[HN Gopher] Mac OS 9 ___________________________________________________________________ Mac OS 9 Author : Shank Score : 571 points Date : 2022-12-05 17:00 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (macos9.app) (TXT) w3m dump (macos9.app) | zczc wrote: | Apple logo on the bottom does not render on non-apple machines, | because it is apple-specific PUA code-point U+F8FF. See | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas#Vendor_use | ben_w wrote: | Hah, Marathon Infinity, running in real time on a Javascript | emulation of MacOS, in Safari, on my phone. | | What a difference 26 years makes. | blonky wrote: | Oh boy. Those extensions loading. So many times I held my breath | when adding a new extension. If it doesn't then you have to | restart in Safe mode, or something. I won't miss the extensions. | OS 9 was cool. I used it a lot on my lime-green imac. | DrBenCarson wrote: | Really cool. Is this running in Web Assembly? | s1k3s wrote: | Damn what a terrible UX this is, no wonder Windows kicked their | ass so hard with ME and XP. This reminded me to keep it simple | and stupid proof whenever I want users to actually enjoy what I | build, thanks! | s1k3s wrote: | I apologize to everyone who got triggered by the above comment. | Please remember that Nike makes great shoes, but they also make | a lot of crap. | bovermyer wrote: | Two questions: | | 1. Are you being serious, or are you being sarcastic? | | 2. If you're being serious, what about it is terrible? | Mogzol wrote: | I don't know if they were being serious, but as someone who | never used a mac back then, I really struggled with this UI. | Why do folders all open in a new window? Why can't I maximize | a window by double-clicking the title bar? Why can I only | resize windows with the little handle in the bottom corner? | What is the point of the settings dock in the bottom left of | the screen? Do I really need to change resolution and colors | that often? Why do I have to browse the whole hard drive to | find any of my applications? Why can't I right-click | files/folders? What is the point of the bigger/smaller window | button, why not maximize? Why does minimizing just collapse | windows to their title bar? How do you even turn off the | computer? | | These are all features that work how I would expect on | Windows 98. I'm sure if I had used a mac back then this would | all make sense to me, but even as someone who uses modern | macs, I was very lost in the old UI. | flenserboy wrote: | A few quick answers -- | | >Why do folders all open in a new window? | | Spacial Finder (see | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/). It | remembers window position, icon positions within the | window, and the like. | | >Why can't I maximize a window by double-clicking the title | bar? Why can I only resize windows with the little handle | in the bottom corner? | | Nobody really thought about maximizing by double-clicking, | as there was the maximize button available, that maximized | not to the screen but to the _content_ being presented (at | least that was the intent). Double-clicking on the title | bar made the contents of the window disappear while keeping | the title bar hovering there. This was _great_ on small | screens so that you didn 't have to click between windows | that had information in them but could hide the top one, | read the one below, and go back to the top one without | moving the mouse. | | As for the little handle, that was for a) the sake of | consistency, and b) because that was the one way the OS did | things; resizing windows worked just that way. Not sure if | that was purely intent or if it was due to system | resources, especially in earlier Systems. | | >What is the point of the settings dock in the bottom left | of the screen? Do I really need to change resolution and | colors that often? | | I remember using settings much, much more than on current | machines -- there were a lot of little tweaks one might | want to make for performance or ease (changing colors or | resolution might be necessary due to a game, for instance, | whether for speed or compatibility if it were older). | | >Why do I have to browse the whole hard drive to find any | of my applications? Why can't I right-click files/folders? | | That was simply the way of things, though there were plenty | of extensions out there that put application links (or | links to pretty much anything) into the Apple menu, which | became a catch-all that Apple has pared down (in response?) | to almost nothing. | | >What is the point of the bigger/smaller window button, why | not maximize? Why does minimizing just collapse windows to | their title bar? | | See above. | | >How do you even turn off the computer? | | Choose shut down, and turn it off with the switch when it | told you it was safe to do so. | Mogzol wrote: | Thanks for the replies, I guess a lot of it does boil | down to "that's just the way things were". | | Although, like I mentioned, all those features do work on | Windows 98, which released over a year before Mac OS 9, | so I think the parent's comment of "no wonder Windows | kicked their ass so hard" does have a point. Windows 98 | feels far more "modern" than this, at least in my | opinion. | | Also, in response to "Choose shut down, and turn it off | with the switch when it told you it was safe to do so." | That's what I was asking, where do I choose "shut down"? | I expected it to be in the Apple menu but it wasn't | there. After searching some more I eventually found it in | the "Special" menu, still seems like a weird place for | it. | s1k3s wrote: | I am serious, and it's all about how things are named and how | the OS interacts with you. | | Some examples (imagine you've never used a computer before): | | - "file explorer" on Windows, "finder" on Mac. This is just | an example of naming that I think it's just confusing to | users, among many other names | | - a red "X" to close a program on windows, a random square | with no color differentiation on the Mac | | - a clear view of what programs are running in the taskbar on | Windows vs. the current active program in the top right | | - taskbar showing date + time and the calendar "on click" on | Windows vs. time, date on click & no calendar on the Mac | | ... and the list can go on. I honestly believe they screwed | up by acting too smart, when people wanted something simple | that makes sense to them. | robotresearcher wrote: | - a clear view of what programs are running in the taskbar | on Windows vs. the current active program in the top right | | The top right current program name has the running programs | in a dropdown on click. You can 'tear off' the dropdown | menu to create an always-visible task bar, either in the | dropdown format or as nice little icons. | thesuperbigfrog wrote: | Just a reminder that Windows 98 was Microsoft's popular OS | at the time and it had its own issues: | | https://youtu.be/yeUyxjLhAxU | hardnose wrote: | One of my first real entries into "the industry" was as a beta | tester for WC2:ToD on Mac OS. Warms my heart to see its included | here. Shout out to all my Burning Blade bros from the ladder | days! | GingerMidas wrote: | Warcraft II actually plays, I wasn't expecting that. | calmconviction wrote: | Does anyone know the address of a website that used to bring up a | full blown VM in the browser as a background to whatever the main | site was loading? | autotune wrote: | Oh wow this actually has The Oregon Trail available to play, this | is impressive! | spking wrote: | Prince of Persia as well. There goes my whole day. | aareet wrote: | I tried the Prince of Persia but it just loops on the intro. | Wasn't able to get to the game. | autotune wrote: | This may sound obvious but try clicking File -> New Game. | That is how I escaped the intro loop. | lowbloodsugar wrote: | Oh no... it has a working Civilization... | TacticalCoder wrote: | Oh the memories! I've spent countless hours on MacOS 8 and then 9 | IIRC, running QuarkXPress to do professional desktop publishing. | Mostly on a beige Powermac G3 tower. I still have that computer | somewhere in a garage, don't know if it still boots and still has | my software of yore installed. | | Our physical tools of the trade were Iomega Zip drives and Iomega | Zip disks (100 MB then 250 MB IIRC), Apple II Extended keyboard | (the M3501, with ALPS switches: incredible keyboards for the | time), HP LaserJet printers (600 and then 1200 dpi) and Sony | Trinitron CRTs. | ubermonkey wrote: | That's the version of Mac I started with, back around the turn of | the century, on a 500Mhz G3 Powerbook. | | I was in a job that was mostly analysis and presentation and | writing, and Win95/98 on a laptop was just a NIGHTMARE of freezes | and crashes and excruciatingly long boot times. I had a | colleague, though, that was using a Mac (because his background | was design), and while OS 9 definitely did crash, too, it was far | less frequent -- and boot times were faster. Plus, sleep actually | WORKED. | | Maybe 18 months later, that firm tanked, OS X came out, and I was | keeping the lights on with freelance LAMP work using that same | Mac as a dev environment. I'm on OS X to this day. | WraithM wrote: | Ohh! Don't tease me with Escape Velocity! It apparently needs | 2050K more memory? | bitlax wrote: | Wow, A10 Attack must have been by the same people who did FA-18 | Hornet. | fideloper wrote: | I played that game for HOURS as a kid. I literally just yelled | "OMG A-10 ATTACK!" when I saw it there about 3 minutes ago. | | I don't remember the key bindings very well (or if it works | with a mouse), but I did make it into the air before crashing. | | What a wonderful hit of nostalgia. I'll have to try to play | again when I have a free second. | trafnar wrote: | I really wanted to play Barrack but it doesn't work :( | sfpotter wrote: | Just FYI, anyone who wants to play any of the Marathon games, be | advised that they have been available open source for a long | while now: | | https://alephone.lhowon.org/ | j1elo wrote: | Oh well, I _almost_ got to play Another World :-) (I recently | finished it on PC so it was the first thing to catch my eye). | | Didn't work, either on Firefox or Chrome ( _memory access out of | bounds at void powerpc_cpu::execute_loadstore_ ) but I get it, | playing AW is not the ultimate purpose of this emulator! | dkonofalski wrote: | And here I thought the purpose of this emulator was to play | Battle Chess. Unfortunately, that doesn't work either. | ehaliewicz2 wrote: | Escape velocity seems to work, I recommend it if you haven't | played it. | johnthuss wrote: | This is awesome! I still love the look of the Finder from this | era, and I love that this has the Window Shade extension turned | on too. | chongli wrote: | The WindowShade control panel disappeared after MacOS 8. The | feature became part of the Appearance control panel at that | point. You can customize it on this MacOS 9 machine by going to | Apple -> Control Panels -> Appearance and clicking on the | Options tab. There you have access to the option "Double-click | title bar to collapse windows", an option that lets you use the | feature the way it originally worked (before the minimize | widget was added to the far right end of the title bar). | lostgame wrote: | WindowShade was _amaaaazing_. There was something that - for a | while, was an OSX equivalent...I want to say 'ShapeShifter'(?) | - but it only worked for versions from like 10.2-10.4. | zero_iq wrote: | You might be thinking of SheepShaver, a Mac emulator for BeOS | and Linux. Its name is a play on the name ShapeShifter, an | earlier emulator by the same develope, which was an Apple II | emulator for the Amiga. | bri3d wrote: | This is really impressive and goes way above and beyond the | normal "emscripten an emulator into a browser" shenanigans. | | There's seamless file copy in/out, and a really clever setup | where accessing the same subdomain as someone else puts you in an | AppleTalk zone together. | | Extremely cool stuff. | rzzzt wrote: | If you open the developer console, it is revealed that the | experience is provided by SheepShaver, a traditional desktop | emulator (packaged presumably with Emscripten) running in the | browser. :) | | The integration portions are pretty nice, no doubt. | | Edit: https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac#building-the- | emulator... reveals that it is indeed built using Emscripten. | bri3d wrote: | Oh sure, I didn't expect it to be a from-scratch emulator, | but it's way beyond the usual low-effort "type make and send | it" type stuff. | pmarreck wrote: | Graphing Calculator doesn't work because it can't find an FPU, | and it's the first thing I tried. :/ (also, because it was pretty | revolutionary at the time!) | rcarmo wrote: | This sort of UI elegance is why I keep around an XFCE container | with the Platinum theme: | https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 | | I love using it when I need a break from GNOME. | mbauman wrote: | Man, I miss all those Ambrosia Software games (Apieron, Barrack, | Escape Velocity, etc). I love how many are pre-loaded there, but | the few I tested all seem broken. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia_Software | BillFranklin wrote: | The A-10 attack game works! Controls are at http://www.sierrahe | lp.com/Documents/Manuals/A-10_Tank_Killer.... | | Also, you can still get EV Nova on a Mac as far as I'm aware. | The price hasn't decreased in about 20 years though. | danaris wrote: | > Also, you can still get EV Nova on a Mac as far as I'm | aware. | | There's also an open-source clone, Endless Sky [0], and a | recently-Kickstarted project to re-create EV Override for | modern systems, Cosmic Frontier: Override [1]. | | 0: https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky | | 1: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic | -f... | ehaliewicz2 wrote: | Escape velocity works here! | mdasen wrote: | I've always loved Apple Platinum (the Mac OS 8 and 9 interface). | I'm not a UI/art person, but the gray color they used always | seemed so clean compared to the dull gray of Windows 95/98. | Likewise, it wasn't the blinding white of light-mode in | macOS/Windows today. The purple used was soft and pleasant, | unlike the harsh yellow of folders in Windows or the harsh royal | blue of Windows progress bars. | | Plus, everything had lots of contrast without feeling harsh. One | of the things that bugs me about modern UIs is the lack of | contrast. I don't need a high-contrast mode, but it would be nice | to get back to the contrast of 90s operating systems. | Not_John wrote: | Reminds of this https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/ | | Had a lot of fun with this some time ago. | webwielder2 wrote: | Very excited to see Infini-D. Hands down the most Macintosh-esque | 3D rendering software ever created. | hadrien01 wrote: | Question from someone who never used MacOS 9: why does the | Sherlock UI look so... OS X like? | johnzim wrote: | Because it was built with the newer design language that Apple | was developing - they used it in Quicktime too. I'd hazard a | guess that the key difference was that at the time that MacOS 9 | came out, you could get something in as long as it appealed to | Steve. | | It's not that Apple didn't experiment in earlier days, but this | was a time when the push to the next OS and design was really | strong after so many failed efforts to get a next-gen OS out | the door. | Lammy wrote: | See also: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm | cortesoft wrote: | I still play quite a few games from MacOS using SheepShaver. | Still find it pretty fun. | ty_2k wrote: | Thanks for sharing this. It's stuff like this that really makes | the web feel mysterious and magical. | jdlyga wrote: | Brings me back to being a kid playing with Mac OS making folders | and colorizing them with labels. This was the first time in my | life I ever heard the word "essential" and had no idea what it | meant. I used to pronounce it like "assess natal". | thfuran wrote: | You had a very novel approach to phonetics. | heywire wrote: | I have some words like this too. I still read archive as arch- | ive in my head all these years later. Native speaker too, just | wasn't a word I heard a lot when I was younger I guess. | siruva07 wrote: | I can hear "Sosumi" while clicking around :) | | "Sosumi is an alert sound introduced by Jim Reekes in Apple | Inc.'s Macintosh System 7 operating system in 1991. The name is | derived from the phrase "so, sue me!" because of a long running | court battle with Apple Corps, the similarly named music company, | regarding the use of music in Apple Inc.'s computer products." | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi | papandada wrote: | Not a Mac user. Figured this was a new announcement. Clicked and | then remembered -- I was at a "System 7" launch as a youngster, | 30+ years to get a couple version would be very, very slow. | eigenhombre wrote: | Very cool to see a working HyperCard app in there (Infinite HD > | Multimedia > HyperCard). Some of the animations are painfully | slow, but dang this takes me back... and the old Photoshop!!! | Just, wow! | | Spent a lot of time in this world a few decades ago.... | poundtown wrote: | KPT Bryce! | kirykl wrote: | Love the inclusion of ClarisWorks, spent so much time in there | mitchitized wrote: | First thing I did was look for Shufflepuck Cafe and Sun Tzu's | Ancient Art of War. | | Anybody else do the same? | blastro wrote: | Turns out I'm nostalgic for an operating system... | winrid wrote: | Amazing that this boots faster in Chrome on my phone than it did | on my laptop in the day. | sph wrote: | Look at that subtle off-grey colouring, the tasteful thickness of | it... | | What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the | 1990s. | miohtama wrote: | Web browser and mobile happened. | cogman10 wrote: | And why is everything just so slow! | | That's what always annoys me. I have a computer that's easily | 100x or 1000x more powerful than my 1995 desktop yet so many | actions have noticeable lag. | | Like, try it, resize outlook right now (just stretch the side | left and right). You'll see so much jank and jitter. How is | something like that not instantaneous? | bombcar wrote: | Some of that you can tune down as it's trying to redraw at | every single step in between. | | Sometimes there are accessibility options that speed it back | up (don't redraw until mouse let go) - I know you can turn | off animations but not sure you can disable that one. | IncRnd wrote: | It's created with javascript in the browser, which is not | efficient. | chrisco255 wrote: | JavaScript is very efficient. It compiles to native on the | fly in v8 engines. The DOM itself, however, has a lot of | foot guns for performance. | IncRnd wrote: | That's a distinction without a difference. Running JS is | slower than native. The user of JS cares about the real | world speed of emulating a quadra machine, which is shown | as very slow at this webpage. | retrac wrote: | When you resized a window on classic Mac OS, your program had | to actually like, draw the new window. Your program is | spinning in a loop listening for events, you get a window- | resize event. So you allocate space for the new bitmap, | calculate what you need to display within the enlarged view, | and then draw it. Did the user drag another window over your | window, and then drag it away again? You get an event for | that. Gotta draw what was there all over again. | | This is all very close to the metal. On early 68K Macs, this | is driven by QuickDraw, some very tightly coded assembly | routines in ROM. Invoking them is only 2 bytes of code, as | they're simply CPU opcodes (trap instructions). Render this | string at this point size with this font at this X, Y | location. Redraw the menu bar. Draw a rectangle. And so on. | If you sequence these Toolbox invocations correctly, as a | great master programmer of coroutines who never mistreats a | handle as a pointer, you can render a complex scene with | hundreds of polygons and a full screen of text in 200 | milliseconds at 8 MHz. | | But it takes thousands of lines of hand-holding the machine | to do it. | | Today, all of this is typically handled by instantiating a | window object which draws into a private framebuffer which | the system composites. That right there is tens of megabytes | of RAM overhead. Then you use a thread to handle the UI and a | thread to draw and etc. There's almost no boilerplate to just | show a window. Perhaps one line of code. And it doesn't get | overwritten by intrusive neighbour windows. Creating | frameworks that can do all that bookkeeping in a flexible and | general way (don't forget you want to be able to render | vector fonts for any Unicode language) has a tremendous | overhead. | yamtaddle wrote: | Well, you see, they've traded end-user performance for | productivity. This is why it only takes a team five times as | large to deliver the same functionality as a comparable | program from the 1990s, and that team can make a buggier | initial release in merely twice the time. | sharikous wrote: | There might be something in what you are saying but it's | not really like that. | | The current macOS is humungous, kernel aside. There is a | variety of systems running under the hood (Spotlight, | fsevents, Apple Events, duet, launchd, MIGs, XPCs, caches, | endless network services, launch services, anti-malware | background programs, AppleID agents, diagnostics, | cloud/AppleID integration, auditing, RAM compression, | energy management, backups, filesystem snapshotting, | COW,.... not to mention that huge OS inside the OS that is | the browser) that is more than a surgeon can know about the | human body. | | Of course most of that is spying on you and telemetry... | But you just have much more features these days and | stability and security increased a lot. If that is not | added value for you just work on one of those "minimal" | OSes that appear from time to time. I guarantee you that | you will miss a modern "bloaty" OS in no time. | yamtaddle wrote: | One might expect all those extra services and | capabilities would make application development faster, | though. Less for application developers to worry about, | since the OS and built-in services do way more than a | typical 1990s OS--and any that aren't helpful, ought at | least not be getting in the way. So, sure, the situation | for our industry's even more embarrassing than my | original post implied. | dzikimarian wrote: | Javascript/Electron - single code base for multiple desktop | platforms. | potatolicious wrote: | +1. I can't speak to Windows but I suspect it's similar: if | you're running a well-implemented native app (ex. | Pixelmator) the responsiveness is entirely there and in | fact significantly better than it was in the 90s. Even | fairly graphically heavy apps have no issues resizing and | otherwise being real-time interactive. | | I would hazard that the vast majority of "jank" you see in | desktop apps today is due to cross-platform code. A large | portion of this is webviews (ex. Slack), but some of it is | also poorly-implemented shims between the platform's native | APIs and shoehorning that into some cross-platform library | (ex. Photoshop). | iforgotpassword wrote: | I recently used a legacy win32 app at work, on a windows | 10 laptop. It looked old, even though the buttons etc got | styled the win10 way. Since the app had some issues, I | wanted to rule out a compatibility problem with modern | Windows, and ran the app in a windows XP VM on the same | laptop. Unfortunately the same issues arose, but I was | really surprised by how snappy the app felt. Everything | was just immediate, sub-windows popped up instantly. | Sure, the machine was an order of magnitude faster than | the typical XP machine back in the day, so it's not an | apples to apples comparison, but still it was one of | these revelations that we just seem to be taking one step | forwards and at least one step back every time we improve | something. | cogman10 wrote: | Even if you take a step above win32 and use a framework | like GTK or QT, you'll find that sort of responsiveness. | FirstLvR wrote: | Yup that's the answer, and cyber security, we had to add | thousand of code lines in order to circumvent login | properties and such, in order to make software more secure | (and less private) | chrisco255 wrote: | VS Code works great in my experience. | dzikimarian wrote: | We'll I've spent years on notepad++ and I will have to | disagree (ofc VSC can be almost like full IDE but I don't | have a lot of plug-ins) | pjmlp wrote: | Thankfully to having multi-process architecture with | enough of those services written in a mix of C#, Rust and | C++. | bovermyer wrote: | Just this morning I finally bought a license for Sublime | Text. | | It's just so much faster than any other GUI-based editor. | dieulot wrote: | Modern macOS is a significant counterexample to that claim. | Most of it is janky. Zooming and dezooming the Finder is | not something a 2.5 years old MacBook Air (EUR1200) can | keep up with smoothly, for instance. Opening a Save dialog | takes over 3 seconds, and expanding/collapsing the file | explorer in it is comically janky. | ace2358 wrote: | None of this sounds right based on my experience. | | Wondering which model you have? Is it fanless? I've never | used until o got my 2022 m2 air. It's the best computer | I've ever used. | | Before that, 10 years of Mac Pro, and they've all been | old (2010 models) and fast. | dieulot wrote: | MacBook Air early 2020 base model. | | The 2010 Mac Pro doesn't run macOS 11+, that might be its | X factor. | ezfe wrote: | That's simply not true. A 2019 MacBook Air has no trouble | with any of these things. If you're having trouble with | these, something is seriously wrong with your computer. | dieulot wrote: | Proof: https://dieulot.fr/~temp/Screen%20Recording%202022 | -12-05%20a... | | It's more pronounced while recording but that's the idea. | ezfe wrote: | Ah, I misunderstood what you were referring to. Now that | I understand, I'm less surprised. For some reason I was | thinking File I/O. | | The Early 2020 MacBook Air is a joke from a CPU/Graphics | perspective - even compared to other Intel Macs. | | I still think something's wrong with your computer, as I | have worked with multiple of that model and they weren't | nearly this bad (even accounting for screen recording) - | perhaps your cooling is worse? | mritchie712 wrote: | Not by any means a solution to all Electron problems, but | Tauri[0] is promising. | | 0 - https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri | no_time wrote: | Is this any better in performance? Looks like rust bolted | to a system webview (chromium in the case of Windows) | instead of electron (chromium bolted to v8) | robertlagrant wrote: | We're looking seriously at Tauri for a new application. | It seems good, although we're very early days. | mritchie712 wrote: | yep, we're using too. Very happy so far. | robertlagrant wrote: | That's great to hear. | genewitch wrote: | https://danluu.com/input-lag/ has some actual metrics with | scientific rigor and accuracy. | zozbot234 wrote: | See, the whole problem is that you're running Outlook, | probably on Windows. A light-weight Linux desktop is _not_ | slow. If anything it 's a bit faster and snappier now than | those older systems were on their historical hardware, since | it can save a lot more disk I/O via caching in RAM. | throwaheyy wrote: | It's not slow. It's just that modern OS's redraw at every | intermediate size between the initial size and the final | size. The name of the setting in Windows is "Show window | content while dragging", you can disable it and all your | windows will be 100x snappier than Mac OS 9. | ehaliewicz2 wrote: | Rendering at every intermediate size means that it is | slower (by default). | walrus01 wrote: | > What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the | 1990s. | | People of this opinion will probably enjoy using the latest | version of XFCE4 on a Linux or BSD environment. | | It's "less terrible" than most other modern GUIs that waste | space and are full of bubble shaped smooth looking jellybean UI | elements. | bacchusracine wrote: | >People of this opinion will probably enjoy using the latest | version of XFCE4 on a Linux or BSD environment. | | Mate desktop might also be something they'd enjoy. I | personally recommend the Ubuntu-Mate version since it | inherits a lot of the papercut fixes from when it was used in | Ubuntu as Gnome 2.x. I was very excited to hear that the lead | developer of Ubuntu-Mate was working with Debian to port | those changes over. | dri_ft wrote: | Let's see Paul Allen's operating system. | jzelinskie wrote: | If this is intended to be an American Psycho reference[0], | it's a pretty great comment. | | [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iixytdJqZg | iaabtpbtpnn wrote: | That'd be MS-DOS. | [deleted] | mk_stjames wrote: | I've lived to see the day where someone made an American | Psycho business card reference _and_ a follow up comment | would - in context mind you - be able to reference Paul Allen | as both the movie character and the Microsoft founder. | foobiekr wrote: | NeXTSTEP was peak traditional UI. Everything since has been | gradual degradation. And I include with that Apple's butchering | of what made MCCA on NeXTSTEP so amazing. | aj7 wrote: | An Excel 4.0 was peak Excel. It brilliantly chose axis limits | for you in scatter graphs, rather than wasting two minutes of | your time every time you created one. Create new data series | in the formula bar. Write your own functions and macros | without consulting documentation. (I had to create my own | ATAN2 (quadrant sensitive two-variable input arctangent. | Ironically, when it began appearing as a standard function, | it was called ATAN2!) | mattl wrote: | MCCA? | hahamrfunnyguy wrote: | I lived through these times, and I thought OS X was a huge | improvement over MacOS, I'd never want to go back! Software in | general has gotten more bloated and slow since the '90s, but I | don't blame it on the OS. | | I didn't have too many major complaints about working on MacOS, | but I've always preferred windows. I used Windows 3.1 before | MacOS. It's probably since I used Windows first, but I've | always preferred the Windows approach of window management. | Whenever using a Mac, I would always end up with a jumble of | windows and I'd frequently click the wrong one when and it | would pop to the front and hide what I was looking for. Then | the wrong application's tab strip would be visible. Arrrgggh! | It was a common point of frustration for me when using | Photoshop and Illustrator since there are a number of similar | Windows. | | In Windows 11, I like that there is reasonable support for dark | UI and multiple desktops. I haven't used OS X that much in the | past 10 years, so I can't comment on the improvements that have | been made since then. | heather45879 wrote: | I think it's the compounding effect of digital clutter over | time. It's easy to create digital things and the tendency to | keep adding features never stops. | | Minimalism is a good thing for an OS as it really makes it | easier to use. | | Another thing to note: there's a lot or duplication in modern | software. For instance, each OS file browser has a search bar | to help find files. But tragically, the browser also has one, | and so do many websites in the browser. So we have a recursive, | ever-expanding set of search bars--yuck. | | And also tragically, so do many apps have built-in file | browsers. Ideally there should be one mechanism to find things, | one mechanism to organize things, etc. It should be simple but | flexible, and apps shouldn't have to roll their own, they | should be able to gracefully use the one provided. | | We're at a weird point in software where the browser is | basically the OS for many people. ChromeOS was an interesting | thought but it's more like a limited-feature OS designed to | sell Google services. | | We need to take a step back and kind of assess the situation | more--and then make a nice little OS :) | mk_stjames wrote: | I completely understand people like Andreas from SerenityOS and | the idea that there was a time that was a peak of GUI | simplicity yet usefulness for power users.. In their case it's | the Win2K aesthetic but I think OS9 is pretty close to that | level of streamlining. | | As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched, I partially | blame OSX and the whole "make everything round and groovy and | graphical goodness" trend that started us down the path of | making GUI's 'form over function'. | | This is bleeding over from OS into power-user-oriented software | like CAD and engineering tools and most everyone hates it. The | whole "lets take away buttons and make the ribbon icons bigger | and more graphically pleasing" to make products look more | modern is a cancer for power users and productive people who | just want access to everything as best and fast as possible. | It's a delicate balance that I do indeed believe peaked well | over a decade ago. | asveikau wrote: | > As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched | | This reminds me: There was pretty interesting community of | Linux users customizing X11 desktops in the late 90s and the | very early 2000s... When the first screenshots and demos of | OS X and Aqua came out, almost immediately, people tried to | imitate that. | rzzzt wrote: | I remember WindowBlinds and an MP3 utility (but just | vaguely) that used a theme similar to Aqua on Windows. | Joeri wrote: | The frustrating part is that OS X was NeXTStep under the | covers, and that had the late 90's look down better than | any OS. http://toastytech.com/guis/ns332.html | | I ran windowmaker on my linux systems around 2000 to get | that same look, but I had serious NeXT envy. | asveikau wrote: | I liked NeXT and GNUstep in those days too. | | I'm not sure they had it literally "better" than | everybody else, but they certainly had something unique, | well executed, etc. | | You can still recognize NeXT patterns in modern Mac GUIs. | They're usually not surface level anymore. | SoftTalker wrote: | I have always felt that Win2K Pro was the pinnacle of the | Windows UI. | deergomoo wrote: | I would prefer we leave the window borders in the 1990s but I | do wish we'd stop hiding controls in overflow menus when we | have more pixels available than ever before. | | I appreciate that dropping a user in a window with 150 | unlabelled icons is intimidating for them, but needing to hover | over the magic space or find the correct icon abstraction of | "junk drawer" to find core features is hardly intuitive either. | etc-hosts wrote: | how do I use this to play Dark Castle and Crystal Quest? | aj7 wrote: | It's amazing how much more central search is in modern OS's. This | feels more like the original'84 Mac, but gussied up. I like OS6 | better. It was 10 years ahead of anything else, except perhaps | Amiga, in the hands of a developer. This Mac OS9 actually looks | like it came from a low point in Mac's penetration and power. | adolph wrote: | Agreed, 6 was the high point, 7 wasn't bad and 8/9 were | skeuomorphic slow lipstick on the core OS pig. Gimme 6 with | original iPod any day of the week. | bastardoperator wrote: | Sick! | GoofballJones wrote: | Now you just need QuarkXpress loaded on it and use a weird 3rd | party font manager to load the customers weird fonts....and then | have it simulate crashing every 5 minutes or so. | | Would really bring back that OS 9 feeling. | agys wrote: | Makes me remind (and appreciate) of how beautiful and clean the | UI was. Designed in the tiniest detail! | lprd wrote: | Wow, what a blast from the past. I was only 9 at the time this | was released and every bit enamored with the world of computers. | My dad owned a data recovery business that also developed | software. I was home-schooled and would visit his office | frequently after class as I loved looking at all the hard drives | and also loved the "computer room smell". There was also the | office tradition of playing a game of Bungie's Marathon (which | ran natively on Mac OS 9) before closing up shop. It wasn't too | long after I would be saving up for my first tangerine iBook. | | Good times. | genewitch wrote: | the smell being dust, or ozone? Working in a computer repair | place when i was ~19 ruined my sinuses forever. I have a lot of | old hardware kind of sorted in cabinets, and whenever someone | needs some old hardware i have to either dust mask or take an | antihistamine. | | So asking me for something to fix a broken old thing usually | involves me making a cross face, handing you whatever it is, | and then taking a nap after washing my hands twice. | dheera wrote: | Reminds me of a fake MacOS website that we naughty students | used to load up on IE on Windows machines at school and then | full screen it, which would make it look like it was converted | to a Mac. | | Except it was just a webpage designed to look like a Mac with | some very basic GUI features. | | It was an extremely popular prank, I just can't remember the | name of the website now. | | And today we have actual real MacOS in a browser. | slowmotarget wrote: | It's a great reminder of how well MacOS 9 UI and UX were | designed, and how space efficient the whole OS was on screen. | | Even the window handle bars were subtly shadowed, the window | shadows evolved when they were collapsed. Like Windows 95 at the | time, Mac OS 9 was a beautiful work of interaction design. | truetraveller wrote: | Mac UX is far worse compared to Windows, in my opinion. I feel | very claustrophobic using it. How do you live without a simple | maximize button? "Maximimze to contents" is ambiguous, and in | practice, does not work at all for most apps. I find myself | having to "manually" maximize windows. And now, I don't want a | third party app. | | To add to this, even after I "maximimze" windows, I have an | ugly menu bar at the top, in addition to the windows own | titlebar. Allow apps to have a menu in their own window, but | don't force an ugly global menu. For the clock/systray, | integrate it like windows in the bottom app bar. | | I could keep listing frustrations. Many of these are objective. | | Note: I'm not talking about app installation, or malware, or | "polish". Mac is superior, will agree. | matthewmacleod wrote: | If they're anything like this, almost none of your | frustrations are going to be objective - they are going to be | things that grate on you because of the design and | interaction models you are used to. | | There's nothing wrong with that! You're allowed to prefer | particular approaches. It's like when I use Windows or | Ubuntu, and get frustrated at how particular interactions | work. It's not because the Mac is objectively better, but | because I'm used to it. | | (Except for the keyboard shortcuts. Distinct | control/option/command keys is objectively better and I will | die on this hill.) | philwelch wrote: | > How do you live without a simple maximize button? | | Classic Mac OS apps did not put the entire application UI in | a single full screen window. Instead, it was typical for an | application to contain multiple windows that could all be | visible at once. | | > To add to this, the "top" menu bar is lame. | | This is related. In Windows, the entire UI of the app is | contained in a single window, which you would typically | maximize to fill the screen. In classic Mac OS, apps have | multiple windows open at the same time, but the menu bar | pertains to the application and not to the window. | truetraveller wrote: | I understand all of that. And that is precisely my point. | Isolate everything concerning an app to its own window, and | allow that to be maximized. If an app has multiple windows, | contain them within the main app window. Don't pollute the | "global" window space with app-specific windows. | kccqzy wrote: | > If an app has multiple windows, contain them within the | main app window. | | This advice is actually rarely followed by apps | regardless of whether they are on Windows or Mac. | Consider Microsoft Word; if you open two Word documents, | does Microsoft Word open two windows or does it open one | main app window and then contain both documents in a | single window? Are you aware of this Microsoft concept | called MDI? | | It sounds like you were used to iOS where each app has | but one window and you'd prefer that to be the case on | desktop operating systems like Mac or Windows. There's | nothing with preferring that, but it's against decades of | desktop computing tradition. | philwelch wrote: | The tradeoff to that being the lack of UI consistency | between applications. | deergomoo wrote: | > How do you live without a simple maximize button? | | Why would I want a webpage which stops showing additional | content after ~1200 pixels wide to take up the entire of my | 2560px wide monitor? | truetraveller wrote: | Because it removes the clutter of your desktop + other | windows. I think many would agree. Sure, there are times | you need to see windows side-by-side, and there is | affordance for that. But mostly, a person is doing one task | at a time. | Kehvarl wrote: | As my displays have gotten larger, I've found I want my | windows to take up less and less of them. I may | occasionally full-screen something, but it always feels | incredibly difficult to deal with. As primarily a Windows | user, I've more than once wished I had a "fit to content" | button like Mac's. | | Just another instance of different users having different | patterns. | npteljes wrote: | I'm this person. I have a hard time focusing on one, | never mind more than one - in a similar vein, | notifications are also disabled / minimized. | toasteros wrote: | Are there any decent implementations of this UI for Linux? | asveikau wrote: | It's not maintained, but a few years ago I was feeling | nostalgic and playing with "mlvwm", the mac-like virtual | window manager, a project from the late 90s. | | At least a small amount of C knowledge is sometimes helpful | for getting those old projects working. Sometimes a new | compiler or new libc will expose old bugs. | | My experience with old window managers is they need tweaks to | work reasonably on modern high dpi displays. | | Iirc mlvwm builds with imake, which is positively ancient. | It's the build tool that X.org got rid of after taking over | from XFree86. | rcarmo wrote: | Here you go: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 | | You can theme XFCE to look really, really close. Won't behave | identically, of course. | retrac wrote: | You could theme some window manager, but it's not the same. | It'd be a tough project! The Mac UI was holistic. Early on, | it didn't even make much of a distinction between application | and operating system. Just getting the menu bar right (shared | between OS and application) when every program has its own | idea on how to present a menu would be a major challenge. | Applications really do need to be designed for the classic | Mac environment. Back in the day software was almost never | ported directly, but had to be substantially redesigned for | the Mac. | sho_hn wrote: | Linux has a standard protocol (dbusmenu) for exporting menu | structures supported by most common app UI libraries, and | environments like KDE's Plasma use this to offer a global | menu bar option, too. | projektfu wrote: | Yeah, apps were responsible for drawing the menu bar and | handling its mouse events (delegated to toolbox libraries). | They also used to ask the OS to put in the menu items for | the apple menu, and were responsible for delegating those | mouse clicks to the OS as well. Background tasks required | the foreground app to release the processor (or interrupts | like vertical blank). Everything depended on proper | cooperation. | mk_stjames wrote: | The whole system.. from the sizing of the borders and titlebars | to the font and the menu density to the icon sizing, spacing, | and design in general... | | All feels more coherent than anything today. It feels like it | was sketched out by a small group of people and executed | incredibly well. Meanwhile things today look more disjointed | like the product of a lot of design-by-committee. | | Susan Kare's 'Chicago' in this rendering hits hard in the | nostalgia factor to me a well. | Cockbrand wrote: | I'll be that guy... the system font for menus, etc in OS 8 | and 9 is "Geneva" [EDIT: It's _" Charcoal"_, of course. | Thanks for the heads up!]. It was "Chicago" up to and | including System 7.x. | | I do agree on all other points :) | ihatepython wrote: | Pretty sure it was Charcoal and not Geneva. | Cockbrand wrote: | You're right, I mixed up the two font names in my head. I | edited my post above. | mk_stjames wrote: | Huh, TIL. I had always thought it was always just up- | res'ing variations on Chicago, up thru and including the | first iPod. | | They look pretty similar but now that I look it them side | by side I see it a bit. | | As much as it is the style, it's also that kinda.. not- | True-type still-a-bit-pixelated edges look that is the | nostalgia factor, I guess. | tobr wrote: | Original iPod did use Chicago though! Then when they got | color screens they switched to Lucida Grande. | philwelch wrote: | iPod used Chicago for the same reason Chicago was used on | the original Mac--it was designed to make UI elements | clearly readable on low resolution monochrome screens. | resters wrote: | I agree it was a high point for UI/UX logic. The filesystem | was part of the OS experience and it generally made sense | with little magic going on. | | I have wondered in the years since whether the newer | abstractions and UI patterns we find in MacOS and Windows are | actually necessary. These days both OSes are trying to be | tablet friendly, trying to discourage user-installed/curated | software, and trying to promote bundled cloud services, so | it's not even clear to me whether the MacOS 9 abstractions | are really the correct ones anymore, as evidenced by the many | problems with cloud backed file explorer interfaces, | synchronization, etc. | klodolph wrote: | Sure, but-- | | The fat borders for the windows and the control strip at the | bottom left of the screen took up a lot of space on real | monitors of the era. Try running at a more modest 800x600 or | 640x480 and it will seem less efficient. Modern Mac OS X is | actually quite efficient, with zero-pixel window borders on | three sides, and narrower scroll bars. | | Worse, a bunch of applications had code that would set up | window locations with the assumption that the window borders | were 1 pixel wide, like they were prior to Mac OS 8. This often | meant that controls which were supposed to be visible would be | partially covered by another window's border. | | I remember the Mac OS 8 era as a bit of "excess" that got | cleaned up somewhat with the arrival of Mac OS X. | | On the other hand, Mac OS 8 came with a fresh batch of | standardized widgets (Appearance Manager) which made all the | apps look better. These widgets came with guidelines for how | they should be sized and placed, something which is missing | from a lot of modern UI toolkits. | outworlder wrote: | Yes, but also keep in mind that the pointing devices in use | were very primitive compared to what we have today and that | many users were not as proficient. All contemporary operating | systems had thick borders and some had very prominent | resizing handles. | klodolph wrote: | The thick borders took up valuable screen space and weren't | necessary. They weren't present prior to Mac OS 8, and they | weren't present after Mac OS 9. You might consider the era | of thick borders as a 5-year blip on the timeline from 1997 | to 2002. | | If anything, modern pointing devices are often less | precise. We now commonly use trackpads, touch, and pens. In | the 1990s, it was usually the mouse, so you find a lot of | 1990s UI elements that are very small. The only reason our | modern scrollbars on macOS are so small is because it's | assumed that you can scroll without them, either with a | scroll wheel or with a touch gesture. | | I'm not sure if the list of contemporary operating systems | is particularly illuminative. You might look at Windows | '95, CDE (Solaris), or BeOS and find chunky borders. Or you | might look at TWM or Window Maker (OpenStep) and see thin | borders. The only conclusion I draw is that everyone agreed | that you _should_ have borders. | sitzkrieg wrote: | sure but this trend of tiny/hidden until you magically know | to mouse over a 10px wide area on the right to reveal the | scrollbar is simply user hostile | amadeusz wrote: | Compared to amount of space wasted in modern applications on | margins, padding, etc, I would take Mac OS 9 window borders | with rest of the interface. | | Not to say it was perfect, but overall old computer | interfaces were more information dense than todays one. | david422 wrote: | Not a fan of the new trend of zero window borders. I wish | there was at least a way to make them customizable. | natemwilson wrote: | You can turn on Increase Contrast from the OSX System | Preferences Accessibility section. I do that for this exact | reason. | klodolph wrote: | By "new trend" are you talking about how the borders got | eliminated in Mac OS X in 2001? That trend is old enough to | buy beer. | | Although for a while (starting with 10.3?), some windows | had a chunky brushed-metal look. | azinman2 wrote: | You say that but I've recently been programming an app in | system 7, which isn't totally dissimilar to 9 in UX, and I keep | thinking "wow how did I ever use this." Windows constantly | occluding each other, no easy way to switch between them | outside of the mouse, finder windows filled with grids that I | have to scroll through, no easy way to just see the desktop, | etc. Current macOS is miles ahead in usability. | eyesee wrote: | It's interesting: my recollection of that period was I rarely | stored anything on the desktop. The file system was so much | smaller and easier to handle that I stored things in folders | and didn't have trouble finding them again. Not until OS X | did I pick up the desktop-as-staging-area habit because | navigation was so painful. | azinman2 wrote: | But then how do you easily navigate / launch apps? Dig thru | your folder trees each time in Finder? Most apps I'm | finding have folder structures with a bunch of aux files. | It's not so seemless as a dock or even a start menu. | | Back even then I used my desktop heavily too. | amelius wrote: | Apple isn't so great. For example why aren't Copy and Paste | separate or specifically marked keys and do we have to use | Cmd+C and Cmd+V? Same for Undo/Redo, etc. This is stuff any UX | student can figure out. | suction wrote: | dmix wrote: | I love the purple color used in the "Platinum" interface theme | in Mac OS 8/9, even the scrollbar is purple: | | https://i.imgur.com/WwFdpJH.png | | They even offered a crazy "Memphis" art themed option: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLWbFUG_ig "High-tech" wasn't | very pretty either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBUgDnPT8Ps | | https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appearance_Manage... | JonathonW wrote: | None of the alternate themes actually made it into a final | release of Mac OS; just Platinum. | | There was a fairly healthy third-party theming community, | though, and the Apple-developed themes (Memphis, High-Tech, | and a sketch-styled theme called Drawing Board) would still | work if you got your hands on them. | munificent wrote: | I love that color too. Fun trivia that I discovered doing | pixel art way back then: That color is blue. | | It appears purplish, but it's actually a desaturated blue | with hue right at 240deg. Something about the lack of | saturation and brightness gives it a purplish cast. | WirelessGigabit wrote: | Except for the lack of a proper fullscreen function... | philistine wrote: | Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows thing. | Apple has added full screen app support only recently, and | any Windows convert who has switched to macOS and has | problems adapting to its UI has one thing in common: they | haven't let go of the idea that all apps need to use the | whole screen at all times. | dTal wrote: | >full screen apps are a Windows thing | | And iOS. Funny, that! | pjmlp wrote: | Nope, other 16 bit OSes and UNIXes have them. | genewitch wrote: | i see to recall america online was fullscreen on macOS 8 | and 9. | realgeniushere wrote: | This is a funny cope. | | > _Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows | thing._ | | Nope. It's just that maximizing--single action to expand a | window the whole screen minus the OS docks/taskbars--is | present in every widely used OS _except_ for Mac OS. | | > _they haven't let go of the idea that all apps need to | use the whole screen at all times_ | | Not sure where you're getting "at all times" from. Windows | and Linux desktops all easily support having windows take | up less than the whole screen. In fact, it's easier than in | Mac OS because of window snapping to sides and corners. | It's only that Mac OS makes it very clumsy to get the | effect that maximizing has on every other OS. | klodolph wrote: | Prior to full-screen mode on macOS, you would option- | click the window resize button to resize it to the full | size of the screen. This still works. It just doesn't | snap. | kccqzy wrote: | That's a Zoom button not a Maximize button. Apps like | Safari zoom based on the content, not the screen. | reaperducer wrote: | _Apple has added full screen app support only recently_ | | I read somewhere that the reason Apple finally added full- | screen support to macOS (back then OS X), wasn't because of | the Windows switchers. It was to get a bit more real estate | out of the MacBook Air's small screen size. | deergomoo wrote: | I think it was also to try to get some i(Pad)OS users | back to the Mac--one of the major advertised things about | OS X Lion (which introduced full screen) was all the iOS | stuff they were bringing "back to the Mac". | retrac wrote: | Classic Mac OS supported full screen applications since the | beginning. I'm not sure if Apple allowed it or whatever in | their very strict interface guidelines, but from a | programming perspective you just have to turn off the menu | bar and take the entire screen as the GrafPort. | klodolph wrote: | I think the recommended route is to make a window that | fills the screen, rather than taking the entire screen as | a GrafPort. If you want the code to be portable, you can | make your fullscreen window, draw to an offscreen GWorld, | and CopyBits to the window. There's a whole song and | dance that you do in order to make sure that this is | fast. | | Later on, there was DrawSprocket. It solved the problem | of figuring out how to do "portable" and "fast" at the | same time, and let you use features like page flipping, | if the hardware supported it (saving you the call to | CopyBits). | jameshart wrote: | HyperCard was a fullscreen app. A stack could hide the | menu by just... saying 'hide menuBar' in its background | script. | klodolph wrote: | You can think of HyperCard as a fullscreen app, and | that's not wrong. Look at it another way, and it's | displaying a 512x342 pixel window. On B&W compact Macs, | that's the size of the display. If you ran Hypercard on a | later 640x480 color Mac, you could see the border of the | window and move it around. | | Later versions of HyperCard let you choose the size of | the window. Various extensions would let you use a | borderless window for the stack, and put a big black | window behind it covering the rest of the screen. | PeterCorless wrote: | OMG. Original Warcraft was so terrible. But at the time, we | thought it was SO COOL. Very simple "guns or butter" simulator. | [Also runs slow like molasses in the emulator.] | ok123456 wrote: | How do I send the command key (propeller)? | samhickmann wrote: | kitsunesoba wrote: | Seems like it's not running at the highest bit depth, or | something funky with the emulator is causing the Finder to | display low bit depth icons. On a real machine and on qemu-ppc on | my machine OS 9 displays icons that are more shaded and detailed. | | Impressive that it runs in a web browser, but it seems that it | has some quirks. | Cockbrand wrote: | You can change the color depth in the Control Strip in the | bottom left corner. It's indeed set by default to "256 Colors", | setting it to "Millions of Colors" (=24bit) removes the | dithering from the icons. | kitsunesoba wrote: | Nice catch. Opening the Monitors control panel yields an | error but didn't think to check the Control Strip. | erksa wrote: | Sherlock, I've forgotten about this beautiful software and how it | opened the internet for me. | gnicholas wrote: | A tiny nit -- this refers to showing the experience of using a | Mac in the mid-90s, but the screen looks like it's the 15" | display that Apple released in 2000. Or perhaps I'm wrong, and | they had something like this in the 90s? | TazeTSchnitzel wrote: | Mac OS X came out in 2001, so even though Mac OS 9 was mostly a | 1990's experience, it did survive into the 2000s. | gnicholas wrote: | Oh sure, I remember running OS 9 on my Cube in 2000 before | the OS X beta was available. My point was that the monitor | frame shown is not consistent with the note in the stickies | that indicates a mid-90s timeframe. | ChrisArchitect wrote: | Related discussion from only _7 months ago_ | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168646 | | 1038 points, 323 comments | mk_stjames wrote: | So, is Photoshop 3.0 considered freeware/abandonware at this | point? | | It runs impressively fast in this compared to what I remember in | period. | hardnose wrote: | It's considered shhhware | johnthuss wrote: | Civilization 1 runs! I played this for SO many hours back then. I | loved that game so much. This VM locked up after 100 turns or so, | but man, this really brings me back. | smallstepforman wrote: | Whatever you do, dont attack Spearmen with a battleship. | kzrdude wrote: | Spearman is civ 2. Phalanx is the Civ defender of choice :) | tambourine_man wrote: | I managed to get over most of the nostalgia in my life. After a | certain age, I feel it's a bit counterproductive and not a net | positive. | | But old Macs hit me hard and it's something I can't seem to build | an immunity to. The aesthetics, the simplicity, the cohesion of | the metaphors... so good. | rocketbop wrote: | Me too. I think it's because Macs were around when I was a | child, and they seemed to represent all the possibility of the | future. At the turn of the 90s I connected to bulletin boards | before I'd heard of the internet, and it seemed like whatever | sci-fi future was ahead of me, these machines were pointing the | way. | grishka wrote: | I don't share any of the nostalgia about old Macs most of HN | seems to have. They weren't around me in my childhood, and even | trying to get anything meaningful done on classic MacOS in the | modern times on an emulator is an exercise in frustration | because of how poor the support for Cyrillic characters is. | | But! I do have a similar feeling about old Windows versions. | The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser | (not yet ruined by the existence of touchscreens) and much more | thought out. They actually felt like extensions of your mind, | not something you have to fight all the damn time. | | Two things frustrate me immensely about modern computers: the | dumbing down of everything, and the insistence on using | touchscreen-inspired UI controls and patterns where they don't | belong. The third thing, that kinda encompasses the second one, | is the erosion of affordances. Is it a label? Is it a button? | Is it a text input? You never know! | tambourine_man wrote: | It has more to do with what you were brought up with than any | intrinsic merit, I'm sure. | | Being a Mac die hard I despised DOS and Windows 3.11. But I | remember seeing Windows 95 and being as impressed as my young | self would allow itself to be while still exhaling my Mac | superiority fumes. | Joeri wrote: | _The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser_ | | I'm not so sure about that. The pixel density was lower so | apparent size was the same for the "denser" UI. A 14 inch vga | monitor in the late 90's would run 800x600, where a modern 14 | inch laptop runs 1920x1080. | chongli wrote: | That's because it's never just nostalgia. Sometimes things were | better in the past. Take Google search for example. Everyone on | HN knows it used to be better and that it's been getting worse | every year. Of course, a lot of that was not (originally) | Google's fault because spammers get more sophisticated every | year, but I think Google deserves a share of the blame because | they have a conflict of interest by running the ad network so | many spammers use. | | I still believe Classic Mac OS (culminating with OS 9) was way | easier and more pleasant to use. Everyone knows the story | though: it didn't keep up on the back-end. Application crashes | would frequently bring down the entire operating system. Multi- | user security was non-existent (you were basically always | running as "root"). | | But when Mac OS X came along they abandoned the dedication to | ease-of-use and focused on power user features to go along with | a more modern (UNIX-based) kernel and userland. That led to the | computers we have today: for more complicated, mixed metaphors, | and borderline unusable by grandma. | ace2358 wrote: | Can't grandma still use the old computer while we all use our | new computers with new software that's enriching our lives? I | have countless instruments at my disposal in VST form, 3D | software like blender, DAW to write music in, stable | diffusion to help with the creative process. | chongli wrote: | Sure, grandma can still use the old computer. That's not | the point. I see people constantly make this conflation | here on HN. It's the idea that you can't have new | technology while keeping the benefits of old. It's rubbish! | What made the Classic MacOS great and easy to use were its | solid, fundamental principles. We have abandoned those | principles for convenience's sake. | bacchusracine wrote: | >Can't grandma still use the old computer while we all use | our new computers with new software that's enriching our | lives? | | Sure! And so can Uncle Joe and Aunt Mable! But why should | they have to? | | We used to have this thing called 'sane defaults' and | configuration options, which allowed people to set things | to their preferred level. Why is it now suddenly that | everything is hardcoded to behave one way? Nothing is | allowed to be configurable? | | So much of this is about configurations and not about the | age of the software being used. | Nav_Panel wrote: | Same. And, for me, it's the little happy Mac icon at startup... | seeing him takes me back to such specific moments in my | childhood. Playing Oregon Trail in my friend's basement... | damn. | pram wrote: | I miss window shading to this day, shame it never made it into | OSX. | sroussey wrote: | I can't seem to install McDraft on it, unfortunately. | emrah wrote: | No matter how good anything is, it has to be resigned every | year/major version/etc because it is far more "fashion" based | whether we like it or not. And fashion is all about creating | novelty by changing stuff not for utility but for the sake of | generating a different neural firing pattern in our brains so the | item doesn't simply fade into oblivion even if it is designed and | works perfectly | mihaip wrote: | I'm the creator of the site, thanks for the submission. | | This is an in-progress port of the SheepShaver emulator to | WebAssembly/Emscripten, https://github.com/mihaip/infinite- | mac/issues/34 is tracking the remaining work. | | If you're interested in running older Mac software in the | browser, the BasiliskII-based sites at https://system7.app/ and | https://macos8.app/ may be better bets. They will boot faster and | have fewer compatibility issues (especially System 7). | | The main thing that Mac OS 9/SheepShaver brings is PowerPC | support. There is also a variant of System 7 for PowerPC with | more esoteric mid-90s Apple projects like OpenDoc and QuickDraw | GX installed available at | https://system7.app/?domain=system7-ppc.app. | jxdxbx wrote: | I really love your project. It is a giant pain in the ass to | get BasiliskII and/or SheepShaper working, at least the few | times I've messed with them. Is it possible to run this offline | or in some kind of encapsulated web app form? | mihaip wrote: | macintosh.js | (https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/) is an | Electron packaged version of an earlier iteration of the | BasiliskII Emscripten port. | p_l wrote: | Hi, it's a great project, although I found out that some 68k | and PPC software seems to have required things that aren't | emulated by either BasiliskII nor Sheepshaver, or at least so | it looked when I was playing with it - tried running Macintosh | Common Lisp and it always seemed to crash. | | Still, reminds me of plying with vMac long ago and this weird | world of, to our perception then, barely usable machines ;) | CydeWeys wrote: | Awesome, this is so cool! I remember MacOS 9 with a mix of | fondness, hatred, and nostaglia. OS X was definitely a big | improvement when it came out (I remember OS 9 having so many | crashes), but some of the charm was definitely lost. | | And these .app domain names you're all using in this space are | great and totally apt. I love to see great usages of my work in | the wild like this. | thealienthing wrote: | I love that this exists. Time to time I crave playing some of | my childhood games that are OS9 based and setting up | sheepshaver is a pain. This will help me to get my kicks | playing some old games for the few minutes I intend to play | them :) thanks! | 5amdotis wrote: | Brings back memories! | yubiox wrote: | I wanted access to the college mac lab so bad back then, and | eventually got in. Something about those little white screens | and the feel of those keyboards was so compelling. | Cockbrand wrote: | Oh man, it's even got the "Grouch" extension for the Trash Can. | Can't install it on Chrome/Mac, though, as it can't be read. | | Still, very very nice! And as others have pointed out, the UI/UX | design is immaculately well thought out, discoverable and very | clean. | davepeck wrote: | In addition to being impressive technically, this is just plain | fun. I downloaded a game my friends and I wrote _way_ back in the | day [1] and... it worked in my browser. Such a nice blast from | the past. | | [1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2851-infotron | [deleted] | chuckreynolds wrote: | idk why but... cool. I had that Hellcats and Glider game... | probably f-18 one too. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-12-05 23:00 UTC)