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11 Dec 1997 - 10 Aug 2026

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What the New Mac OS Does for You

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With the Finder at last written in code optimized for the PowerPC processor, Mac OS 8 brings Apple into the nineties and offers powerful and convenient new capabilities.

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by Alan Stafford

With Mac OS 8, Apple has at last delivered a Finder optimized for the PowerPC chips that have hummed within Macs for the last few years. More importantly, it brings many real ease-of-use improvements, the likes of which we haven't seen since the change from System 6.5 to System 7. The number implies a mere incremental advance over its predecessor, System 7.6.1. Mac OS 8 is more than that, however. It's not the completely revised, bottom-to-top revamped operating system the world insists the Mac platform needs; i.e., it doesn't offer features such as preemptive multitasking or protected memory, as the forthcoming Rhapsody promises. But it does pack the power most of us need. Even so, seeing as how 7.6.1 is just a few months old, you may wonder why you need to play Apple's little update game. Don't fix what isn't broken, right? The problem is, Apple's operating system does need fixing. It's awash in patches, workarounds and compromises, and it suffers as a result. With each passing upgrade, however, Apple flushes out some of those obsolete elements and tunes the operating system for newer machines. Mac OS 8 takes that process further than any operating system since System 7. While older machines are left behind, more recent models will thrive on the new OS. For them, 8 is great. But a round number isn't reason enough to shell out the cash; you may need a little convincing. Take a look at OS 8, inside and out.

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OS 8 allows you to display pretty pictures as your desktop backdrop; drag windows to the bottom of the screen to store them as pop-ups.

040 and Over To join the OS 8 party a Motorola 68040 or PowerPC processor must power your Mac. That cuts out all the 68030-powered Macs; For those machines, System 7.6.1 is the end of the line. Any machine not supported by 7.6.1 -- the IIcx and older -- were clotheslined at System 7.5.5. Why? Peter Lowe, Mac OS 8 product manager, explains the cutoff was necessary to make the operating system better. "By no longer supporting 030 and earlier machines, the Mac OS engineering team has been able to remove a lot of code that was specific to 24-bit addressing, for example." As the version numbers for the Mac OS climb, the system supports fewer machines and caters more to Power Mac owners. The way Apple sees it, however, older machines aren't upgraded that often, and they still run well on older versions of the OS. "We're hoping our installed base of users who might be on 68K today are going to give Power Macintosh and PowerPC systems a second look because Mac OS 8 takes such great advantage of those systems," said Lowe. We were pleasantly surprised that even the owners of 68040-powered Macs will still reap benefits from OS 8 -- more than might be expected with the rush to PowerPC. The price tag may be a bit harder to justify for those machines, though. Look on the bright side: Buy a new Mac and get OS 8 free. Even if you do have a qualifying machine, you still need substantial resources within: 20MB of RAM (12 of it must be real RAM chips) to run the new OS with its integrated Internet applications, or 16MB (8MB physical) without them. OS 8 costs $99 SRP for the CD version, and an upgrade from OS 7.6 is $69. If you purchased a Mac after June 22, you can get it for the price of shipping: $10. You will be able to get it on a big stack of floppy disks for an extra $25. Appearance Counts The first thing you notice is the look -- the Mac OS 8 desktop seems as if it belongs to a totally different computer. Instead of the familiar System 7, it's the spit and image of Copland, Apple's dead-and-buried operating system, or Aaron, a shareware interface enhancement extension that mimics Copland. The changes aren't just skin-deep, though; because of its numerous interface enhancements, it works better, too. You can now display full-screen, untiled pictures, such as landscapes, as your desktop background. The visual quality is spectacular; small-file images look great, even at 256 colors. You can use your own images or the included ones, and you can still use tiled patterns, if you prefer. Elsewhere, the Copland treatment appears in window title bars, scroll bars, dialog boxes, buttons and icons. Title bars come with three little boxes -- a close box, an expand-window box and a roll-up box á la WindowShade, which still works if you simply double-click the title bar itself. Scroll bars and many icons get a 3-D look. Icons show up as the old-fashioned type or they can be square buttons. As buttons, they only require a single click to activate, which makes the system easier for children to use. Buttons can only be two sizes, however -- monstrously large or about the same as an icon. Finder windows have changed substantially: In addition to the title bar and scroll bar modifications, in a list view you now see the file name, date and other details listed in boxes at the top of the window, instead of as small, underlined text; as usual, click on a box to sort the window by that attribute. Grid lines separate enclosed elements and the window background is grey, not white. Dates appear as not only "June 27, 1997," but also "Today, 8:12 PM" or "Yesterday, 9:45 AM." If you want to put the window out of the way without closing it entirely, you can drag it to the bottom of the screen where it transforms itself into a pop-up tab. Click on the tab and it opens to the full window, but click elsewhere and it collapses back to its tab. Drag it by its title bar and it becomes a normal window again.

Navigating nested folders is easier, too. You can delve deep into subfolders by double-clicking on a drive or folder icon (hold down on the second click) to open the drive or folder window; Apple calls these items "spring-loaded." Continue to hold down the mouse button, move the cursor to a subfolder -- and it magically opens before your eyes. You can keep opening nested folders until you reach bottom. A preference setting controls how long it takes to open up windows; on its shortest setting, it still seems a bit slow, and you can't open an enclosed application or document while you're rooting around in there; you must let go of the mouse button to open up the window you're in, then double-click on the file the conventional way. ASD Software's PopUp Folder works better, but for now, it's incompatible with System 8. Menu bars include more options. You can customize the look and usage of each window individually: Instead of a View control panel, you now pull down a Viewing Options menu for each window. Also, the help menu has been moved from the far right side of the menu bar to a text menu in the middle of the bar; apparently people didn't understand what that little question mark doodad was. The length of the menu can be normal, which shows more options than before, or short, if you don't want to mess around with a huge number of options.

Tired of icons? Big, beautiful buttons are a new option.

A keen addition is support for contextual menu plug-ins. Mac OS 8 incorporates a contextual menu manager that allows applications to use third-party solutions to add functionality. These plug-ins aren't application-specific: Lowe explained that third parties can extend contextual menus based on what a selected item within a document is, such as text or a graphic. In other words, if you're in an application that doesn't have a spell checker, such as Photoshop, and you've selected some text in an image, a contextual menu plug-in could recognize it as text and provide the spell-checking option in the menu bar. "It's a great opportunity for third parties to add value to other people's programs," Lowe said. The Finder Is Found More important than the pretty new face is the new PowerPC-native Finder. The new Finder makes Macs much more responsive, which addresses a big gripe with older OS versions. Before OS 8, the Finder was written in code designed for older, 680X0 Macs. Power Macs accessed that code with an emulator that translated it into something they could read. That translation process takes time, causing those systems to seem sluggish, even with the fastest processors. Compared to Windows and other operating systems, the Mac OS was frustratingly slow at opening windows, and scrolling down a list of folder contents often resulted in hesitations and blank spots on the screen. No more. Windows burst forth before your eyes, buttons appear and are gone before you know it, and the system seems to enjoy scrolling through windows. Lowe revealed Apple's strategy: "We have not optimized the Finder for copy throughput [transfer rate]; we've optimized for user responsiveness, and we make no apologies there because that's the number-one priority." The PowerPC-native Finder also means multitasking: the ability to make the processor do several things at once, such as copying files while you open applications and empty the trash. "The fundamental runtime architecture of the Mac OS doesn't change with OS 8," said Lowe. "We still have a cooperative multitasking model," which allocates processor time evenly to competing applications, as opposed to a preemptive multitasking model that allocates processor time depending on how needy an application is. The new OS now takes advantage of the Thread Manager extension, which Apple has included in the OS for some time. "Developers take advantage of it [the Thread Manager] to allow their programs to multitask within themselves. With Mac OS 8, the Finder takes advantage of that multithreading capability to allow it to do many things at the same time." The Finder of OS 8 will run on 68040 Macs as well, Lowe is quick to point out; just because it's PowerPC-native doesn't mean non­Power Macs are out in the cold. Those 68040 machines will also be able to take advantage of the multithreading capabilities of the Finder.

Mac OS 8's new color picker allows you to pick colors by clicking on crayons in the control panel option-clicking any color on the screen.

Embracing the Internet You've got to hand it to Apple for the way it has built Internet access into OS 8. Not that getting online was particularly difficult with previous systems, but OS 8 makes it even easier. When you install OS 8, you're prompted to use an Internet configuration routine; just answer a few questions -- name, password, IP addresses and so on -- and you're set. The assistant configures the TCP/IP, PPP and other control panels for you. Two icons on your desktop serve as aliases to your browser and e-mail applications. CyberDog 2.0, Netscape Navigator 3.01 (Communicator didn't arrive in time) and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.01 come with OS 8. Mac OS Runtime for Java is built into OS 8, so Java applets can run independently, without using a browser. Open Transport 1.2 is in the deal, so you should enjoy faster, more stable connections. With Personal Web Sharing, you can now use any Mac as a Web server. This is most useful over small Local Area Networks (LANs), where you might not want to share entire hard drives, but just certain folders or files. Networked users can access the files you designate with a Web browser; that attribute means non-Macs can access those files, too. And the files don't have to be HTML. The system also comes with PointCast and Marimba's Castanet Tuner to "push" Web content onto your desktop. "Push" technology downloads Web pages automatically, without your having to search for them or manually dial them up with your browser. PointCast appears as a screen saver and delivers news, weather reports and stock and sports tickers; better yet, Apple will have its own PointCast channel, so you can get all Apple news, all the time. Castanet, a Java-based application, can be set up on a server to automatically distribute and maintain software applications and content on LAN-based client computers or over the Internet. Performance In practice, OS 8 is faster, smoother and more stable; instead of working in fits and starts, it operates at a more steady pace, so it's more pleasant to use. Even with the final beta version we tested, Type 11 errors occured far less often. The system seems very polite; instead of rude, cursor-freezing crashes, you get a warning box that alerts you to the fact that your application has bailed on you, and that you really ought to restart your machine. But you don't have to if you don't want to -- if you like playing with fire. Virtual Memory continues to evolve. "We're seeing about a 9% raw performance improvement," said Lowe. Apple encourages almost everyone to use VM, unless you have prodigious amounts of RAM. You'll notice the memory allocation for the system decreases when you turn virtual memory on; the Finder is PowerPC-native, so it can run in less memory with VM. The Finder wasn't the only culprit slowing down System 7, though; much of the operating system is still a patchwork enabling it to work on a wide variety of Macs, old and new."There's no question, as long as we have a system that is a combination of PowerPC-native code, 68K high-level code and 68K assembly language, there are going to be system-specific aspects of the software, but that has been significantly cleaned up over the last year," Lowe said. However, Apple can only chop at the OS so much without eliminating a large number of its customers. Fortunately, the advent of Rhapsody could relieve the pressure to do so.

The Info Center is a browser-based help resource.

Make the Move to OS 8 OS 8 is a substantial upgrade with greatly enhanced capabilities, particularly for Power Macs. It isn't simply a minor bug fix, as the fractional upgrades to System 7 have been, so it should be high on your list of scheduled software purchases.