PC Exchange was a
utility program
Utility software is software designed to help analyze, configure, optimize or maintain a computer. It is used to support the computer infrastructure - in contrast to application software, which is aimed at directly performing tasks that benefit ord ...
for
Apple Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software ...
computers. It was a
control panel for the
classic Mac OS
Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. ...
that lets the
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
mount
FAT file system
In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...
s and mapped
file extensions to the user-defined
type and
creator code
A creator code is a mechanism introduced in the classic Mac OS to link a data file to the application program which created it. The similar type code held the file type, like "TEXT". Together, the type and creator indicated what application shoul ...
s.
It was first made available in 1992 as a
commercial software
Commercial software, or seldom payware, is a computer software that is produced for sale or that serves commercial purposes. Commercial software can be proprietary software or free and open-source software.
Background and challenge
While sof ...
product from Apple, but in 1993, it was no longer a commercial product on its own, and shipped with
System 7 Pro as part of Apple's push to become more compatible with
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...
. It worked transparently, mounting the disks on the desktop as if they were normal Mac disks, with the exception of the large letters PC on the icon which were visually similar to the
IBM logotype
A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wordm ...
. Originally only
floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined ...
s were supported, but later versions added support for hard drives, CD-ROMs and other types of media.
PC Exchange is not used in
macOS
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 ...
, which uses a completely different driver architecture to read the
FAT file system.
Compatibility layers
Classic Mac OS
Apple Inc. file systems
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