Archive for June 8, 2024
Apple Announces Snow Leopard
June 8, 2009
At their World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple announced their next Mac operating system, Mac OS X 10.6, known as Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard, the follow up to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, was as the name somewhat insinuated, more of an update to the previous OS than a full blown feature upgrade. Indeed many of the features in Snow Leopard were performance updates and optimizations for 64-bit and mutli-core processors. It was also the first Mac OS to drop support for the PowerPC processor line, focusing only on the Intel processor, which Apple has switched to for their Macintosh computers in 2006. Additionally the footprint of the OS was actually smaller, which would save disk space for users of Snow Leopard when it was released in September of that year.
One Processor to Rule Them All
June 8, 1978
Intel introduces the 16-bit 8086 processor with clock speeds of 10, 8, and 5 MHz. The 8086 would become the basis for the series of processors used in “IBM Compatible” PCs and the x86 family (later marketed under the name “Pentium”) that would dominate the market in the PC era. Ironically, however, it was the modified 8-bit 8088 processor that was used in the original IBM PC, primarily due to factors that would reduce overall cost. The current line of Intel “Core” processors are still based on the same architecture that was introduced with the 8086.