Macintosh kit-Wikipedia

The Macintosh kit ( English Macintosh Toolbox ) is a collection of resources, drivers, routines and programming interfaces, which used to be in the Rome models of Macintosh computers. These were later as ” Old-World-ROM “Models. The Macintosh kit is used by the operating system for Macintosh-Computer, the Macintosh System Software, which was later referred to as classic Mac OS-Mac OS cannot be carried out without the Macintosh kit.

In order to save work and floppy storage space, numerous components of the operating system have been provided in a Rome since the first Macintosh with 128 KB RAM. RAM (RAM) was twice as expensive at this time as the same amount of memory Rome, and 128 kb of RAM already represented a significant cost factor during production. In addition, this measure offered a certain speed advantage, since Rome could be read faster than the combination of RAM And data from disks, because the data should have been loaded from a floppy disk into the RAM. Disposal drives were far slower than the Rome. In addition, the routines in Rome were always available in the Rome – without providing valuable storage space on disks, which was important for the programs and their data. ^[first] Likewise, the original Macintosh from 1984, retronymous, was called “Macintosh 128k”, the sparse RAM for the programs. ^[2]

Since the content of the ROM was defined with the delivery of the computer, all contents of the kit are jumped into a table. In order to make the Macintosh kit expandable, a newer routine from the operating system (from disk) can be loaded into the RAM (RAM). The jump address in the table is redirected to the function now available in the RAM. The new one is used automatically instead of the outdated function of the Rome. This allowed z. B. Cleaning errors and expanding functions, which then cost a little RAM.

OldWorld [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

At the end of the 1980s, Rome and Ram’s price ratio turned over, Rome was now significantly more expensive than the same amount of RAM and also slower. From 1992 also in the A pped- I BM– M Otorola alliance (AIM) Developed a new RISC processor based on IBMS power architecture, which should replace the Motorola-68000 family. The first models with this PowerPC baptized processor, the PowerPC 601, came onto the market in 1995. A nanokernel was loaded in the system ROM, which was able to emulate 68k program code transparently. The Macintosh kit was originally developed in Pascal and then implemented in Motorola-68000 assemblers for reasons of speed and space. On the PowerPC, the Macintosh-ROM was almost unchanged in 68K machine code as before in Rome, which made the existing firmware further usable and also ensured software for the necessary compatibility, since any software use the transparent 68K emulation via the nanokernel could. This procedure enabled Apple a gentle transition from a processor architecture to a completely different actually incompatible commanding set architecture, but it also led to a loss in the execution speed. As a result, the actually faster PowerPC in a Macintosh computer under System 7 (later Mac OS 7.6) was not much faster than the 68K processor, which he was supposed to replace-because of the speed.

Gradually, the Macintosh kit or Macintosh-ROM was translated into programming language C and C ++ and converted into native PowerPC machine code. The computer’s firmware was also switched to the open firmware based on the Sun Microsystems. This firmware should offer the necessary hardware components quickly and finally hand over control to the Mac-OS-Boatloader. These first Macintosh computers with open firmware received the name after 1998 OldWorld (German: “Old World”) because it contains the Mac-OS-Rom, which contains parts of the Macintosh kit, as AAPL,ROM Provide in the device tree of the open firmware. ^[3] The Macintosh kit is therefore part of the firmware and, as usual, part of the Rome, which is why it continues to continue Macintosh rom was designated.

NewWorld [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

When Apple received access to the source text of the Open firmware, numerous Macintosh-specific extensions flowed into it. The result was Open Firmware 3.0, which could already charge eleven objects and accessed the file systems HFS and EXT2. This type of Apple Mac computer was as a NewWorld (German: “New World”). Numerous functions that were necessary to start an operating system were shifted to the open firmware-and in return the Mac-OS-ROM were outsourced. This was referred to as “ROM-in-RAM”, since the Macintosh kit was no longer available in Rome, but was loaded from a file from the hard disk into the faster RAM when starting the operating system. The first Newworld-Mac was the IMAC “Bondi” presented in 1998, followed in 1999 the PowerBook G3 “Lombard” and the blue and white Power Mac G3.

Important components of the Macintosh kit include:

• QuickDraw
• Window Manager
• Dialog Manager
• Control Manager
• Menu Manager
• Event Manager
• Textedit
• Resource Manager
• Finder interface
• Scrap-Manager
• Standard file package
• Sound Manager

At the beginning of the 1990s, Apple was no longer competitive with the “Macintosh System Software” operating system, which was considered outdated (renamed Mac OS from 1996). Microsoft and IBM worked on a graphic operating system that should be as easy to use as the Apple operating system, but also offered modern functions such as cooperative multitasking and storage protection. During the development of System 7, the Macintosh kit from 68k assembler was implemented on C and even ported with the “Star Trek” project (System 7 on an IBM-PC-compatible computer) to the X86 architecture.

In the end, however, Apple failed when trying to either expand its operating system or replace it with a modern new development. Projects such as Pink (Taglent) and Copland were never completed while Microsoft celebrated great success with Windows 95 and had developed IBM with OS/2 and Microsoft with Windows NT stable and modern operating systems.

At the end of 1996, Apple received a modern Unix-based operating system, which contained a non-compatible object-oriented programming interface (API) name OpenStep. This new API was finally further developed by Apple in the Rhapsody operating system project as a Yellow Box and with Mac OS X as a cocoa.

However, since many providers of user software indispensable for Apple demanded that the system compatible with the original Macintosh-API, a new programming interface was implemented both under Mac OS from version 8.1 and under Mac OS X Source-Code -Compatibility with the Macintosh kit should offer. This kept the porting effort for existing applications low and software manufacturers were able to portray their programs relatively quickly to the new Mac OS X operating system, which completely replaced the older classic Mac OS from 2002. This compatible programming interface received the name Carbon and is in Mac OS X, which was renamed MacOS in 2016, until Macos Mojave, which is version 10.14 from 2018, has not been developed since 2007 and has also been developed and no longer to 64- Bit ported, so that only 32-bit applications can use the functions of the carbon programming interface under Mac OS X. In the successor Macos Catalina from 2019, only 64-bit applications are supported.

At ” Old-World “-Macintosh computers was still saved in Rome. The storage capacity of the built -in Rome has been increased from 64 kb to 4 MIB from 1994 to 1998 since 1984.

At ” New-World “-Macs are the following versions of the Mac us rum known: ^{[4] [5]}

1. ↑ Andy Hertzfeld: We’re Not Hackers! We were always dealing with memory limitations. In: The Original Macintosh – Anecdotes about the development of Apple’s original Macintosh, and the people who made it. Folklore.org, September 1983, Retrieved on November 9, 2016 (englisch): „…as we started to get some software going on the prototype, it became increasingly clear that we didn’t have enough RAM for the kind of graphic intensive applications that we wanted to build; … Burrell added another row of 8 memory chips, doubling the RAM size to 128K … ROM is half the price per bit of RAM, so it makes sense to use as much as we can. … Fortunately, we had started to use the resource manager to load objects like fonts and drivers, so we had some flexibility about keeping stuff on disk instead of the ROM. … But code on floppy disk is much slower to load, and it also would reduce the effective size of each disk.“
2. ↑ David Craig: 3rd Party Developers and Macintosh Development. Some Comments about Developing Applications for the Apple Macintosh 128 Computer from a 20 Year Perspective. In: The Original Macintosh – Anecdotes about the development of Apple’s original Macintosh, and the people who made it. Folklore.org, January 1984, Retrieved on November 9, 2016 (englisch): „…Sophisticated Macintosh applications required more resources than the Macintosh 128 provided. The original Macintosh’s 128K bytes of memory and 400K byte disk drive were on the small size when it came to sophisticated applications (I recall reading that even in Apple there was lots of discussion about this). The original Macintosh was really around a 90K byte memory machine since the screen took 22K bytes of memory and a bit of memory was devoted to system code such a ROM patches and file system buffers. I recall my Investor application was around 200K bytes in size and though it ran on the original Macintosh it was slow due to constant application code segment swapping. …“
3. ↑ Netneurotic.de
4. ↑ Mac OS: Matching Mac OS ROM File To Mac OS Version. Apple Computer, Inc., February 20, 2012, accessed on May 7th, 2017 (English).
5. ↑ Mac-on-Linux contains the text file /Doc/NewWorld-ROM , available z. B. here
6. ↑ Power Mac G4 Mac OS ROM 1.8.1. Apple Computer, Inc., 18. OCTOBER 1999, accessed on May 7th, 2017 .
7. ↑ Ethernet Update 1.0 Document and Software. (No longer available online.) Apple Computer, Inc., May 30, 2000, archived from Original am 20. April 2001 ; accessed on May 7th, 2017 (English): “This update replaces the” Mac OS Rome “file with the newer version 3.8.”