MAC OS

I was introduced to the idea of computers in elementary school in the eighties, but they never had much appeal to me. I had played Oregon Trail and that lemonade stand game, and when I was in high school I learned enough about word processing (Wordperfect, Word, Microsoft Works) to get my assignments turned in. I've never really even been big on surfing the web, until I went back to school at UT and realized the books I had checked out for a research paper were all over fifty years old. I am more familiar with the Windows operating system, but I have used MACs a few times. I had never even heard of the linux operating system until I read this assignment.

Most of what I learned from the atomic learning was basic terminology and basic concepts of what a MAC can do. For example:
-The dock is the row of readily accessible icons on the bottom of the screen
-Stacks are piles of documents placed together. (I'm not sure if they are the exact equivalent of folders, or just very similar.
-Quickclick allows you to see what a file is (at least vaguely) without taking the time to actually open it. (very cool)
-Clicking the red box doesn't actually quit the application.
-The launchpad gives you all the icons for various applications.
-Widgets can be added to your dashboard. (They seem like really simple gadgets.) They are a sort of quicklink. Additional choices can be downloaded.
-There is a time machine backup system (but you need an extra hard drive to use it). In case your hard drive ever crashes, this has automatically backed up everything on the hard rive (not stuff on your flash drives, ect). It also allows you to go back and retrieve files if you've erased them by mistake.
(Unlike how the name implies, to find something old you don't have to give up new material, you can selectively retrieve just the one thing you regret losing. --Not like the undo button on a word document.) This is the best computer related invention of all time!