The two reasons that make the Apple Macintosh so powerful and easy to use are: 1) its fully implemented G3 or new "super computer" G4 processor in the entire hardware line-up, and more importantly, 2) Apple's operating system called the Mac OS. The basis of the modern Apple Mac OS started in 1984 with the first Macintosh, during the dawn of the personal computer revolution.

The Macintosh was a computer ahead of its time boasting an operating system with a true graphical user interface, commonly referred to as GUI (pronounced goo-wee). But GUI was not actually a discovery of Apple's, rather it was discovered by an elite group of Xerox researchers in the mid 1970s. Steve Jobs, one of Apple's founders saw the technology on a tour of the Xerox research facility and instantly fell in love. Xerox later canned the project as GUI was too expensive as a viable business tool (at the time).

Six years before Microsoft created its own GUI Apple had established themselves as a world class GUI computer system manufacturer. The fun icons, the pull down menus and the WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) experience was cute. Early in its existence the Macintosh had no hard disk drive, the "floppy shuffle" was necessary to run applications and save documents. The first Macs were not power-user material, but the GUI experience was elegant, impressive, fun, and they were Steve Jobs' dream become reality.

Most business types didn't associate "fun" with computers in 1984 so many had reservations about work efficiency on this new machine, let's call this poor judgement. Apple's current motto, "Think different" may have been even more fitting then than now. As the years passed, studies have proven that a GUI provides much greater work efficiency on average, and Macintosh users are significantly more efficient than users on other platforms.

So businesses didn't subscribe to the GUI, at first, but now, it has become a standard for nearly all computer users. Why the switch? Why did it take years to catch on? I'll leave the answers to these questions to be pondered, discussed and resolved by the scholars and philosophers of the next millennium.

The Modern Mac OS

The modern Mac OS seamlessly integrates elegance, customizability, stability, features and functionality into an extremely powerful and user friendly package. The heart of the experience on a Macintosh is provided by the Mac OS. It is the Mac OS alone that makes the Macintosh one of the easiest computers to use.

The fact that a G3 or G4 processor resides in every Mac assembled today is a big reason for the platform's power, but it's the responsibility of the Mac OS to utilize that potential power, and the Mac OS does, and then some!

At this writing, Mac OS 8.6 is the current version shipping, but Mac OS 9 will be in stores soon; Mac OS 9 is discussed later. For those Mac users with a 200MHz+ machine, if you aren't using 8.6, you may want to re-think that decision. If you're already using 8.5.x, download the free update from Apple, the new features and power will astound you. For those thinking about Macintosh, don't worry, Mac OS 8.6 is already on all the new machines.

The Mac OS interface is elegant and easily customizable. But to call it elegant is an understatement as nearly every function of the Mac OS is customizable for the user to define their own definition of elegance. Desktop pictures, patterns, sounds, the entire "look and feel" can be easily modified through the Appearance control panel based on user preference. Other elegant features of the operating system include running programs automatically on startup or shutdown, standardized short-cut keys to most of the Mac OS and application functions.

Nearly every aspect of the Mac OS is customizable typically through control panels or the control strip which can be present on the desktop at all times. From the mouse, the screen, voice recognition, speech synthesis, networking options to maintain and switch to multiple Internet profiles, it's all customizable. It's easier to list the things that aren't customizable, and this writer can think of only one thing, you can't have separate voice pattern recognition user profiles for one computer, but this is one of the new features in Mac OS 9.

Stability of an OS is crucial to all users, whether a network/Internet administrator, a graphics professional, a web developer or a home user, nobody wants their computer to crash. Apple places considerable attention on stability, especially in OS 8.6. Apple rewrote their entire power management process to be smaller, more efficient and significantly more stable. And the virtual memory option offers significant memory management enhancements that actually speed the performance of the Mac and reduce memory requirements for programs. The new file structure introduced in the Mac OS, called HFS+, allows for greater volume sizes, significantly more free space when volumes have lots of files, faster file access, and again as in all the new features, greater overall stability of the system.

Mac OS 8.6 is capable of the basic operating system features of all the others, but what really sets it apart is everything Apple includes. The feature list includes - Sherlock (see discussion), ColorSync, AppleScript, QuickTime, File Exchange, Open Transport, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Netscape Navigator, Location Manager, Extension Manager, Speech Recognition, Voice Synthesis, CD quality audio, Disk First Aid, Disk Copy, Mac OS Help and many others. Nearly every one of these features deserves its own discussion, but alas, the editor allows only so much space, so I'll concentrate on some of the big and truly unique features to Macintosh.

What is a computer if it isn't functional. Apple has gone to great painstaking lengths to determine that every aspect of customizability, stability and features have been proven to integrate with one another. To call it integration is a misnomer as nearly all aspects of the Mac OS flow together through each other with Speech Recognition, AppleScript, Location Manger and Sherlock. Another third party product called QuicKeys from CE Software can also help automate Mac OS and application interactions through easily created shortcuts.

So all this is what makes the Macintosh so gosh-darn user friendly and powerful, and yes, you can just use the default settings that Apple pre-installs or spend a little time playing with the options to create your own unique Macintosh experience.

Modern Mac OS Case Study

Let's summarize the functionality of the Mac OS, we'll say you use your Macintosh for a server gateway to the Internet at your location so all computers can connect through a local network. Maybe you also use it as your web page, email, print, file and remote access server, and it's your responsibility to keep it running. This machine is key to everything you do, you don't want this computer to be down, but if it does go down, you don't want to baby-sit the machine at 3:23am. So you get yourself a small dongle that plugs into the Mac keyboard from Sophisticated Circuits called PowerKey Rebound that detects for a lockup every 10 minutes (user definable). If your Mac did lock up the dongle forces your Mac to restart. It also relaunches individual applications and schedules periodic restarts.

Remember, you put all the server software you wanted to run in the startup folder so it automatically executes when the Mac is booted. Some of that software required a few unique settings based upon your needs, so some of those programs were actually AppleScript programs that you created in a few seconds with the easy-to-use record feature of the Scripting Editor.

So your Mac reboots, and all your server programs are turned back on and everything works as if you had been there to do it yourself. And you used the features of the Mac OS plus the PowerKey Rebound dongle, nothing more needed, and you didn't even need to be there!

The Case for Sherlock

Do you ever get those messages in an Internet search engine, "You have 21,567 matches". How long would you spend browsing all those matches to find what you're looking for? Oh sure, you can narrow it down a bit by tweaking your search to maybe 5,284 hits, but is this any better? Time is money, right? And indubitably Apple Computer thinks so, too!

"Think different." Apple Computer has done it again, Sherlock brings the Macintosh to its standing as the easiest and most powerful computer, especially when connected to the Internet. Sherlock allows you to search the entire Internet using plain English, quite a revolution for all Internet users! Just type what you're thinking and press "Search", it's that easy. Better yet, Sherlock is a free software component included in the current Mac OS.

Sherlock eliminates the clutter and complexity of Internet search engines and can search ALL and any engines quickly and efficiently through the use of special scripts. In a few seconds a result window of about 100 sites ordered by relevance to your search text appears with a conspicuous relevancy bar to use as a comparison guide. There is a visible indicator of which search engine found your matches, and by clicking once on the link a the lower portion of the Sherlock window displays a brief description of the web page found.

Special scripts are used to provide Sherlock with its functionality, 25 are included with Mac OS 8.6. Advanced users can write their own Sherlock scripts or download them from web sites, and Sherlock is smart enough to update it's own scripts off the Apple Internet site when a new one becomes available. This is also a feature of Mac OS 9, the difference being the entire operating system can be upgraded through the Internet automatically.

Specific scripts (search engines) can be selected for Sherlock to search through. Apple includes scripts for the big eight search engines such as, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Hotbot, and also other sites such as Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Apple Computer, CNN and Rolling Stone.

Sherlock also includes several other features for searching your local computer or network including Find File and Find by Content features. The Find File searches your computer or networked computers for specific file names, file dates, file creators, file labels, file attributes, etc. Find by Content lets you search for a file by the actual physical content within files. Say you don't remember the name or the date modified of a word processing file and you can't remember where you put it. You may remember a name you typed in the file so you can Find by Content for that name. There are still other uses and features of Sherlock that you really must see for yourself.

Adam Smith, an Economist Before His Time

Although Sherlock Holmes and Adam Smith never knew each other personally, Apple is combining the detective skills of Sherlock with the early principals of the great Economist, Adam Smith. Smith lived and died about 200 years ago, but in the same year our great country's Constitution was ratified, 1776, he published his first edition of the Wealth of Nations.

The Wealth of Nations was outstanding in its time, and its concepts are still the basis of modern economics. It was controversial and debated as are many new concepts today (GUI and colorful and appealing computers, for example, remember, "Think different."). The two most important bits of information to glean from Mr. Smith are the seeds of the theories of efficient markets and perfect information. To try to make a long story short (Smith's book was over 1000 pages), truly efficient markets are ones where the costs of goods and services (and stocks) reflect their actual value. Perfect information is where all consumers have all information about all sellers of goods and services, including cost, price, options, features, etc.

Now, put these two together and what you have is a capitalistic market with a socialistic twist. Because everybody knows everything about the products and services they are purchasing, you get exactly what you pay for, and the Jones' next door are paying the exact same amount. Differentiation and specialization will still exist, but again, consumers will know exactly what they're getting before paying, so people will pay an extra amount for the products and services with different or more complete features.

Now that we've got that brief bit of history out of the way, let's go back to the Mac OS, Sherlock and you. Sherlock II, a free component of Mac OS 9 and the son of Sherlock will be an even bigger splash as Smith's concept of perfect information is on its way. You will be able to use Sherlock II to search web listing sites consisting of goods and services. You can arrange those products based upon price so you can see the least expensive to the most expensive. Then click on an item listed and you'll go directly to the web site to get more detail. You can shop on-line and get the best price or the greatest feature packed product or service you're looking for.

This is just one of the new features of Sherlock II in Mac OS 9. At the time of writing this article the scheduled release of Mac OS 9 is early October. A total of over 50 new features will be added to the Mac OS's already impressive, powerful and easy to use features, making this a must-have update for Mac users everywhere.

But Mac OS 9 is not Apple's last step, it's only a stepping stone to the next level, OS X (the "X" in this case is actually the Roman Numeral for ten). OS X server software is already available from Apple. It's based upon a BSD Unix shell with object-oriented programming techniques. It is able to execute current Mac software, Unix programs, and a new programs in a simplified Macintosh interface called Carbon. Carbon was written to ease the work of developers while using most of their original code they have for current Macintosh applications. OS X source code for its Unix engine, called Darwin, is available from Apple's web site, free, much the same as Linux is now.

OS X client software will be forthcoming, expect it in the first half of 2000. Sherlock II will also to be included in OS X, but I'll cover OS X in a future article relating to Apple's web server options and future operating systems.

Chuck Hauge is currently a consultant and sales associate at Team Electronics, an Apple Authorized Dealer located in Oakdale. He can be contacted by email at: chaz@cphsolutions.com"