Mac System 1.0 (1998) | Hacker News Reader

Mac System 1.0 (1998)

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The trashcan comments reminded me of a comment by the late Douglas Adams about how it was better not to know that the trashcan had things in it. You're tempted to empty it right away, defeating the purpose of having it there in the first place.

Based on the screenshots, it's amazing how little the Mac System UX has changed between 1.0 -> 6 -> 7.1 (and to some extend even the newer versions, the latter UX changes were mostly theme-remake + little usage helpers).

Now it's good time to go and check out screenshots of Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3 and 3.1 to see how "ready" System 1.0 was compared to the Windows.

Other good thing to note is that the window manager of System was really good getting lots of windows to fit the puny 512x324 resolution. Something the Mac OS X is really bad at even with the 5k resolutions =(

I find it amazing that the bitmap fonts that shipped with Macintosh OS 1 (and System 0.85 for that matter: different 'Chicago' and the strange 'Swan Song') still work on OS X with only a trivial modification: Splice the NFNT from the resource fork into a FontForge-readable system (7 I think?) bitmap resource fork and you are left with something that is easily exportable into a modern datafork bitmap font. I've converted them all (Taliesin and Mobile were hardest to find in their original form. I still haven't found Toronto on an install disk anywhere) and they all work perfectly on 10.11.

Here's System 0.85 Chicago being used in emacs, for example. Looks great in acme as well.

http://i.imgur.com/EuO2bvF.png

If you have NFNT fonts, I don't think they shipped with Mac OS 1.0. NFNT stands for 'new font', the original OS used the more logical FONT as resource type for fonts.

I guess NFNT already is a conversion of an original FONT, but my memory is getting vague. I think I know there also were FOND resources at one time, but Google doesn't help much there (to complicate matters, https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/... talks about 'fond' and 'sfnt' resources. There clearly has been quite a bit of evolution in font formats over time)

Ah yes, you're right! I worked on this over the summer, so I must have gotten them a bit mixed up.

I copied the FONT info from each one into the NFNT portion of the resource fork in a newer file, then imported that file into FontForge for conversion to OS X-readable .dfont.

http://i.imgur.com/teGJ7qp.png

Ooh. Well... now I know what at least one rainy afternoon will be taken up with! That's awesome.

Actually, this reminds me of https://medium.com/designing-medium/system-shock-6b1dc6d6596... - Windows' font subsystem is super backward-compatible too. Sometimes too backward compatible. :P

Also, nice close/resize/FS buttons! :D (Also visible in the picture in OP's followup)

Thanks! Yeah it reminds me of this video I saw of some guy running super arcane Windows 3.1-era stuff on W8/10 or something with little modification. Btw, if you have rootless disabled, I have made that OS X 10.11 theme available for download. Simply move that GraphiteAppearance.car file to the alias marked '~ Car Resources' in the Aliases folder. Make sure to backup your original, if you do.

https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/Platinum

I'm not sure about 32-bit Windows 8+, but I remember the 32-bit version of Windows Vista still had the NTVDM, which is all you need for Win3.1-era apps to "just work" out-of-the-box.

With a little modification, you can run apps from Windows 1.01 and 2.03 on XP, probably Vista, and maybe even newer: http://toastytech.com/guis/misc.html

Also, I admittedly have no experience with OS X, but I was recently given an old G5 to play with that I hope to get up and running at some point. This theme file looks quite fun to play with - will it work on PowerPC?

I'm always impressed with how the Mac menu bar + Apple menu has remained in the same place since 1984 [1], performing pretty much the same functions for over 30 years!

Compare that to the lack of concrete UX decisions in the world's other major OS, unable to settle on a single menu style and so much flip-flopping on key features (cough-Start Menu-cough); removing them in one version and bringing them back in the next.

Is the Mac OS Menu a design that simply cannot be improved on, or are the users just not clamoring enough for a change?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_menu

I dunno. To me both the Apple bar and the MS bar do the same thing, offer a target in accordance to Fitts' Law.

While the layout of the menu itself changed some over the years, the base location in the bottom left has remained the same.

Even with Windows 8 you could get to the startscreen(?) by flicking the mouse to the bottom left corner. That would case a square to come into view holding a preview of said screen.

> both the Apple bar and the MS bar do the same thing, offer a target in accordance to Fitts' Law.

Not until Windows 2000. Prior to that, the Start button had a single "dead" pixel along the left and bottom sides of it in which clicking didn't open the Start menu. Microsoft design: it looks right, but it just doesn't quite work right.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/08/22/711808.as...

Been ages since i used the 9x series, so perhaps my hindsight is rose colored.

If it's not broken, don't muck around with it.

Though I think the Apple bar is starting to show its age with higher resolution screens becoming popular. With the latest macs, moving the cursor all the way across the screen is a bit tedious. Apple seemingly introduced wonky mouse acceleration to solve this, but it seems like they've introduced an extra problem.

Its easy to be good with "lots of windows" when you dont support multitasking.

It's interesting to see the Apple aesthetic of abstracting and hiding things from the user in general is many decades old and was there since the beginning. No command line, paths, or even a simple debugger is present. (Compare MS-DOS' DEBUG and EDLIN, which were included in version 1.0.)

Apple's way is inherently more idiot-proof, but makes a sharper division between developers and users. PC magazines in the late 80s and early 90s had articles consisting of short assembly-language programs the user could create with DEBUG, and I think in general it encouraged somewhat more open culture of tinkering and learning with their machines than Apple's philosophy of opaqueness.

It wasn't anything like the walled gardens of today, but I remember the effort required to even get started writing applications (or just modifying existing ones) on the Mac was significantly higher than the PC.

Did you have a chance to compare it to Apple II? My memory is fuzzy already but I vaguely remember it to be significantly more open?

The Apple II was definitely more open. It was physically open in the sense that one could pop open the top and add cards to it. It was also open in the software sense as one had to write 6502 assembly code to get the most out of it.

You have to write assembly code to get the most out of any computer, but getting the most out of a computer has become less necessary over time.

The Apple ][ was also open in the sense that it shipped with full schematics and an annotated listing of the ROM (https://archive.org/details/applerefjan78)

Inside Macintosh had a high-level description of the hardware, explained the memory map and how to call OS calls, and had good descriptions of the various data structures, but didn't go as far as including full schematics or a full listing. It also was a separate thing to buy, so most users wouldn't have it.

CALL -151 dropped you into a debugger. Later Apple IIs even had a (rudimentary) built-in assembler.

The Apple IIGS was an awkward collision of the Apple II and Macintosh approaches.

Edit: This comment originally went on to briefly describe the Apple IIGS, then tell a long-winded personal story. But I've moved that to its own blog post:

http://mwcampbell.us/blog/apple-iigs.html

While the UNIX and Windows GUIs of the time were abstractions on top of command lines, thr Mac GUI of the time WAS the native UI. It was literally burned into the ROM of the machine. There was nothing lower they were hiding aside from the machine code.

There was a debugger BTW, the very limited programmer's key (which most users only used to kill the current app if it crashed). It could be replaced with the more powerful Macsbug.

That debugger was not in the original "64K" ROM BTW. It was the "128K" ROM included in the Mac Plus that introduced it.

Having the UI code in ROM doesn't preclude (and might actually benefit) shipping a simple but versatile sort of debugging tool with the OS. But Apple decided against doing so, making the system more appliance-like overall.

DOS's DEBUG isn't just a debugger; it also functions as a disk editor, hex editor, memory inspector, and general "system inspecting/tinkering" tool.

There's an old deep division between people who think everyone ought to learn the depths of a computer and people who think that's unreasonable and maybe not even good.

I used to be in the former camp and have moves to the latter. Consider cars. There are lots of "car people" who love to tinker with them, but most people just want to get where they are going.

It would be unreasonable to expect everyone to be a car expert, and it would also mean everyone would have to spend the time required to learn it. That would cut into time spent doing other things, which would be narrowing and wasteful. Instead of composing music or starting businesses or writing novels, people would be futzing with cars.

I agree. It seems to me that as a class of product matures, it becomes less necessary for people to understand the intricacies of its implementation. And then there will inevitably be those that lament that loss of understanding and widespread tinkering.

Which is why cars, which are now 100-year-old technology, come with their hoods welded shut and you need special manufacturer-authorized tools to even change the oil.

There's a difference between "not needing to" and "explicitly discouraged from", and while I think computers should be designed for the former, the latter is what I find more troubling.

I dunno. If my car were sealed that would be okay with me as long as this development were coincident with less maintenance or lower cost. There's not likely to be many user serviceable parts of an electric car.

If you are a computer person there is more and more diversity of cheap hackable stuff out there today than ever before. The enthusiast market and the general market are not the same and are likely to keep diverging. Same has happened with cars.

First, as already pointed out by others, the Mac was really a graphical system. The Finder was the shell.

But there were other tools, too. E.g., ResEdit for manipulating program resources (I customized many programs using this, back in the day), eventually there was also an enhanced version including an assembler/disassembler. Also, there was the Mac Programmer Workshop (MPW) including all the developer tools, and it came for free. And inside this package was finally the MPW shell, a true shell for the Mac by Apple. (But this was now quite the other way round an indirect access to the machine.) It should be noted that the MPW wasn't available for early Macs, since there wasn't room to do actual programming. Commonly, the LISA (or "Mac XL") was used for this.

[Edit] Moreover, it was amazingly simple to change the configuration of the Mac, especially with System 7 and higher. Just drag things in out of the System Folder and you had already set up the system to your exact needs.

You were lucky to get what you got in System 1.0, they had to fit it on a floppy disk and had to take some things out to make it fit.

Later on when SCSI hard drives became more common there was more features to the Mac System.

System 1.0 was like a proof of concept. It just worked and you were lucky if you didn't get a system bomb error message.

The old Macintosh laptops had to power them on to show airport security they weren't a bomb, and hope the system bomb error message didn't come up and confuse the security guards.

What I still find fascinating about the Apple machines of the OldWorld era is not how small the on-disk system was but how much they tried to stick in ROM. My Centris 660AV had QuickTime burnt into the ROM chip. Of course, before anyone used the machine there was a software update to QuickTime so there was no point.

We also had a Mac Classic that has a whole system disk in ROM that you could boot from if you held down a secret key combo.

I am not sure about QuickTime being part of SuperMario ROMs, but it is funny that the Quadra 660AV/840AV and the PowerBook 190 was the only 68K Macs that used it.

>system 5.0 never existed (typical Microsoft ignorance)

Microsoft Works was not written by Microsoft, typical random blog ignorance :P

Microsoft Works was developed and licensed from Productivity Software, company launched by ex Apple employees Don Williams & Gene Carter. Microsoft threatened to destroy their company if they didnt sell. From horses mouth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai24F4Nel7U&feature=youtu.be...

Mac OS revolutionary? Not really, try AmigaOS with preemptive multitasking on ~same level of hardware. Mac OS was a quick hack and a kludge, whole switcher/multifinder ordeal was just sad for a modern 32bit operating system :(

> try finding a PC that can run operating systems from 1984 all the way through 1996

Why would this be hard? The x86 CPU boots into 16-bit real mode, the video card emulates the IBM PC text mode, the hard drive supports ISA, and everything else is ignored, right? The PC architecture is notorious for supporting weird old backwards-compatibility stuff.

He's actually incorrect about the "Set Startup" option being removed. The author claims it was not replaced by "startup items" in the system folder but that is another thing entirely.

Why does he say that folder icons were "much, much rounder" in System 1-6? This [1] is System 7. The only thing they did was add colour and make the tab a little taller. Same shape, and not very round at all.

[1] http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/ipod/images/1/13/Macinto...

> Nowadays, a full system folder easily tops 100 megs, and can easily have over a thousand items in it. A thousand! That's a far cry from the six that made up the original system folder.

And now, on El Capitan, I've got a /System that's 8 GB, with just over 296,000 items in it. And that's not even the whole OS these days, since there's the unix-y stuff in /, a few bits and pieces in /Library, and some more stuff that ships with the OS in /Applications.

Makes for an interesting contrast.

Yeah... And I can edit 4K video, encode/decode dozens of video/image formats, render a web page, etc. I get a JavaScript JIT, Perl, Ruby, and Python. I also get frameworks for mapping, photo editing, asynchronous execution, and many others.

The OS is bigger but it sure is more capable.

I'm not complaining... just observing. I'm not one of those who pines for the "good old days" of cooperative multitasking, unprotected memory, and application errors taking down the whole system.

Although I do find it remarkable that they were able to stuff so much into such a tiny amount of space (everything had to fit on a 400KB disk plus the 64KB Toolbox ROM, and the OS plus applications only had 128KB of RAM to run in).

Funny how that in 2016 we are further removed from when this article was written (18y) than it from the original Mac (14y).

Typical Apple-oriented article, spending whole paragraphs talking about the look of icons.

it feels really strange to me how mac people actually only talk about the visual appearance... ...considered to be not a good trait between civilised people.

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