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. The icon remained unchanged until the introduction of the PowerPC Macs, when it was updated to 8-bit color. It wasn't like that, however, for all Macs, as some late PowerPC Macs still had black and white "Happy Mac". With Mac OS X 10.1, Puma, a new Happy Mac was included.

With the introduction of Mac OS X v10.2, the Happy Mac icon was replaced with a large gray Apple logo.

When a Macintosh boots into Mac OS 9 or lower,the Mac will play its startup chime, the screen will turn gray, and the Happy Mac icon will appear, followed by the Mac OS splash screen, 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". 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.

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. 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.

[edit] External links

• Happy Mac and Friends is a freeware OS X widget from Kelari Communications.

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