MacOS System 6, Version 6.0.8: run in browser
archive.org
archive.org
Though nowadays I would miss having a decent terminal. Perhaps A/UX [0] was decent, but I never tried that.
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For anyone reading who never used a spatial desktop before, it's kind of difficult to describe how good it was. There is this incredible feeling of solidity, reliability, etc. Things don't move around behind your back; everything is right where you left it. I miss it so much!
Why wouldn't you when developers have the opinion that their way is the right way to do things and you're retarded if you don't let their software organize your life for you? No comrade, you can't install software directly from the vendor! You must use almighty package-manager and hope The People have deigned that software worthy of inclusion in the repo. If you're lucky it might only be a few versions out of date! You don't actually want icons on your desktop, just use the application menu we built for you. Our AI assistant will choose an appropriate time to automatically install OS updates and reboot your machine, citizen. If it does so in the middle of your work or when you really need to use it, that's your fault for not training it well enough!
All you have to do is hide the toolbar, and it pops back into spatial Finder mode.
Give it a try!
Its been a while since I've used Nautilus, but back in GNOME 2 it had spatial design.
Everyone keeps saying that, but current macOS still seems to remember icon positions. Isn't that what the .DS_Store files are mostly for?
E.g.:
Navigating around in browser mode clobbers the existing folder view state (window size and position, view mode, etc.). So your folders always seem to lose their view state.
And there's no way to set a preferred browser window size. Instead, it always uses the spacial mode window size and if there is none it uses the hard coded default window size, which is way too small. And, again, as you browse around it clobbers the existing window sizes of other folders.
Create a new folder on the desktop, then double click. You'll get that tiny default browser window. Now navigate up to your home folder. You just clobbered your preferred home folder window size.
The end result is that when you open a Finder window, you never know what you're going to get.
Classic Mac OS Finder did not allow this. Every time you opened a new folder, a new window would open. If you navigated to a folder already open, the previous window would jump to the front. That's how spatial Finder worked so well. It's difficult to combine both these patterns. It's one of the reasons people felt Mac OS "just worked" without necessarily being able to elaborate as to why.
One thing Adi Robertson at The Verge said about Magic Leap is that she put things down... and then forgot where she put them! The limited FOV means you have to be basically looking right at something to see it.
Mac OS 7.6 was a precursor to Mac OS 8 and released in the era where Apple was working on Rhapsody. System 7 was released in 1991.
Compare the System 7 OS installation procedure to any modern OS. In System 7, you format the disk, then you copy the System folder to it. That's it. Compare application installation. In System 7, you copy the application folder to the disk. That's it.
What the hell is wrong with all the people developing OSs these days? Do they just fetishize complexity? Do they just have too much contempt and condescension for users? It makes me loathe computing as an industry.
> Compare the System 7 OS installation procedure to any modern OS. In System 7, you format the disk, then you copy the System folder to it. That's it. Compare application installation. In System 7, you copy the application folder to the disk. That's it.
> What the hell is wrong with all the people developing OSs these days? Do they just fetishize complexity? Do they just have too much contempt and condescension for users? It makes me loathe computing as an industry.
No, our requirements have changed and so have we.
I think also increasingly there is the view that users shouldn’t even be aware of these things. If you grew up on iOS, you have never even seen a filesystem, let alone an OS directory structure.
As for hiding things from users, what we need are good metaphors (ideally layered atop one another). You want users to be able to peel back one layer if they can't do everything they need. Things like spreadsheets and hypercard started getting there, but personal computing went the entirely opposite direction.
As a whole I think software dev culture has tilted a little too far in the direction of developer convenience. It’s our job to make the lives of our users easier, but it’s also very easy to fall into the trap of settling for “good enough”, which leads to the production of software that in reality is just barely hanging on the edge of “good enough”. To hit the moon you need to shoot for the stars so to speak, and as of late we’ve barely even been shooting for the mountaintops.
Either way, these *nix style operating systems are not great for personal computer users. They can either interact with their machines as pure consumers (app level) or learn a full blown programming language and the ins and outs of the OS. There's nothing in between. It's like having zoology and quantum physics, but without biology, chemistry, etc in the middle.
There's no reason to have all this complicated crap so that you don't have 2 copies of 200k libsomebullshit.so.
I wrote apps and drivers for MacOS 6/7 and early Windows; there was really no comparison in sophistication between the two systems. MacOS's approach was simple, elegant and worked well, while Windows' was baroque, poorly documented, and generally a very bad experience in terms of debugging and having confidence it would work in the field (I'm not talking about writing the apps or drivers themselves, just installing them).
There's absolutely no good reason for the current state of affairs on Windows other than an initial bad design that Microsoft chose to carry forward as architecture. (Read the INF file format documentation, it's a horrorshow).
https://web.archive.org/web/20150711154619/http://www.cnet.c...
System 6 did support color as well as larger screens, and I fondly remember phonebook sized white gloss books called Inside Macintosh. This _was_ Stack Overflow at the time. You had to crack a manual or know somebody if you got stuck.
Before even Xcode's progenitor Metrowerks CodeWarrior came along, Symantec Think C was my favorite coding environment. Microsoft Basic was a thing, as was Hypercard.
System 7 was ushered in with Inside Mac volume VI, a boat anchor of a paperback (never seen another this heavy) that threw everything akilter.
I look at the Macintosh SE on the shelf (no 30) and look forward to firing it up again. Hope its caps and hard drive haven't died. System 7 was basically unusable on the 68000's- too dog slow, and virtual memory was just a bad tradeoff. There's a kind of "snappy" about the old single threaded Mac that newer computers just can't pull off.