A Happy Mac is the normal bootup (startup) icon of an Apple Macintosh computer running older versions of the Mac OS operating system. It was designed by Susan Kare in the early 1980s. It resembles models of the Compact Macintosh series. The icon remained unchanged until the introduction of the PowerPC Macs, when it was updated to 8-bit color. Adoption of this new icon was not universal for all Macs, however, as some late PowerPC Macs still had black and white "Happy Mac". The Happy Mac indicates that booting has successfully begun, whereas a Sad Mac (along with the "Chimes of Death" melody or one or more beeps) indicates a hardware problem.
When a Macintosh boots into Mac OS 9 or lower, the system will play its startup chime, the screen will turn gray, and the Happy Mac icon will appear, followed by the Mac OS splash screen (or the small "Welcome to Macintosh" screen in System 7.5 and earlier), which underwent several stylistic changes. Mac OS versions after 8.6 also included the version number in this splash screen i.e. "Welcome to Mac OS 8.6".
On early Macs that had no internal hard drive, the computer would boot up to a point where it would need to load the operating system from a floppy disk. A standard installation of System 7 was too big for a floppy disk, so Macs that don't support hard disks can that only boot up to System 6.0.8. Until the user inserted the correct disk, the Mac would display a floppy icon with a blinking question mark. In later Macs, a folder icon with a question mark that repeatedly changes to the Finder icon is shown if a valid System Folder cannot be found.
With OS X 10.1, Puma, a new Happy Mac was included. This is also the last version that had a Happy Mac logo.
With the introduction of OS X, the blinking system folder icon was replaced with the prohibition icon, the bomb screen was replaced with a Kernel panic (which was originally coloured white but was changed to black in version 10.3) and, in version 10.2, the Happy Mac symbol was replaced with the Apple logo.
Read more about this topic: Welcome To Macintosh
Famous quotes containing the word happy:
“... in the happy laughter of a theatre audience one can get the most immediate and numerically impressive guarantee that there is nothing in one’s mind which is not familiar to the mass of persons living at the time.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)