Mac OS 9.0

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Mac OS 9.jpg
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The final major version of the "classic" Macintosh system software. Requires a PowerPC processor.

The final version of OS 9 ever released is under Mac OS 9.2.

Features

Sherlock 2

The Internet search detective lets you create your own web-based news channels—and finds people and the best deals in online shopping, too.

With over 800 million pages of web content vying for your attention, it’s easy to get lost in the sea of information out there. Unless you have Sherlock, the powerful search technology that may have been the best-loved feature in Mac OS 8.5. And now with Mac OS 9, you could start to see a number of fan sites dedicated to the world’s most famous Internet search detective. Because now there’s Sherlock 2, and “next level” doesn’t begin to describe it.

Hungry for news and information? Sherlock 2 will find it for you, tailoring its search results according to your query. Sherlock 2 lets you find and get in touch with people, too. Use it to hunt down those high school or college classmates, the friends you used to hang with in your old neighborhood, or former colleagues you’ve lost track of. Sherlock not only finds their phone numbers, it even serves up their email addresses (where available).

Shopping on the Internet just got easier, too. Sherlock 2 not only finds the best deals online and ranks them by price, it also shows you details about availability. And it’s not just for new stuff, either: With more and more treasures coming out of the attic and onto the Internet, that out-of-print comic book, rare video or one-of-a-kind sketch you’ve been looking for could find its way online. And when it does, Sherlock 2 will find it.

 

Another neat thing about Sherlock 2 is that it lets you enjoy a high degree of personalization: You get a choice of icons to assign to your different channels (like a shopping cart for your shopping channel, and so on), but you can also choose to personalize Sherlock with your own icons. Simply drag and drop images into Sherlock from your desktop, and you’re done.

Sherlock 2 keeps your channels up-to-date automatically, adding search sites and e-commerce sites as they come online. So you’ll always have the very latest news and information—and the scoop on the Internet’s hottest deals—at your fingertips.

Multiple Users

What do you do when you share your Mac with friends or family members who turn out to have preferences that are very different from yours—and you’d rather they didn’t fool with your settings? The answer is, you go out and get a copy of Mac OS 9—and give each of them his or her own virtual Macintosh.

 

It’s easy. With Mac OS 9, you can allow up to 40 different users to allocate different amounts of memory for their favorite applications, pick their choice of desktop themes (or create their own), select their preferred combination of System sounds (or, again, create their own), or choose to launch a particular application at startup.

Want to restrict someone’s access to certain applications or folders? You can with Mac OS 9. Because Mac OS 9 lets you specify how much access—and liberty to change things—each individual user can have. You can, for instance, allow them to speed up or slow down mouse tracking, sort their views the way they like, bookmark favorite websites, and do many other things that create, in effect, a personalized Mac for each individual user.

No other computer enables as high a degree of personalization as Macintosh. And with Mac OS 9, no other computer can reflect the personal preferences of so many different users as Macintosh.

Voiceprint Password

Just say the magic words: Mac OS 9 performs voice analysis, so you can log in without using your keyboard. An individual’s voiceprint is as unique as a fingerprint—no two voiceprints are alike—and Mac OS 9 uses this to your advantage. With its Voiceprint Password feature, your voice is your password.

Record yourself speaking a phrase—it can be the default phrase “My voice is my password,” or even something fanciful like, say, “Afghanistan banana stand”—and Mac OS 9 stores your voiceprint for comparison. Later on, when you want to log in without the effort of typing in your password, Mac OS 9 analyzes the waveform of your voice to make sure you are who you say you are.

 

If it’s really you, all systems are go—your Mac starts up automatically with all your settings and preferences just the way you like them. If, however, it’s people pretending to be you, no dice: they can talk and talk till they’re blue in the face, and Mac OS 9 will deny them access to your personal files.

Better still, the Voiceprint Password feature works with the Keychain feature (see 4), so you might think of what you have here as synergistic security on the one hand—and sheer convenience on the other.

Keychain

Keeping track of a slew of Internet passwords can be a major challenge, even for web surfers with prodigious memories. As you probably know, you can’t use one password for everything because password conventions vary widely from website to website. One online publication or e-commerce site might insist that you use a minimum of eight nonconsecutive numbers, another might require that you use a combination of between six and nine letters and numerals, while still another might arbitrarily assign you a password and then rebuff your attempts to change it to something you can more easily remember. It’s enough to drive you into doing something you’ve been warned against: writing down all your passwords—and defeating the purpose of elaborate security measures in the first place.

 

Good thing the personal Keychain built into Mac OS 9 stores all your passwords and user IDs securely and lets you unlock them all with a single password. Thanks to the Keychain feature, logging in by speaking (see 3) or typing a single password automatically unlocks all your email, web and file server accounts—as well as files encrypted on your hard drive. And it’s a benefit you’ll come to appreciate in the months ahead as more and more third-party developers incorporate the Keychain feature into new versions of their email and web server software.

Not that every item that gets locked gets added to the Keychain automatically. Mac OS 9 asks you if that’s what you want, and lets you decide what to keep locked and on the Keychain on an item-by-item basis. Think of it as a key to greater convenience.

Auto Updating

In addition to releasing new versions of the system software at regular intervals—in effect, enabling you to upgrade your Mac very inexpensively from time to time—Apple also releases a stream of free software updates and powerful plug-ins to enrich your computing experience.

 

As the Mac OS grows and evolves, downloading these updates and plug-ins to their proper place in your System folder lets you keep your Mac up-to-date with the latest enhancements. Only now there’s no more need for scouring the Internet or searching CDs for the up-to-the-minute updates you need—and no need even to manually download updates and add them to their proper place in your System folder. Because now you can let Mac OS 9 do it: Mac OS 9 uses the Internet to download (and even install) the latest updates, drivers and other enhancements from Apple—automatically.

You can even set Mac OS 9 to check Apple’s server periodically and automatically download and install updated software for you. And, as an added benefit, Mac OS 9 only installs software that’s been digitally signed by Apple, so you don’t have to worry about downloading non-authorized updates by mistake.

Encryption

The Internet has been described as a massive security breach that’s waiting to happen. That’s why we made industrial-strength encryption such an important new feature of Mac OS 9. You can use the new Encrypt command in the Mac OS 9 Finder to encrypt individual documents on your hard disk—and send them across the Internet with confidence.

 

As the Internet boom gets under way and millions of people stay in touch via e-mail, the need for ironclad security has never been greater. With shady types trolling the Internet for information of a personal nature, you need to keep in mind that what you say can and will be used against you if it falls into the wrong hands—and you don’t want that. After all, whether your e-mail contains details about your personal aspirations or information about the little ones in your family—or proprietary business information that needs to be safeguarded at all costs—private e-mail messages between individuals need to be just that: private. Now they can be, thanks to Mac OS 9.

With Mac OS 9, you can encrypt important files that need to remain confidential and send them to other Mac OS 9 users around the world. Because Mac OS 9 uses encryption technology that’s as good or better than that of some servers used for e-commerce purposes.

So even if someone manages to slip into your office physically (when you’re on a coffee break, say) and steals sensitive files that you’ve encrypted, they can’t read what’s in them. Ditto with encrypted files stored on a server. You’ll have the peace of mind that comes from knowing that security will not be compromised. Because Mac OS 9 keeps your private information private, accessible only to those with whom you choose to share it over the Internet.

File Sharing over the Internet

Apple’s simple-to-use, built-in file sharing now works over the Internet as easily as it works between two Macs in the same room. Internet file sharing is implemented using ShareWay IP from Open Door Networks. With Mac OS 9, File Sharing works over the TCP/IP protocol, so you can share your files, folders and disks with other Macintosh users at home, school or at work—or at a branch office halfway around the world. And when you give your friends or colleagues permission to log on, they can see the folders you’re sharing with them right on their desktops—just like local disks or file servers.

 

How it works: To share items on your Mac with others on the Internet, just turn on File Sharing, select the items to be shared, and set the access privileges for the people with whom you’ll be sharing your files and folders. You can even share applications designed for multiple users on a network simply by turning on the Program Linking option in the File Sharing control panel.

AppleScript over TCP/IP

Mac OS 9 takes automation to the next level with AppleScript over TCP/IP. So now you can remote control any Mac—or an entire bank of Macs—and operate large-scale workflows over intranets and the Internet.

AppleScript makes it a snap to automate everything from the simplest task to the most complex workflow processes. AppleScript over TCP/IP takes that capability several steps further, with program-to-program linking that works over industry-standard protocols. So you can now combine the processing power of a group of Power Macs and iMacs over the Internet—or an intranet—with each doing its part to automate large-scale projects like publishing a magazine.

What’s more, you can do it remotely, from wherever you happen to be—and get more work done without doing more work.

 

Not sure which Mac on your network has the file you’re looking for? With AppleScript over TCP/IP, you can make each machine search itself to find it for you.

Network Browser

Know how easy it is browse through the files and folders on your hard disk, or to select a printer on your network? With the Network Browser feature in Mac OS 9, that’s how easy it is to find Internet file servers, FTP servers and web servers—and browse through files and directories on FTP servers—across the World Wide Web. The Mac OS 9 Network Browser remembers commonly used networks and servers for quick access, and lets you connect to others simply by typing an URL.

 

The Network Browser feature in Mac OS 9 lets you see servers on TCP/IP networks the way you’re able to see AppleShare servers on AppleTalk networks listed in the Chooser. The Mac OS 9 Network Browser supports SLP—the industry-standard protocol for “ad hoc” networks—so you can find other computers on your local area network. The Mac OS 9 Network Browser also supports the domain name services (DNS) protocol to take advantage of existing network infrastructures, as well as LDAP (the directory protocol for arbitrary organization of network resources). The result? You suddenly have the perfect network-sleuthing complement to Sherlock—yet another great way to find stuff on the Internet.

Previous Versions

External Resources

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