A brief history of System Information and Gestalt
One of the most fundamental questions you can ask is what’s in my Mac, and what’s connected to it? From the size of its memory to the extensions it has loaded, we often need to know all about Mac internals. As Macs became more configurable and were offered with options, this became increasingly important.
From as early as System 4.1 in 1987, Macs could deliver more detailed information, that was gathered together in a new app, Apple System Profiler, in System 7.6 at the start of 1997. The following screenshots show Apple System Profiler at the height of its maturity, in System 9.0.4 during the Spring of 2000.
This Mac is a Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) model from 1999-2000, one of Apple’s distinctive ‘blue and white’ tower systems with a single-core PowerPC 7400 processor running at 450 MHz. It has 512 MB of memory and internal ATA hard disks. Notable by their absence from this overview are UUIDs, as they were seldom used at that time.
Two of its three internal expansion slots were occupied by a SCSI card, to connect to SCSI peripherals, and its display card driving the monitor.
