Re: Rewriting PT
Yea! I love that sketch, and shared it with everyone I knew who'd ever used Macs. XD
I can associate with everything he says. But, honestly, that was the change over period between OS 8 and OS X. (OS 9 was the "compatibility layer" so you could run OS 8 software on OS X because .... There was no OS X software when they released it. Remember, it's Y2K.
Classic Macs still didn't have proper multi-tasking and while Steve had been away making NeXT the Mac OS hadn't changed much since that Classic Mac II I used. It got colour screens and more resolution, (Mac2 was "high res" 512 x 384? ) switched (quite gracefully) from 680x0 CPUs to PPC, and became a 3D grey. (about 7.6) But essentially, it was all the same. OS X was sooooo different.
This is the pinnacle of Classic Macness. This is why I worry what modern Apple can do now Steve has passed.
This is the first release of OS X. ... Woa! Say what!?
It's like Going from Win98 to Vista, only Vista can't run *any* existing Windows software! How would PC users react to that?
Unsurprisingly, many Mac users re-formatted the hard disk of their new Mac and devoted all of the drive to OS 9. XD
Most of those "shutdown" and "system lock up" things he's talking about are all "Classic Mac" problems. They where competing with the constant BSODs of Win9x. And it's the exact same problem, with a different "user experience". Classic Mac had true 32-bit protected memory from first Boot, where Win9x didn't, but Win9x had cludgy multi-tasking (multi-threading) where Classic Mac did not. NT, and OS X pushed all of that aside. NT is essentially IBMs Vax VMS kernel for the PC, (rewrite) and OS X is essentially BSD. (port & fork ... actually fork to Match-O Xen, port and fork again to Darwin)
Dragging files from a CD / DVD to the desktop on OS X 10.0 made a copy. (actually, you couldn't fit many icons on your dektop, and if you ran out of space, you couldn't see them and needed to open the "Homeesktop" folder in a window so you could scroll down to it, or just look at the "details" file list view XD) In OS 8/9 this was not the case. Anything over 2.88Meg was considered a hard disk and assumed to be "always available". :
In 800x600, (as above, and a common maximum res for "Apple" displays) the Dock was unwieldy. And in early Mac versions, you could make the "magnify" value stupidly high, so that the icons where 16px and zoomed to 128 when the pointer was over them. The solution is simple, if you don't know what you're doing, GTFO of the System Preferences! I cured the OS X haters "Every Mac I go to is set up differently and I can't find anything" by locking down all of the system areas from the bash shell and imaging a standard OS setup to all Macs. (Carbon Copy Cloner rocks... I want a version that works on Doze) Users needed to give the network admin password to mess with that stuff, but could "work" just fine. That, funnily enough, made them happy again.
Renaming system files is also a "Classic Mac" problem, but MS introduced "System Restore" to ME because Windows users where doing the same thing with OS where users regularly operate with "root" privileges. Classic Mac was a single-user system. Even networked, you only needed to "log in" to access network resources. Not to use the Mac! (Mac users where horrified when they had to click on their avatar to get to their desktop even if they didn't set a password too)
I can have lots of fun at the expense of Mac users too. But if you know one end of an OS from another, it's pretty good. Nothings perfect, and I can giggle at Windows users for much the same. Here's a common one, I get with Windows users "I left my pendrive in the PC over the weekend, and now I can't see it in 'My Computer'?" Hmm, well, it will have gone into hibernation over all that time, have you tried un-plugging it, and plugging it back in? Also, try a different USB port. (because you didn't "Safely remove" the device) Also... WTH!!!? You can't safely remove the pendrive and log off before you go away for the weekend? Are you 12 and need to forget about school and go play!? FFS!
The screen grab for 10.0 I took from
He's using a 466Mhz iBook, but I think I was on a 600Mhz iMac / eMac when I played Diablo II and WoW. Diablo II was fine. I couldn't have any complaint, but it was fine on a 166 Pentium too. WoW was pretty good, considering a RISC processor (like the PPC G3, or the ARM CPU in most of your phones) will take about 5 instructions to de the same task as 1 on a CISC processor. (like i386) So you should consider it to be equivalent of about a 133Mhz Intel CPU. My PC was a 1.2Ghz AMD, and cost much less. XD
Yea! I love that sketch, and shared it with everyone I knew who'd ever used Macs. XD
I can associate with everything he says. But, honestly, that was the change over period between OS 8 and OS X. (OS 9 was the "compatibility layer" so you could run OS 8 software on OS X because .... There was no OS X software when they released it. Remember, it's Y2K.
Classic Macs still didn't have proper multi-tasking and while Steve had been away making NeXT the Mac OS hadn't changed much since that Classic Mac II I used. It got colour screens and more resolution, (Mac2 was "high res" 512 x 384? ) switched (quite gracefully) from 680x0 CPUs to PPC, and became a 3D grey. (about 7.6) But essentially, it was all the same. OS X was sooooo different.
This is the pinnacle of Classic Macness. This is why I worry what modern Apple can do now Steve has passed.
This is the first release of OS X. ... Woa! Say what!?
It's like Going from Win98 to Vista, only Vista can't run *any* existing Windows software! How would PC users react to that?
Unsurprisingly, many Mac users re-formatted the hard disk of their new Mac and devoted all of the drive to OS 9. XD
Most of those "shutdown" and "system lock up" things he's talking about are all "Classic Mac" problems. They where competing with the constant BSODs of Win9x. And it's the exact same problem, with a different "user experience". Classic Mac had true 32-bit protected memory from first Boot, where Win9x didn't, but Win9x had cludgy multi-tasking (multi-threading) where Classic Mac did not. NT, and OS X pushed all of that aside. NT is essentially IBMs Vax VMS kernel for the PC, (rewrite) and OS X is essentially BSD. (port & fork ... actually fork to Match-O Xen, port and fork again to Darwin)
Dragging files from a CD / DVD to the desktop on OS X 10.0 made a copy. (actually, you couldn't fit many icons on your dektop, and if you ran out of space, you couldn't see them and needed to open the "Homeesktop" folder in a window so you could scroll down to it, or just look at the "details" file list view XD) In OS 8/9 this was not the case. Anything over 2.88Meg was considered a hard disk and assumed to be "always available". :
In 800x600, (as above, and a common maximum res for "Apple" displays) the Dock was unwieldy. And in early Mac versions, you could make the "magnify" value stupidly high, so that the icons where 16px and zoomed to 128 when the pointer was over them. The solution is simple, if you don't know what you're doing, GTFO of the System Preferences! I cured the OS X haters "Every Mac I go to is set up differently and I can't find anything" by locking down all of the system areas from the bash shell and imaging a standard OS setup to all Macs. (Carbon Copy Cloner rocks... I want a version that works on Doze) Users needed to give the network admin password to mess with that stuff, but could "work" just fine. That, funnily enough, made them happy again.
Renaming system files is also a "Classic Mac" problem, but MS introduced "System Restore" to ME because Windows users where doing the same thing with OS where users regularly operate with "root" privileges. Classic Mac was a single-user system. Even networked, you only needed to "log in" to access network resources. Not to use the Mac! (Mac users where horrified when they had to click on their avatar to get to their desktop even if they didn't set a password too)
I can have lots of fun at the expense of Mac users too. But if you know one end of an OS from another, it's pretty good. Nothings perfect, and I can giggle at Windows users for much the same. Here's a common one, I get with Windows users "I left my pendrive in the PC over the weekend, and now I can't see it in 'My Computer'?" Hmm, well, it will have gone into hibernation over all that time, have you tried un-plugging it, and plugging it back in? Also, try a different USB port. (because you didn't "Safely remove" the device) Also... WTH!!!? You can't safely remove the pendrive and log off before you go away for the weekend? Are you 12 and need to forget about school and go play!? FFS!
The screen grab for 10.0 I took from
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and it's a modern Mac user who blogs about "Classic". This OT article, for his blog as well as this thread, is pretty sane. He says he missed these early OS X versions first time around, and I'm sure that's because everybody wiped them and used the companion OS 9 disc. So he also forgets that there was very little you could run that didn't come from Apple. (No Adobe, no Avid, no Macromedia, no nothing!)He's using a 466Mhz iBook, but I think I was on a 600Mhz iMac / eMac when I played Diablo II and WoW. Diablo II was fine. I couldn't have any complaint, but it was fine on a 166 Pentium too. WoW was pretty good, considering a RISC processor (like the PPC G3, or the ARM CPU in most of your phones) will take about 5 instructions to de the same task as 1 on a CISC processor. (like i386) So you should consider it to be equivalent of about a 133Mhz Intel CPU. My PC was a 1.2Ghz AMD, and cost much less. XD
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