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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

The article in general is pretty good, but this is off:

> The Macintosh’s operating system was showing its age, especially compared to Microsoft’s Windows 95.

I don't think that there was ever a point where Systems 7, 8 or 9 were worse than Windows 95.

Windows 95 supported preemptive multitasking for 32-bit applications. Mac OS kept using cooperative multitasking for an embarrassingly long time through all versions of 7, 8, and 9. Macs didn't get preemptive multitasking until OS X came along although there was a half hearted API that some apps could opt into in OS 9. By that time, a lot of Windows users were already on Windows 2000 or moving up to XP, both of which made classic Mac OS look downright archaic. But not to be mistaken, Windows 95 was a lot more advanced than classic Mac OS in a lot of important characteristics.

Don't forget the per-process heap size bar that you had to adjust. If you were used to any 386 version of Windows, it was like going back to a very well-manicured version of the dark ages.

I'll freely admit that it was, in the main, not worse than MS-DOS, most of the time.

> I don't think that there was ever a point where Systems 7, 8 or 9 were worse than Windows 95.

Systems 7, 8 and 9 had better font handling, prettier icons, a more comprehensive GUI experience (eg. drag and drop worked everywhere), and a richer desktop publishing ecosystem.

But with respect to multitasking, 32-bit application support, protected mode, and networking, including support for, you know, the Internet -- Windows 95 was way, way, way better than Mac OS.

Apple had a 11 year head start with the Mac. With Windows 95, Microsoft had finally caught up, and then some.

The only people who thought Win 95 = Mac 84 were Apple fanboys.

>> networking, including support for, you know, the Internet -- Windows 95 was way, way, way better than Mac OS.

I don't know about that - Macs with Mosaic and then Netscape were the internet surfing tools of choice in the Windows 3.x and 95 days.

Anyone remember winnuke?

Agreed, watching a Photoshop filter lock up an entire machine was painful in those days. Not to mention all of the other random beach balls one would get.

I actually came over to the Mac (for my home machine) for a little while after the writing was on the wall for the Amiga and it felt like a painful step backwards. At work we had been running NeXt boxes for a while, which made it's deficiencies all the more apparent.

I was not a big fan of Win95 but it would be a far stretch to argue that System 7/8/9 where anywhere near it in terms of actual use without regular crashing, which plagued MacOS at the time. Everyone was familiar with the bomb icon back then.

>Not to mention all of the other random beach balls one would get

Beach balls were a Next invention, which was bright along to OS X. It was monochrome originally and supposed to represent the terribly slow CD-ROM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel#From_NeXTSte...

Classic Mac OS had a wrist watch: https://i.stack.imgur.com/orvO6.png

Classic MacOS also had a beach ball https://i.stack.imgur.com/sGdwO.png

It didn't plague the OS like it did in OS X though, usually it was accompanied by a progress dialog box.

We always called the black and white spinner the beach ball and the colored one from OSX the pinwheel. May be a terminology thing, but I was talking about the old black and white spinner in MacOS. If one did any kind of video, image or 3d editing, it was not far behind and pretty much locked the computer up until whatever processing was done.

While Apple was faffing about with Taligent and Copland, Microsoft shipped something that provided preemptive multitasking and memory isolation for 32-bit apps.

Windows 95 was a collection of hacks that never should've worked but it put Apple behind the 8 ball to bring its OS tech into the present.

Apple also shipped A/UX which did all that

And was so expensive no one cared.

And this is probably the greatest inhibitor Unix had for its adoption.

They also shipped the Lisa prior to that, which also had protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking. This died for other reasons however (too expensive, upstaged by the mac, etc).

Oh, I rather liked OpenDOC.

They really were, though; astoundingly, System 7/8/9 didn't even support preemptive multitasking[1] which Windows 95 did have.

[1] http://forums.macnn.com/64/classic-macs-and-mac-os/44121/wha...

And the Amiga had preemptive multitasking in 1985. :-)

(It didn't have per-process memory protection, though, but it was a huge point of pride for Amiga users back in the early 90s)

Microware's OS-9 Level 1 had preemptive multitasking IIRC - this was late-1970s, early-80s - it was distributed by Radio Shack for the TRS-80 Color Computer line, which ran the 6809 8-bit processor, at something like .89 MHz (pretty f'in amazing when you think about it).

System 9 still lacked preemptive multitasking, due to a pragmatic decision from the very beginning of MacOS. (Perhaps even predating the Mac?) That alone would be enough to say that it was showing its age. As someone who was using System 9 at the time, I would say that this is indeed what knowledgeable users were thinking.

It's not entirely true. Copland microkernel was in (hidden) in System 8.5 onward, and provided preemptive multitasking, file mapping, timers etc. It's just that the only real 'task' on it was the old cooperative OS.

They had made a LOT of work on that, and the driver model by the time System 9 arrived. What really failed on Copland was the 'userland' equivalent. At the time, Apple had gone into a completely bizarre way of designing complex APIs for everything and most of them had no use whatsoever. There were heaps of crap, like OpenDoc and many others and Copland was 'trying' (and failing miserably) to integrate all of that.

How do I know? I have a collector t-shirt with 'Copland Driver Kitchen' on it ;-)

8.5 wasn't released until years after Win 95, though.

Slight correction: it was called the "nanokernel".

So not entirely true -- it's "only" true from the standpoint of typical User Experience.

When it came out, Windows 95 blew everything out of the water, including AmigaOS. Which was itself vastly superior to anything else at the time, including the various Mac OS.

It took years for Apple to even support preemptive multitasking, they were easily 5 if not 10 years behind (and still kind of are today).

> When it came out, Windows 95 blew everything out of the water

Surely not in a technical sense. OS2/Warp and NeXT already existed and BeOS would be released a few months later able to play multiple videos in real time (playing MP3 on Windows would preclude doing anything else with the machine for a few more years, lest you liked skipping).

Windows 95 was the best mass market OS at that time. Yes OS2/Warp and NeXT existed, but they were not popular. The Mac and Amiga OSs were inferior at that point.

That doesn't come even remotely close to "blowing everything out the water".

It had the best bones at that point, but it's UI/Fonts/Graphics were still subpar.

> It had the best bones at that point

Windows 95? Had the best bones? The underlying system was just terrible, there's a reason why the line would be replaced by NT two releases later.

> and still kind of are today

What are you referring to here?

Yeah, I run Windows 10 on my Mac, but only under protest. It's really not as good as MacOS.

That even today, MacOS looks very antiquated compared to Windows (talking mostly about the UI and UX here, the foundations of both OS are on par).

>When it came out, Windows 95 blew everything out of the water

We had two NeXT color slabs at the time when Win95 came out. We used them to help MS launch Win95 in Hong Kong. NeXT by then was gone as a company and the slabs were getting long in the tooth. We switched to SGI -- the SGI Indy wasn't graphically as slick as NeXT Step, but it it blew away ANYTHING out there. IRIX was a very nice BSD Unix. We built one of the first ISPs in Hong Kong on IRIX. Solaris had just come out, which was a buggy mess, and to me wasn't nearly as nice to work with as SunOS on Sparc 10s. We were running IRIX, SunOS, Solaris and not long afterwards, early versions of Slackware (which ran our Usenet servers). But even today, my fondest memories are using NeXT and SGI -- very cool, very expensive.

IRIX was actually System V (with BSD extensions) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX.

But I agree, it was very nice and I remember it fondly.

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