonLib software from Apple's website; it is not a standard component of Mac OS 8.1. Applications needing later versions of CarbonLib will not run on Mac OS 8.1. More recent versions of CarbonLib require Mac OS 8.6. As part of Apple's agreement with Microsoft, 8.1 included

Internet Explorer 3 Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 (IE3) is a graphical web browser which was announced in March 1996, and was released on August 13, 1996 by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and on January 8, 1997 for Apple Mac OS (see IE for Mac). It began serious ...

initially, but soon switched to

Internet Explorer 4 Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 (IE4) is a graphical web browser that Microsoft unveiled in Spring of 1997, and released in September 1997, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but also with versions available for the classic Mac OS, Solaris, and H ...

as its default browser. Mac OS 8.1 was free for Mac OS 8 owners and was available in February 1998 via the apple.com website.

Mac OS 8.5

Released October 17, 1998, Mac OS 8.5 was the first version of the Mac OS to run solely on Macs equipped with a PowerPC processor. If Mac OS 8.5 is installed on a 68k system, the

Sad Mac The classic Macintosh startup sequence includes hardware tests which may trigger the startup chime, Happy Mac, Sad Mac, and Chimes of Death. On Macs running macOS Big Sur or later the startup sound is enabled by default, but can be disabled by ...

error screen will appear. As such, it replaced some, but not all, of the 680x0 code with PowerPC code, improving system performance by relying less on 680x0 emulation. It introduced the Sherlock search utility. This allowed users to search the contents of documents on hard drives (if the user had let it index the drive), or extend a search to the Internet. Sherlock plug-ins started appearing at this time; these allowed users to search the contents of other websites. Mac OS 8.5 includes several performance improvements. Copying files over a network was faster than prior versions and Apple advertised it as being "faster than Windows NT".

was also rewritten to use only PowerPC code, which improved AppleScript execution speed significantly. Font Smoothing, system-wide

antialiasing Anti-aliasing may refer to any of a number of techniques to combat the problems of aliasing in a sampled signal such as a digital image or digital audio recording. Specific topics in anti-aliasing include: * Anti-aliasing filter, a filter used be ...

for type was also introduced. The

format for online help, first adopted by the Finder's Info Center in Mac OS 8, was now used throughout. This made it easier for software companies to write online help systems. The PPP control panel was removed and replaced with Remote Access, which provides the same functionality but also allows connections to

AppleTalk Remote Access AppleTalk Remote Access, or ARA, was a protocol stack that allowed AppleTalk to be run over modems. It became a fairly major product for Apple Computer in the early to mid-1990s when their first portable and laptop computers were available (and v ...

(ARA) servers. The installation process was simplified considerably in Mac OS 8.5. In earlier versions the installer worked in segments and often required a user to click to continue in between stages of the installation. This was a holdover from the days when the OS was distributed on multiple floppy disks, disk swapping promoting a natural segmentation model. The Mac OS 8.5 installer generally required very little user interaction once it was started. Customisation options were also much more detailed yet simpler to manage. From Mac OS 8.5 onward, MacLinkPlus document translation software is no longer bundled as part of the Mac OS. Mac OS 8.5 was the first version of the Mac OS to support themes, or skins, which could change the default Apple Platinum look of the Mac OS to "Gizmo" or "HiTech" themes. This radical changing of the computer's appearance was removed at the last minute, and appeared only in beta versions, though users could still make (and share) their own themes and use them with the OS. The Appearance control panel was also updated to support proportional scroll bars, and added the option for both scroll arrows to be placed at the bottom of a scroll bar. Along with themes support, 8.5 was the first version to support 32-bit

icons An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most c ...

. Icons now had 24-bit color (16.7 million colors) and an 8-bit

alpha channel In computer graphics, alpha compositing or alpha blending is the process of combining one image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render picture elements (pixels) in separate pas ...

, allowing for transparency-translucency effects. The ''application palette'' made its debut with 8.5 – the application menu at the right side of the menu bar could be resized to show the active application's name, or 'torn off' into a palette of buttons. This palette could be customized in many ways, by removing the window frame and changing the size and layout of the buttons. Apple provided no user interface to set these options, instead making them available via AppleScript and

Apple Events Apple events are the message-based interprocess communication mechanism in Mac OS, first making an appearance in System 7 and supported by every version of the classic Mac OS since then and by macOS. Apple events describe "high-level" events suc ...

and relying on third parties to provide a user interface for the task. By setting it to display horizontally and turning off the window border, the palette's look and function could be configured to resemble the

task bar.

Mac OS 8.5.1

Mac OS 8.5.1, released December 7, 1998, was a minor update to Mac OS 8.5 that fixes several bugs that caused crashes and data corruption.

Mac OS 8.6

Released May 10, 1999, Mac OS 8.6 added support to the

Mac OS nanokernel The Mac OS nanokernel is an operating system kernel serving as the basis of most PowerPC based system software versions 7 through 9 of the classic Mac OS, predating Mac OS X. The initial revision of this software is a single tasking system whic ...

to handle preemptive tasks via the Multiprocessing Services 2.x and later developer API. This update improved PowerBook battery life and added Sherlock 2.1. This free update for Mac users running 8.5 and 8.5.1 was faster and much more stable than either version of 8.5.x and was also the first version of Mac OS to display the version number as part of the startup screen. However, there was still no process separation; the system still used cooperative multitasking between processes, and even a process that is Multiprocessing Services-aware still had a portion that ran in the "blue task", which also ran all programs that were unaware of it, and was the only task that could run 68k code.

Versions

Compatibility

Notes

References

External links

* from apple.com * from apple.com * from apple.com * from apple.com
Mac OS 8 Hardware Compatibility
{{Authority control 1997 software Classic Mac OS PowerPC operating systems Microkernel-based operating systems Microkernels