Apple Macintoshes run their own OperatingSystem, also made by Apple. They are collectively known as MacOS, although there are several major versions. Version 7 was around at the time of windows 3.1, but everyone chose the inferior system anyway... Versions 8.5 through to all versions of 9 is the more familiar look and feel, and the latest, Mac OS X (pronounced OS ten) is a complete re-write that has a FreeBSD and Mach based kernel.
Initially written for the Motorola 68000? CPU, the later versions (up until Mac OS X) never supported such things as ProtectedMemory. Support for the PowerPC was hacked in to System 7.5. The promised rewrite for the PowerPC (codenamed Copland) was supposed to be System 8, but it was so late that eventually Apple cancelled it and bought NeXT instead. The NeXT engineers effectively rewrote NeXTStep?, incorporating a few features from Copland (such as Carbon) and took so long that Apple might as well have just finished Copland.
Part of CategoryOperatingSystem
