So here I am on a battered PowerBook that will barely hold a charge, playing with classic Mac OS (version 9.2.2) and trying to appreciate the work of those who developed the software in the mid-to-late ’90s (and to amuse my co-workers). We’re now 12 years past Steve Jobs’ funeral for the OS at WWDC in 2002. While some people still find uses for DOS, I’m pretty sure that even the most ardent classic Mac OS users have given up the ghost by now – finding posts on the topic any later than 2011 or 2012 is rare. So if there are any of you still out there, I think you’re all crazy… but I’m going to live with your favorite OS for a bit.
Ars Technica rewrote the article I wrote eight years ago.
Pretty much the same experience I had in 2004.
Mac OS 9, Haiku, CDE… I just love how “GET OUT OF MY WAY” the user interface is. I miss it in Windows, Mac OS X, GNOME, and KDE.
Off topic: Thom, both your English and writing style have noticeably improved since 2006.
This is why I much prefer Openbox or Xfce in *nix OSes. Xfce is pretty good about giving you a complete DE while not getting crazy with options (KDE) or making you learn a completely new and obtuse UI in an attempt at being “modern” (Gnome). Openbox is for the ones who want to start with nothing and build up to exactly what they need to get the job done, and no more, which is why I prefer it above all others.
I have had to fricking build “NOS” (New, Old Stock) systems going back to as old as DOS 3 because a VERY expensive piece of equipment ran on software that hadn’t been updated since Ronnie Raygun was president!
Oh and just FYI but I have used Win2K on the net as early as last year* and frankly its…well its rather pleasant actually, as long as you stick to a modern browser instead of the ancient IE crap. Luckily there is a browser that supports as far back as Win98SE and that is Kmeleon. With Kmeleon and ABP it was quite nice, although I wouldn’t recommend using it without ABP as a single flash ad heavy site would drag that 1.8Ghz P4 down to a fricking crawl. But other than that it really wouldn’t be uncomfortable for day to day usage if for some reason you just had to have the old OS.
(*.-had somebody that refused to upgrade their systems, again because of VERY expensive hardware and I had to figure out how to lock it down, really wasn’t hard with GPOs)
QupZilla works quite nicely in win2k (USP5)
Ars wrote something on a topic you wrote about x years ago. See, a normal person would have never wrote that last sentence. My passive aggressive, self centered mom would, and that’s how I think of you now.
How about the above poster think about writing positive comments or take it elsewhere (like your own news site).
…under power, sleeping, with the LED “breathing”. It is a multiboot system that can run 9.2.2, Tiger, and Leopard. I use it as an intermediate station to lift industrial customer code from decades ago to modern platforms, mostly to Mac OS X. The major tool is an old CodeWarrior Pro 5.3 – which works every bit as effective as a recent XCode, at least for editing. I don’t run CW in Tiger/Classic, because the debugger does not work there.
It certainly is not the look, feel, general snappiness, or even feature completeness of the old base OS, where it falls behind. Quite to the contrary, the old OS is, on average, a lot more responsive than X. My work is further assisted by the speed of the CW compiler, which runs circles around gcc.
While the article theme implies that the lacking experience is a matter of the OS itself, it really is about any platform that has no current software and about the resource hogging web technology. The only real OS shortcoming mentioned is the occasional UI blocking caused by the cooperative multitasking.
Now, classic MacOS does have its deficiencies and idiosyncracies, which don’t get mentioned. The killer one is the lack of memory protection. One bad pointer write is a reboot in the best, or a prolonged bug hunt in the worst case. Fonts are, though crisp & clear, prettier elsewhere these days. But even XP used a pixel font until the end. The spacial metaphor combined with the window layer logic requires an adjusted workflow. (And Sherlock 2 is abysmal, a vast step back from the clean search in 8.6.)
I’m quite convinced that the platform could have moved nicely forward and that it did not decay because the time of its basic ideas was over, but because Apple’s development efforts went into a state of disarray on many fronts from roughly after System 7. (e.g. have a look what an insult to the eyes the Performa 6400 was).
All the technology was there. While some stuff was probably misguided (OpenDoc, AOCE), somewhat ugly bolt-on (OpenTransport), other stuff provided nicely integrated technology that can’t be taken for granted even today (QD3D on RAVE or the algebra behind QDGX). That was just really badly executed. The Nanokernel came with 8.6 and the Carbon route was laid out for Copland/Gershwin, which they then totally screwed up.
So I think this classic system deserves a more differentiated writeup than “No modern browser, no TLS mail, and no docx-support” from someone whose use cases cover pretty much exactly browsing, mailing and exchanging recent Word documents.
Rich
They are still here: https://68kmla.org/forums/