Macintosh Toolbox

The Macintosh Toolbox is a set of application programming interfaces with a particular access mechanism. They implement many of the high-level features of the Classic Mac OS. The Toolbox consists of a number of "managers," software components such as QuickDraw, responsible for drawing onscreen graphics, and the Menu Manager, which maintain data structures describing the menu bar. As the original Macintosh was designed without virtual memory or memory protection, it was important to classify code according to when it should be loaded into memory or kept on disk, and how it should be accessed. The Toolbox consists of subroutines essential enough to be permanently kept in memory and accessible by a two-byte machine instruction; however it excludes core "kernel" functionality such as memory management and the file system. Note that the Toolbox does not draw the menu onscreen: menus were designed to have a customizable appearance, so the drawing code was stored in a resource, which could be on a disk.

The original Motorola 68000 family implementation of the Macintosh operating system executes system calls using that processor's illegal opcode exception handling mechanism. Motorola specified that instructions beginning with 1111 and 1010 would never be used in future 68000 family processors, thus freeing them for use as such by an operating system. As 1111 was reserved for use by co-processors such as the 68881 FPU, Apple chose 1010, which is the binary equivalent of the decimal number ten, as the prefix for operating system calls. Ten is represented in hexadecimal as A, and handling illegal instructions is known as trapping, so these special instructions were called A-traps. When the processor encounters such an instruction, it transfers control to the operating system, which looks up the appropriate task and performs it. There were two advantages to this mechanism:

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