Some of us are old enough to recall life before word processors. (It wasn't that long ago.) Consider this sentence:
How did we survive in the days before every last one of us had access to word processors and computers on our respective desks?
- Before running out to buy Microsoft Word (or another industrial-strength and expensive) word processing program for your Mac, remember that Apple includes a respectable word processor with OS X. The program is TextEdit, and it call s the Applications folder home.
- At Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple executives unveiled the latest version of MacOS, called Big Sur (and also known as MacOS 11).The new operating system will include.
- The Mac vs PC debate will continue as long as they are the two major choices for hardware and operating systems. Each system does some things better; it's really a matter of what features are important to you and what you're going to use the computer for.
That's not a great sentence — it's kind of wordy and repetitious. The following sentence is much more concise:
It's hard to imagine how any of us got along without word processors.
The purpose of this mini-editing exercise is to illustrate the splendor of word processing. Had you produced these sentences on a typewriter instead of a computer, changing even a few words would hardly seem worth it. You would have to use correction fluid to erase your previous comments and type over them. If things got really messy, or if you wanted to take your writing in a different direction, you would end up yanking the sheet of paper from the typewriter in disgust and begin pecking away anew on a blank page.
Word processing lets you substitute words at will, move entire blocks of text around with panache, and apply different fonts and typefaces to the characters. You won't even take a productivity hit swapping typewriter ribbons in the middle of a project.
The standard operating system on a Mac is called Mac OS X (See links below) which is built on a UNIX system. A Mac can also run the Windows and Linux operating systems if required. Whenever Apple releases a new version of its operating system, it's freely available to download and install on any Mac that supports it. Windows 10 gets free updates, too, on a twice-a-year schedule.
Before running out to buy Microsoft Word (or another industrial-strength and expensive) word processing program for your Mac, remember that Apple includes a respectable word processor with OS X. The program is TextEdit, and it call s the Applications folder home.
The first order of business when using TextEdit (or pretty much any word processor) is to create a new document. There's really not much to it. It's about as easy as opening the program itself. The moment you do so, a window with a large blank area on which to type appears.
Have a look around the window. At the top, you see Untitled because no one at Apple is presumptuous enough to come up with a name for your yet-to-be-produced manuscript.
Notice the blinking vertical line at the upper-left edge of the screen, just below the ruler. That line, called the insertion point, might as well be tapping out Morse code for 'start typing here.'
Indeed, you have come to the most challenging point in the entire word processing experience, and it has nothing to do with technology. The burden is on you to produce clever, witty, and inventive prose, lest all that blank space go to waste.
Okay, got it? At the blinking insertion point, type with abandon. Type something original like this:
It was a dark and stormy night
Can you buy mountain lion at apple store. If you typed too quickly, you may have accidentally produced this:
It was a drk and stormy nihgt
Fortunately, your amiable word processor has your best interests at heart. See the dotted red line below drk and nihgt? That's TextEdit's not-so-subtle way of flagging a likely typo. (This presumes that you've left the default Check Spelling as You Type activated in TextEdit Preferences.)
You can address these snafus in several ways. You can use the computer's Delete key to wipe out all the letters to the left of the insertion point. (Delete functions like the backspace key on the Smith Coronayou put out to pasture years ago.) After the misspelled word has been quietly sent to Siberia, you can type over the space more carefully. All traces of your sloppiness disappear.
Delete is a wonderfully handy key. You can use it to eliminate a single word such as nihgt. But in this little case study, you have to repair drk too. And using Delete to erase drk means sacrificing and and stormy as well. That's a bit of overkill.
Use one of the following options instead:
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- Use the left-facing arrow key (found on the lower-right side of the keyboard) to move the insertion point to the spot just to the right of the word you want to deep-six. No characters are eliminated when you move the insertion point that way. Only when the insertion point is where it ought to be do you again hire your reliable keyboard hit-man, Delete.
- Eschew the keyboard and click with the mouse to reach this same spot to the right of the misspelled word. Then press Delete.
Now try this helpful remedy. Right-click anywhere on the misspelled word. A list appears with suggestions. Single-click the correct word and, voilà, TextEdit instantly replaces the mistake. Be careful in this example not to choose dork.
What's the big deal about operating systems in the first place? What do they actually do? An operating system is the level of programming that lets you do things with your computer. The operating system interacts with a computer's hardware on a basic level, transmitting your commands into language the hardware can interpret. The OS acts as a platform for all other applications on your machine. Without it, your computer would just be a paperweight.
At its heart, a computer is a number-crunching device. It takes input in the form of zeros and ones -- bits -- and channels them through various circuits and processors. The hardware behaves according to strict rules. We define these rules using things like logic gates, which take input and produce an output in a predictable way. Some simple computers have no need of an operating system because they only perform a specific task. But personal computers need to be more versatile. The operating system allows complex programs to access the capabilities of the hardware to get results. Only the hardware's physical properties and our own imaginations can limit what programs can do.
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You could design an operating system by physically programming it into a computer's circuits. This would require building electrical pathways using millions of logic gates. But such an operating system would be inflexible. That's why operating systems like Mac OS X and Windows are software. Software is more malleable than hardware -- you can make changes through software patches and version updates. To do the same with hardware would mean switching out physical chips and circuit boards.
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Operating systems are like the manager for a computer. It's the job of the OS to monitor what software needs and what the hardware can provide. As you run applications on your computer, the OS allocates the resources necessary to complete the task. That can include processing power, memory allocation and computer storage access, among other things. Ideally, the OS will make sure that your computer's hardware is never overtaxed.
The OS also allows programs to run on a computer. Without an OS, a programmer would have to design an application to run on the hardware directly. News software download. This isn't very efficient. An operating system acts as an application interface to the hardware. The OS does this through an application program interface (API). Program developers build applications for the API. Assuming the programmer has done a good job at building an application without any serious bugs, it should run just fine on the operating system.
One important part of the Mac computer is the firmware. Firmware is a level of programming that exists directly on top of a hardware layer. It's not part of the operating system itself. The Mac firmware is the first stored program that executes when you turn on a Mac computer. Its job is to check the computer's CPU, memory, disk drives and ports for errors. The PC equivalent to the Mac firmware is called BIOS, which stands for basic input-output systems. A second program called a bootloader loads the Mac OS X, assuming there are no errors reported by the firmware.
Next, we'll take a closer look at what makes the Mac OS X tick.
