Datasheet

 Sad Mac: If any of your hardware fails when it’s tested, you might see a
black or gray screen that might or might not display the dreaded Sad
Mac icon (shown in the left margin) and/or hear a far less pleasing musi-
cal chord (in the key of F-minor, I believe), known by Mac aficionados as
the Chimes of Doom.
Some older Macs played the sound of a horrible car wreck instead of the
chimes, complete with crying tires and busting glass. It was exception-
ally unnerving, which might be why Apple doesn’t use it anymore.
The fact that something went wrong is no reflection on your prowess as
a Macintosh user. Something inside your Mac is broken, and it probably
needs repairs. If any of that has already happened to you, check out
Chapter 19 to try to get your Mac well again.
If your computer is under warranty, dial 1-800-SOS-APPL, and a
customer-service person can tell you what to do. Before you do any-
thing, though, skip ahead to Chapter 19. It’s entirely possible that one of
the suggestions there can get you back on track without your having to
spend even a moment on hold.
 Prohibitory sign (formerly known as the flashing-question-mark disk):
Although it’s unlikely that you’ll ever see the Sad Mac, most users even-
tually encounter the prohibitory sign shown in the left margin (which
replaced the flashing question-mark-on-a-disk icon and flashing folder
icon back in Mac OS X Jaguar). This icon means your Mac can’t find a
startup disk, hard drive, network server, or CD-ROM containing a valid
Macintosh operating system. See Chapter 19 for ways you can try to
ease your Mac’s ills.
14
Part I: Introducing Mac OS X Leopard: The Basics
The legend of the boot
Boot this. Boot that. “I booted my Mac and. . . .”
or “Did it
boot ?” and so on. Talking about com-
puters for long without hearing the
boot word is
nearly impossible.
But why
boot ? Why not shoe or shirt or even
shazam?
Back in the very olden days — maybe the 1960s
or a little earlier — starting up a computer
required you to toggle little manual switches on
the front panel, which began an internal
process that loaded the operating system. The
process became known as
bootstrapping
because if you toggled the right switches, the
computer would “pull itself up by its boot-
straps.” This phrase didn’t take long to trans-
mogrify into
booting and finally to boot.
Over the years, booting has come to mean turn-
ing on almost any computer or even a periph-
eral device, such as a printer. Some people also
use it to refer to launching an application: “I
booted Excel.”
So the next time one of your gearhead friends
says the
b -word, ask whether he knows where
the term comes from. Then dazzle him with the
depth and breadth of your (not-quite-useful)
knowledge!
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