The Macintosh Classic was a personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from October 1990 to September 1992. It was the first Macintosh to sell for less than US$1,000.
Descent is a first-person shooter (FPS) game developed by Parallax Software and released by Interplay Productions in 1995 for MS-DOS, and later for Macintosh, PlayStation, and Acorn Archimedes. It popularized a subgenre of FPS games employing six degrees of freedom and was the first FPS to feature entirely true-3D graphics. The player is cast as a mercenary hired to eliminate the threat of a mysterious extraterrestrial computer virus infecting off-world mining robots. In a series of mines throughout the Solar System, the protagonist pilots a spaceship and must locate and destroy the mine's power reactor and escape being caught in the mine's self-destruction, defeating opposing robots along the way. Players can play online and compete in either deathmatches or cooperate to take on the robots.
Adobe PageMaker is a discontinued desktop publishing computer program introduced in 1985 by Aldus on the Apple Macintosh. The combination of the Macintosh's graphical user interface, PageMaker publishing software, and the Apple LaserWriter laser printer marked the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution. Ported to PCs running Windows 1.0 in 1987, PageMaker helped to popularize both the Macintosh platform and the Windows environment.
Produced by Boston-based IDG World Expo, Macworld/iWorld is a trade show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It was held annually in the United States during January. Originally Macworld Expo and then Macworld Conference & Exposition, the gathering dates back to 1985.
Claris International Inc., formerly FileMaker Inc., is a computer software development company formed as a spin-off from Apple Computer in 1987. It was given the source code and copyrights to several programs that were owned by Apple, notably MacWrite and MacPaint, in order to separate Apple's application software activities from its hardware and operating systems activities.
Ambrosia Software was a predominantly Macintosh software company founded in 1993 and located in Rochester, New York, U.S. Ambrosia Software was best known for its video games, but also published utility software. Its products were distributed as shareware; demo versions could be downloaded and used for up to 30 days. The company also released some products for iOS. Ambrosia's best-selling program was the utility Snapz Pro X, according to a 2002 interview with company president Andrew Welch.
StuffIt was a family of computer software utilities for archiving and compressing files. Originally produced for the Macintosh, versions for Microsoft Windows, Linux (x86), and Sun Solaris were later created. The proprietary compression format used by the StuffIt utilities is also termed StuffIt.
Stunt Copter is a Macintosh game that was released in the mid to late 1980s and which involved piloting a small helicopter around a playfield. The player would have to position the helicopter and then click the mouse at the right time so that a person suspended from the aircraft would fall into a hay bale on a moving cart. Unless precisely timed, the person might fall onto the ground or injure the horse or the driver of the cart.
The Mac OS X Public Beta was the first publicly available version of Apple Computer's Mac OS X operating system to feature the Aqua user interface. It was released to the public on September 13, 2000 for US$29.95. Its release was significant as the first publicly available evidence of Apple's ability to ship the long-awaited "next-generation Mac operating system" after the Copland failure. It allowed software developers and early adopters to test a preview of the upcoming operating system and develop software for the forthcoming operating system before its final release. It is the only public version of Mac OS X to have a code name not based off a big cat until the release of 10.9 Mavericks in 2013. The US version had a build number of 1H39 and the international version had build number 2E14.
Scarab of Ra is a Mac OS shareware computer game written in 1987 by Rick Holzgrafe and released in 1988 by Semicolon Software. It is an adventure set within an Egyptian pyramid.
Softdisk was a software and Internet company based in Shreveport, Louisiana. Founded in 1981, its original products were disk magazines. It was affiliated and partly owned by paper magazine Softalk at founding, but survived its demise.
Rogue Amoeba Software, Inc. is a Macintosh software company that produces audio software, specializing in applications for audio capture. Rogue Amoeba's best-known products are Audio Hijack and Audio Hijack Pro. The Audio Hijack programs allow for users to capture and record audio from any program running under macOS. The Pro version adds support for VST, Audio Unit, and LADSPA plugins, among other features.
A Macintosh clone is a computer running the Mac OS operating system that was not produced by Apple Inc. The earliest Mac clones were based on emulators and reverse-engineered Macintosh ROMs. During Apple's short lived Mac OS 7 licensing program authorized Mac clone makers were able to either purchase 100% compatible motherboards or build their own hardware using licensed Mac reference designs.
Allume Systems was a software developer, founded in 1988 by David Schargel and Jonathan Kahn in New York City as Aladdin Systems to develop, publish and distribute software for personal computers. Allume was incorporated in January 1989.
MacUpdate is an Apple Macintosh (desktop) app/software download website, which was started in the late-1990s. MacUpdate has been featured in several magazines and newspapers including The New York Times, USA Today, Detroit News & Free Press, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Macworld, and MacLife.
TaskMaker is a role-playing video game for the Macintosh developed by Storm Impact. The original black-and-white version was published by XOR Corporation in 1989. In 1993, Storm Impact released an upgraded shareware version of TaskMaker featuring color graphics and compatibility with newer versions of the classic Mac OS. Storm Impact also released a sequel, The Tomb of the Taskmaker, in 1997. With Storm Impact's closure that same year, both TaskMaker games are no longer supported. They are still covered by intellectual property rights, including copyrights.
Mac gaming refers to the use of video games on Macintosh personal computers. In the 1990s, Apple computers did not attract the same level of video game development as Microsoft Windows computers due to the high popularity of Microsoft Windows and, for 3D gaming, Microsoft's DirectX technology. In recent years, the introduction of Mac OS X and support for Intel processors has eased porting of many games, including 3D games through use of OpenGL and more recently Apple's own Metal API. Virtualization technology and Boot Camp also permit the use of Windows and its games on Macintosh computers. Today, a growing number of popular games run natively on macOS, though as of early 2019, a majority still require the use of Microsoft Windows.
The Macintosh is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Inc. since January 1984.
Classic Mac OS refers to the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The Macintosh operating system is credited with having popularized the graphical user interface concept. It was included with every Macintosh that was sold during the era in which it was developed, and many updates to the system software were done in conjunction with the introduction of new Macintosh systems.
Dejal is a company that develops software for Mac OS X. Established by developer David Sinclair in 1991 in Auckland, New Zealand and since relocated to Portland, Oregon, the company develops and distributes a variety of shareware and freeware applications. Dejal has also released a number of open source projects to be used by other Mac developers in their software.
