A Description of the different PC and Macintosh Operating Systems

PC stands for Personal Computer and refers to any IBM-compatible computer. The term PC comes from the first personal computer made by IBM. A computer that is IBM-compatible means that its architecture is based on the IBM microprocessor. A number of different operating systems are compatible with PCs, the most popular of which is Microsoft Windows. Some others are the unix variants, such as Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.
Mac is short for Macintosh and refers to any computer produced by Apple Computer. Macs are traditionally classified separately from PCs because they are based on the PowerPC architecture from Apple/IBM/Motorola instead of the traditional Intel based microprocessors that have powered PCs for decades. A great deal of software is also compatible with either Mac or PC, but not both.
As time moves on the line between Mac and PC as begun to blur. Apple redesigned their operating system based on UNIX in 2000, and more software packages and file formats have become interoperable between PCs and Macs every day. In early 2006, Apple switched to an Intel architecture for their computer systems which now makes it possible to run Microsoft Windows on Mac hardware. Up until this point Apple hardware only support the Macintosh Operating System (Mac OS), and Mac OS itself was not compatible with any other hardware besides Apple’s.
PCs and Macs are still not 100% compatible, despite their now similar architectures. While many software vendors release their products for both platforms, not all do. Particularly, most of the popular computer games are PC-only.