Product Description

Mac OS 7.6 (codenamed "Harmony") was the last major update, released in 1997. With 7.6, the operating system was officially called "Mac OS" instead of "System". Mac OS 7.6 introduced several features that were also included in Mac OS 8, including a revamped Extensions Manager, more native PowerPC code for Power Macs, more bundled Internet tools and utilities, and an overall more-stable Finder. In this version, the PowerTalk feature added in 7.5 was removed due to poor application support, and support for a large number of older Macintosh models was dropped.

The minor update to Mac OS 7.6.1 finally ported the 68k exception handling routines to PowerPC, turning dreaded type 11 errors into less harmful errors (type 1, 2 or 3, usually) as crashing applications would more often terminate safely instead of crashing the operating system[6].

Through this period Apple had been attempting to release a completely new "modern" operating system, named Copland. When the Copland project was abandoned in 1996, Apple announced plans to release an OS update every six months until Rhapsody (which would by 2001 evolve into what was released as Mac OS X) shipped[7]. Two more releases were shipped, now officially branded as the "Mac OS" - Mac OS 7.6 and the minor bug fix 7.6.1. Future versions were released as Mac OS 8-8.6 and Mac OS 9-9.2.