Essential Guide to Computing: The Story of Information Technology, The

The Mac OS

Apple Computer, established in 1976, was immediately and fabulously successful. The company's Apple II was well-designed and well-built. Because Apple made it an open system, an array of third-party vendors surfaced to provide both hardware and software extensions. It's a credit to its founders, Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, that they refused to stand pat and put great effort into advancing the state-of-the-art, especially in software. Apple was a particular leader in improving the UI, but the idea of a computer with a graphical UI was not born at Apple. Jobs saw a working system at Xerox's PARC facility in 1981 (this later became Xerox's Star system) and it was this that inspired him to build one of his own. But neither this lack ...