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Introduction to Mac OS X

Ever wonder why people get so attached to their Mac? Think Mac OS X. At the core of every Mac, Mac OS X is what makes your digital life more simple, more productive, and just plain fun.

It’s easy.

Mac OS X is a celebration of simplicity and common sense. No complicated menus. No obscure commands. Most tasks can be accomplished with just a click or two. And if you ever need guidance, there’s a built-in help system to light the way. Oh, one more thing: Mac OS X is simply breathtaking — and easy to personalize with desktop pictures and screen savers.

It’s advanced.

Making amazing things simple takes seriously advanced technology. Mac OS X is built on a rock-solid UNIX foundation, delivers true 64-bit performance, and incorporates industry-leading animated graphics. The beauty is, you don’t have to know what one word of that means — just start up your Mac and enjoy it.

It’s amazing.

More than an operating system, Mac OS X is a collection of very cool applications. It comes with everything you need to surf the web, send beautifully designed email, video chat, and organize your personal information.

It’s secure.

In a world where PCs constantly do battle with viruses and malware, Mac OS X is a sea of tranquility. Just go about your business and Mac OS X minds the fortress. Your documents are safe even if you share your Mac with others, and you can keep your kids safe by using a rich set of parental controls.

It’s compatible.

It’s a big world out there, and Mac OS X fits in perfectly. It runs Microsoft Office. It has built-in drivers for cameras, printers, and external drives. It plugs right into a PC network. And in case there’s a PC application you can’t live without, Mac computers can even run Windows. Mac OS X is compatible with everything — most of all, you.

ShrinkWrap’s interface is nicer than Disk Copy’s and lets you do what you want quickly, with minimum interruptions. As with Disk Copy, all the commands are available from menus, however you can also do nearly anything in ShrinkWrap by dragging and dropping onto the application while depressing specific modifier keys. Dropping without modifiers mounts images and creates them from folders or disks. Holding Control causes ShrinkWrap to verify the dropped image(s) and display a log window. (Disk Copy can also verify images, but will stop on the first error.) Control-Shift dragging converts images to your preferred format, as specified in the ShrinkWrap preferences. Holding Option lets you specify options for the current operation. The interface for doing so is the same as the well-designed Preferences dialog, however the changes you make are temporary. Other drag modifiers are documented in the about box and manual.

Disk Copy was the default utility for handling disk images in System 7 through Mac OS X 10.2 (Usable in System Software 6 as well). In later versions of Mac OS X it has been replaced by DiskImageMounter for mounting the images and Disk Utility for creating them.

Although the last official public release of Disk Copy for Mac OS 9 was version 6.3.3, there was to be a version 6.5 that supported the newer DMG image format introduced with Mac OS X. But because Apple had stopped support for OS 9 already, support for the old OS was eventually removed in favour of OS X. As such the OS 9 version of 6.5 only ever made it to beta 13 before development on it stopped. There was also a developer version 6.4 that 6.5 was based on and had most of the same functionality, but as a developer version it was never released.

Disk Copy was also the name of an Apple utility distributed with some of the earliest version of the Mac OS. In order to copy 400K floppy disks using as few disk swaps as possible on a machine with only 128K of RAM, the original Disk Copy used the screen buffer to store binary data from the disk being copied; as a result, the screen (other than a small area at the bottom displaying the GUI) filled with noise while copying was in progress.