Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that takes me back. I remember installing it on my G3/300MHz. It was so slow. That really can't be over-emphasized. I'd try all sorts of things to get more speed like turning off the dock bounce, running prelinking, messing with all sorts of hidden settings. It remained slow.

Having been an Apple customer since the Apple IIc, I was worried. OS 9 had a snappiness to it. OS X would struggle to change windows. At the time, Windows 98 and even moreso Windows NT could run circles around OS X. With XP dropping the same year, Windows consumers were running a really well optimized OS compared to an OS X that needed a lot of work.

Apple has come a long way since those dark times to having a truly enviable OS. They quickly got 10.1 out the door and 10.2 and 10.3 shipped in around 1-year increments (with 10.4 shipping a year and a half after 10.3). Apple really did a lot of work and, at this point, I don't think anyone questions Apple's ability to push a great OS, but there were some really bad times.

I remember people questioning whether it was that the Mach kernel was just inherently slow (igniting lots of micro vs monolithic debates) or whether the compositing window manager was worth anything or coming up with theories that it was because Apple replaced Display PostScript with Display PDF to get around Adobe licensing or whatnot. Today, the majority of Mac users probably never experienced that bad time of trepidation when the future of the Mac platform was in doubt. Today, it's really great to be a Mac user. It's hard to imagine a time when Apple's products were so fringe. At nearly 10% of the market (and nearly all of the premium market), Apple feels so strong and people really know Apple (both for computers and other devices).

Kudos to Apple for taking the risk and getting through the bad transition to what is a really wonderful OS. And kudos for making each new OS version feel better than the previous.

Great retrospective. Change was, indeed, scary.

I was so scared of OS X, I stuck around on OS 9 until, I think 10.2. I might have stayed longer but my G3/266 (with AV personality card!) ended up biting the dust. The G4 that replaced it shipped with OS X and I took the plunge.

It was tough, at first. At that point I'd been a Mac user for ten years. I was a power user. OS X made me a newb again.

It was all for the best. OS X has been perfect for both home and work use. In the end, I give it so much less thought than what System 6 - Mac OS 9 required. It stays out of the way and just lets me work.

In addition, Apple gave developers a boatload of APIs and UI classes that let you build a surprisingly solid app with minimal effort. I cranked out a little desktop app a few weeks ago in about 25 hours. This results in an amazing freeware and shareware scene.

What a long way to come, for Apple and for all of us.

> Kudos to Apple for taking the risk

Apple has always taken the risk, it is one thing I love about them. You only need to look to their processor choices to see that: 68k -> PPC -> Intel. All transitions were just as painful as the OS9 -> OSX transition was. All in the name of pushing forward.

And I bought one of the first white iBooks (post toilet seat design) with the sole intention of using OSX (I'd used MacOS from 7 through 9, but departed briefly around that time). It was so slow it was literally completely unusable.

I do admit though, to this day there are things about OS Classic I really miss.

They never really did FTFF, did they?

I seem to recall the PPC -> Intel transition going rather smoothly, what with Rosetta instruction translation and Universal/Fat binaries. It took them about 9 months between shipping the first and final Intel Macs, and most apps were Universal within the first year (Photoshop and Office being the most notable, albeit gigantic, holdouts).

I would go so far as to say it was more painful for the last PPC buyers than it was for the first Intel buyers.

I think it went a little more smoothly than the Motorola 680x0 -> PowerPC transition. Notice the ppc and i386 directories that were in Mac OS X from the get go.

What do you miss about OS Classic? I'm just curious.

How about "my voice is my password?"

That wasn't bad.

Apple just had a better respect for consistency back then IMO. iTunes 10 is a great example, now we have the minimize/expand/close buttons vertically down the side? Sure it looks cool, but consistency is much more important.

And just lots of other little things that added up. Like placing the close button on its own side of the window. So if you are clicking in that region, then you've only got one target so the app can more confidently know you really did mean to close the window. Now in OSX, maybe you meant minimize? Or how the trash can was always in the lower right corner, using the edges of the screen to its advantage. If you dragged an item that far down, then you only had one possible destination, the trash, so the OS confidently places the item in the trash without nagging you for a confirmation (like Windows does by default). No OSX doesn't nag you, but the trash can isn't taking advantage of the corner of the screen either.

Minor things, yes, but I still feel the Apple of old thought about these things more thoroughly.

Depends which consistency you mean. It wasn't consistent prior to 10 when you went to press the green button to get the mini-player and the orientation of the buttons changed from horizontal to vertical. If I'm remembering correctly.

I like your other points though.

Out of curiosity, what do you miss from MacOS Classic?

Let's see. . . cooperative multitasking! No, resource forks! Oh, better: the lack of a minimize!

Really, that's easy: Apple Platinum (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager). I know, it's heresy! Still, I like the elegant simplicity of Apple Platinum. The color is brighter than the Windows grey; I like the horizontal pin-striping in the title bar; I like the purple accents which give it a soft, classy feel (rather than a more contrast-y feel) and it feels easier on my eyes than, say, Windows; I like the simplicity of the controls (such as the simple two black horizontal lines for the "shade-up" function) combined with the soft gradient of the square control. I think it made great use of space as well. The title bar wasn't big as is the current trend (damn kids wasting my pixels).

I'm also just not the biggest fan of the transparent movement. I don't find that it increases my usability, but rather detracts from it by making things fuzzy. For example, the OS X menu (today) is mostly opaque - you can't read anything behind it. However, the little transparency makes it harder to read as there's fuzzy changes behind where you're trying to read. Windows Aero is the worst. Those transparent windows with the changing fuzzyness depending on how you move them - yikes! I also don't like that the menu is white. Contrast is good, but I prefer black on platinum to black on white for my eyes.

There's even a little part of me that misses pixel-based icons. Having a set canvas to work with meant that authors tried to pack good meaning into small space. Now, you're expected to waste lots of pixels. Yeah, I like my screen real-estate.

Now, nothing I've said is objective at all. It's just my aesthetic. OS X, as time has gone on, has gotten closer to my aesthetic. Some of the more garish things have left, but the horizontal pin-stripes have also left. I don't want to make this sound like I don't think OS X is nice to look at - it is. But there's a part of me that misses the simple look of OS 9 and BeOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BeOS_Desktop.png) which had an elegance about them. Apple has done wonderful things with the OS X interface and I don't want to sound negative about OS X (plus, at least half of this is nostalgia talking). It's wonderful and so much better and I'm really happy with it.

> But there's a part of me that misses the simple look of OS 9 and BeOS

Have you given HaikuOS any time ?

> not the biggest fan of the transparent movement

Completely agreed: the fact that OSX UI (and iTunes) change in arbitrarily small ways with each release seems like evidence that they are orbiting a local maximum rather than making absolute progress. But Linux distros and Windows are just as bad. And much more interesting advances are happening with multitouch on iOS, so I give Apple a pass.

At least there's a pref for the menu: System Preferences > Desktop > Translucent Menu Bar.

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