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The Mac

In this episode, The Mac . . .


While looking for something to share with you today, this article from the How-to Geek Newsletter by BENJ Edwards popped up in my feed.

Hello the Apple Macintosh, or The Mac, has been a well-known computer platform since 1984. Have you ever wondered why it's called Mac? Yes, It's Named after a Type of Apple.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ron Wayne founded Apple Computer on April 1, 1976. No fooling! After visiting an apple farm while on a fruitarian diet, Jobs decided on the Apple name. The story has it; Jobs wanted Apple to alphabetically appear before Atari in the phone book.

In 1979, an Apple employee, Jeff Raskin, began working on Apple's experimental appliance-like computer project. In a 2003 interview with ACM's Ubiquity journal, Raskin described the origins of what he named the project: "I called it 'Macintosh' because the McIntosh is my favorite kind of apple to eat. And I figured that if I was going to have an apple, It might as well be a delicious one."

The McIntosh Red is a tart apple with red and green skin; it's the national Apple of Canada and was popular in New England while Raskin was growing up in New York. The McIntosh apple got its name from a Canadian farmer named John McIntosh, who discovered an apple seedling on his farm in 1811, cultivated it, and liked the way its fruit tasted.

Early on, Jeff Raskin had decided to add an “a” to the Mac in Macintosh to try to avoid possible trademark conflicts with a hi-fi audio company McIntosh Laboratory, based in New York.

Steve Jobs took over the Macintosh project in January 1981. For a short time afterward, Jobs wanted to call the computer Bicycle, referencing one of his favorite sayings, “A computer is a bicycle for the mind.”

Still attached to the Macintosh code name, developers never liked Bicycle, and Macintosh won out. To clear up legal issues, Steve Jobs wrote McIntosh Laboratory a letter in 1982 asking to use the name. After some negotiations, Apple licensed the rights to the character from McIntosh Laboratory in 1983, then bought the trademark outright in 1986.

Since the beginning of the Apple Macintosh brand Apple employees, the press, and customers alike have abbreviated the name to Mac for convenience. It’s much easier to say, and the nickname stuck: Upon the launch of the original Macintosh, Apple released MacPaint and MacWrite applications that quickly became must-haves for the new platform.

Since Mac’s operating system (OS) was only designed for one computer—the Macintosh—Apple initially called very early versions of Mac OS under generic names like “System 1,” later formalized to Macintosh System Software or just System Software. In 1997, Apple changed the OS’s name to Mac OS with the release of Mac OS 7.6 to make it easier to license the OS to Mac hardware clone makers at the time. It was more distinctive to sell Mac OS 7.6 than System Software 7.6.

With the iMac release in 1998, Apple brought the Mac abbreviation to an Apple computer name formally for the first time. Eventually, it made its way to other products like the Power Mac G4 and the MacBook Pro. These days, Apple just calls its platform Mac, and you don’t see much mention of Macintosh anywhere in Apple’s marketing literature today.

Even so, we suspect that ole’ farmer John McIntosh would be amazed at what his little seedling inspired.

I'm Patrick Ball; thanks for listening; see you in the next episode.

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