History of Mac OS - Mac OS 8

Mac OS 8

Mac OS 8 was released on July 26, 1997, shortly after Steve Jobs returned to the company. It was mainly released to keep the Mac OS moving forward during a difficult time for Apple. Initially planned as Mac OS 7.7, it was renumbered "8" to exploit a legal loophole and accomplish Jobs's goal of terminating third-party manufacturers' licenses to System 7 and shutting down the Macintosh clone market. 8.0 added a number of features from the abandoned Copland project, while leaving the underlying operating system unchanged. A multi-threaded Finder was included, enabling better multi-tasking. Files could now be copied in the background. The GUI was changed in appearance to a new shaded greyscale look called Platinum, and the ability to change the appearance themes (also known as skins) was added with a new control panel. This capability was provided by a new "appearance" API layer within the OS, one of the few significant changes.

Apple sold 1.2 million copies of Mac OS 8 in its first two weeks of availability and 3 million within six months. In light of Apple's financial difficulties at the time, there was a large grassroots movement among Mac users to upgrade and 'help save Apple'. Even some pirate groups refused to redistribute the OS.

Mac OS 8.1 saw the introduction of an updated version of the Hierarchical File System called HFS Plus, which fixed many of the limitations of the earlier system (HFS Plus continues to be used in OS X). There were some other interface changes such as separating network features from printing, and some improvements to application switching. However, in underlying technical respects, Mac OS 8 was not very different from System 7.

Mac OS 8.5 focused on speed and stability, with lots of old 68k code replaced by modern code native to the PowerPC. It also improved the appearance on the system, although the theming feature was cut late in development.

• Mac OS 8.0 (first version to require a 68040 processor, dropping support for the remainder of the Macintosh II series and other 68030 Macs, added support for the PowerPC G3 processor)
• Mac OS 8.1 (last version to run on a 68K processor, added support for USB on the Bondi iMac, added support for HFS+)
• Mac OS 8.5 (first version to run only on a PowerPC processor, added built-in support for Firewire on the PowerMac G3)
• Mac OS 8.5.1 (bug fixes that were causing crashes)
• Mac OS 8.6 (included a new nanokernel for improved performance and Multiprocessing Services 2.0 support, added support for the PowerPC G4 processor)