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Macintosh OS
Macintosh System 7, later renamed Mac OS 7, was really the Macintosh operating system of the 90s. It was introduced on May 13, 1991 and wasn't replaced until 1997 when Mac OS 8 debuted. System 7 saw the Macintosh transition from Motorola's 68000 line of CPUs to the PowerPC architecture in 1994. It also supported a full 32-bit address space, which meant support for more RAM than previous versions. While multitasking was optional in previous versions of the Macintosh System software, System 7 made multitasking standard. Other improvements included System Extensions being located in their own subfolder, the Control Panel being broken up into separate control panels and located in their own subfolder, and the Apple menu listing the contents of another new folder, Apple Menu Items, including aliases.
On July 26, 1997, six years after the release of Macintosh System 7, Apple replaced the venerable operating system with Mac OS 8. Mac OS 8 was released as a series of updates over the course of two years, the final update being Mac OS 8.6. Each update introduced new features ultimately culminating in the release of Mac OS 9 in October 1999. New features included the Platinum interface, a native PowerPC multithreaded Finder, the new HFS Plus file system, and native PowerPC versions of QuickDraw and Sherlock. With Sherlock, Mac OS 8 was truly an Internet connected operating system. The search utility was not only capable of searching the user's computer for local files but also the World Wide Web through the use of simple plugins.
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