The Chooser is an application program for

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

systems using the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Mac (computer), Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and end ...

. The Chooser started out as a desk accessory and became a standalone application program as of System 7. The Chooser allowed users to connect to AppleShare file servers (via

AppleTalk AppleTalk is a discontinued proprietary suite of networking protocols developed by Apple Computer for their Macintosh computers. AppleTalk includes a number of features that allow local area networks to be connected with no prior setup or the ...

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

), enable or disable the network access, and select which printer to use.

History

The original Macintosh computer included two high-speed (for the era)

serial port A serial port is a serial communication Interface (computing), interface through which information transfers in or out sequentially one bit at a time. This is in contrast to a parallel port, which communicates multiple bits simultaneously in Pa ...

s that were used for most external connectivity. This included printers, which had to be adapted for use on the Mac through the addition of such a port, or an adaptor. Any device could be plugged into either port, which meant that some system needed to be used to identify which port had a printer, possibly both. A small desk accessory called ''Choose Printer'' allowed the printer driver and serial port to be selected for the connected printer. It did this by listing known printer drivers, displayed as icons of the printer model in question, and allowing the user to select it by clicking on the icon. The icons were expected to physically resemble the printer in question and were contained in the drivers'

resource fork A resource fork is a fork of a file on Apple's classic Mac OS operating system that is used to store structured data. It is one of the two forks of a file, along with the data fork, which stores data that the operating system treats as unstruct ...

. At this point the two serial ports appeared, allowing the user to indicate which port that printer was connected to. When Apple introduced the

LaserWriter The LaserWriter is a laser printer with built-in PostScript interpreter sold by Apple, Inc. from 1985 to 1988. It was one of the first laser printers available to the mass market. In combination with WYSIWYG publishing software like PageMaker ...

, its very high cost meant that the only cost-effective way to use it was shared among a small workgroup of Macintoshes. This necessitated the inclusion of

, a simple networking implementation which used low-cost cabling and the same physical RS-422 serial port hardware. It was a natural extension of ''Choose Printer'' to include the ability to select the LaserWriter and also which port was used to connect its network connection. As AppleTalk became useful for other types of networking, such as file sharing, the ''Choose Printer'' accessory was renamed to simply ''Chooser''. The Chooser became the main point to add top-level configuration options for both networking and printing. Starting with

Mac OS X 10.0 Mac OS X 10.0 (code named Cheetah) is the first major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system. It was released on March 24, 2001, for a price of $129 after a public beta. Mac OS X was Apple's successor to the classic Ma ...

, the Chooser was replaced by

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

's integrated networking features in the Finder. For the printing functions, they were found in the separate Print Center (10.0–10.2) and Printer Setup Utility (10.3–10.4) applications and in the ''Print & Fax'' (10.3–10.6), ''Print & Scan'' (10.7–10.8) and ''Printers & Scanners'' (10.9 and later) panes in System Preferences (10.0–12) and System Settings (13 and later) applications.

References

*"Chooser." Mac & Power Mac Secrets. Ed. Mary Bednarek. 2nd ed. San Mateo: IDG, 1994. 74. Print. Macworld. -----(Unused Source) {{Mac OS Classic Mac OS