Definition of Macintosh in Network Encyclopedia.
What is Macintosh?
Macintosh was a personal computing platform released in 1984 by Apple Computer. The Apple Macintosh introduced a number of user interface innovations to the popular personal computer market.
These innovations, originally developed at the Stanford Research Institute and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) in the 1970s, included a graphical user interface (GUI) with mouse-clickable program icons and resizable windows.
The Macintosh originally used the 680×0 series of microprocessors from Motorola and now uses the PowerPC processor developed by Apple, IBM, and Motorola.
The Macintosh operating system was originally called System. Now it is known as MacOS. While it holds a much smaller market share than Microsoft Windows, the Macintosh has a niche in the desktop publishing and graphics industry and among some groups of university professionals.
Macintosh computers and Intel-based computers can be part of the same network. For example, Services for Macintosh allows servers running Windows NT to support Macintosh client machines by emulating an AppleShare server, and it allows servers running Windows NT to provide Macintosh clients with file and print sharing service and AppleTalk routing capability.
A similar set of components including File Server for Macintosh, Print Server for Macintosh, and the AppleTalk protocol, which together are referred to as AppleTalk network integration, can be used on machines running the Windows 2000 platform to enable Macintosh computers to interoperate with PC networks based on the Windows 2000 operating system. AppleShare is a file-sharing protocol that is a part of AppleTalk, a suite of networking protocols developed by Apple for its Macintosh computing platform.
