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The Blue Meanies of Apple Computer was an engineering group primarily responsible for the architecture of System 7 during the early and mid 1990s.
The name references the evil characters of Pepperland in the movie Yellow Submarine , and originated with the Pink and Blue split in Apple's operating system planning. Pink was the further-out project that ultimately became Taligent, and Blue designated incremental improvements to the flagship System 7. "Meanies" describes the group's architectural role, which frequently entailed instructing or negating engineers in other groups.
Though the Meanies have sometimes been characterized as the "coders of System 7", the OS was by then sufficiently large that major subsystems such as QuickDraw and QuickTime were developed and maintained by specialized groups, and the Meanies primarily focused on orchestrating the components together.
The name appeared outside of Apple as an Easter egg starting in System 7.0.1, where the texts "Help! Help! We're being held prisoner in a system software factory!" and "The Blue Meanies:" were followed by a list of names. Subsequent releases were updated to track the comings and goings of people in the group. [1]
The nickname became well known, because many of the Meanies were also the senior engineers interacting with developers at venues such as the Worldwide Developers Conference (especially on the Stump the Experts panel) and MacHack. This included Darin Adler and Lew Cirne. [1]
macOS, originally Mac OS X, previously shortened as OS X, is an operating system developed and marketed by Apple since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and laptop computers, it is the second most widely used desktop OS, after Microsoft Windows and ahead of all Linux distributions, including ChromeOS.
The Power Macintosh, later Power Mac, is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc as the core of the Macintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006.
In computing, Xyzzy is sometimes used as a metasyntactic variable or as a video game cheat code. Xyzzy comes from the Colossal Cave Adventure computer game, where it is the first "magic string" that most players encounter.
Taligent Inc. was an American software company. Based on the Pink object-oriented operating system conceived by Apple in 1988, Taligent Inc. was incorporated as an Apple/IBM partnership in 1992, and was dissolved into IBM in 1998.
The history of macOS, Apple's current Mac operating system formerly named Mac OS X until 2011 and then OS X until 2016, began with the company's project to replace its "classic" Mac OS. That system, up to and including its final release Mac OS 9, was a direct descendant of the operating system Apple had used in its Mac computers since their introduction in 1984. However, the current macOS is a UNIX operating system built on technology that had been developed at NeXT from the 1980s until Apple purchased the company in early 1997.
The Macintosh IIci is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from September 1989 to February 1993. It is a more powerful version of the Macintosh IIcx, released earlier that year, and shares the same compact case design. With three NuBus expansion slots and a Processor Direct Slot, the IIci also improved upon the IIcx's 16 MHz Motorola 68030 CPU and 68882 FPU, replacing them with 25 MHz versions of these chips.
An Easter egg is a message, image, or feature hidden in software, a video game, a film, or another — usually electronic — medium. The term used in this manner was coined around 1979 by Steve Wright, the then-Director of Software Development in the Atari Consumer Division, to describe a hidden message in the Atari video game Adventure, in reference to an Easter egg hunt.
The Konami Code, also commonly referred to as the Contra Code and sometimes the 30 Lives code, is a cheat code that appears in many Konami video games, as well as some non-Konami games. In the original code, the player has to press the following sequence of buttons on the game controller to enable a cheat or other effects:
System 7 is the seventh major release of the classic Mac OS operating system for Macintosh computers, made by Apple Computer. It was launched on May 13, 1991, to succeed System 6 with virtual memory, personal file sharing, QuickTime, TrueType fonts, the Force Quit dialog, and an improved user interface.
The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is an information technology conference held annually by Apple Inc. The conference is usually held at Apple Park in California. The event is usually used to showcase new software and technologies in the macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS families as well as other Apple software; new hardware products are sometimes announced as well. WWDC is also an event hosted for third-party software developers that work on apps for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other Apple devices. Attendees can participate in hands-on labs with Apple engineers and attend in-depth sessions covering a wide variety of topics.
The dogcow, named Clarus, is a bitmapped image designed by Apple for the demonstration of page layout in the classic Mac OS. The sound she makes is "Moof!", a portmanteau of "moo" and "woof". Clarus became the archetype of surrealistic humor in the corporate culture of the original Macintosh group, particularly as the mascot of Apple’s Developer Technical Support as officially documented in Technote #31.
Copland is an operating system developed by Apple for Macintosh computers between 1994 and 1996 but never commercially released. It was intended to be released with the name System 8, and later, Mac OS 8. Planned as a modern successor to the aging System 7, Copland introduced protected memory, preemptive multitasking, and several new underlying operating system features, while retaining compatibility with existing Mac applications. Copland's tentatively planned successor, codenamed Gershwin, was intended to add more advanced features such as application-level multithreading.
Star Trek is the code name that was given to a secret prototype project, running a port of Macintosh System 7 and its applications on Intel-compatible x86 personal computers. The project, starting in February 1992, was conceived in collaboration between Apple Computer, who provided the majority of engineers, and Novell, who at the time was one of the leaders of cross-platform file-servers. The plan was that Novell would market the resulting OS as a challenge to Microsoft Windows, but the project was discontinued in 1993 and never released, although components were reused in other projects. The project was named after the Star Trek science fiction franchise with the slogan "To boldly go where no Mac has gone before".
CodeWarrior is an integrated development environment (IDE) published by NXP Semiconductors for editing, compiling, and debugging software for several microcontrollers and microprocessors and digital signal controllers used in embedded systems.
Rhapsody is an operating system that was developed by Apple Computer after its purchase of NeXT in the late 1990s. It is the fifth major release of the Mach-based operating system that was developed at NeXT in the late 1980s, previously called OPENSTEP and NEXTSTEP. Rhapsody was targeted to developers for a transition period between the Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X. Rhapsody represented a new and exploratory strategy for Apple, more than an operating system, and runs on x86-based PCs and on Power Macintosh.
The architecture of macOS describes the layers of the operating system that is the culmination of Apple Inc.'s decade-long research and development process to replace the classic Mac OS.
The System suitcase is one of two essential files that make up the classic Mac OS, the other being the Macintosh Finder. If either file is missing or corrupted, a Macintosh may display a blinking question mark when booting. The suitcase is located in the System Folder, like the Finder file, and contains keyboard layouts, FKEY resources, cursors, icons, sounds, and, in System 6, bitmap fonts, and desk accessories. Mac OS only supports one System file; the presence of more than one System file on a hard disk is likely to cause system instability.
The Newton is a series of personal digital assistants (PDAs) developed and marketed by Apple Computer, Inc. An early device in the PDA category, it was the first to feature handwriting recognition. Apple started developing the platform in 1987 and shipped the first devices in August 1993. Production officially ended on February 27, 1998. Newton devices ran on a proprietary operating system, Newton OS; examples include Apple's MessagePad series and the eMate 300, and other companies also released devices running on Newton OS. Most Newton devices were based on the ARM 610 RISC processor and all featured handwriting-based input.
The Mac App Store is a digital distribution platform for macOS apps, often referred to as Mac apps, created and maintained by Apple Inc. The platform was announced on October 20, 2010, at Apple's "Back to the Mac" event. Apple began accepting app submissions from registered developers on November 3, 2010, in preparation for its launch.