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Good point about the software. Cube was published when Mac OS X was in its infancy. Ended up doing some expo gig where we presented it with the Mac OS X Public Beta running Mac OS Classic version of Photoshop.

The Cube was so cool for its time and it still looks good, a lot better than most of the modern PC gear. Opening it was also really cool. It just felt like magic when everything else in the market was basically big, ugly beige boxes which required force, trickery and bloody fingers to open and modify the components.

I wish they would make a new version with some Mac Mini hardware.

Funny thing about the Cube. It has a place for a fan but as the article mentioned, it didn't have it in production builds. There are still some aftermarket kits to retrofit the fan in place :)

Been still thinking about buying one to run Mac OS PPC Classic apps...

I don’t remember Mac OS 9 being slow—was it? I remember everything else—it was certainly unstable. Windows XP was introduced about a month after the G4 Cube was discontinued. If you bought a PC during the time the G4 Cube, it would have likely come with Windows ME.

Mac OS 9 was very responsive. e.g. Clicking on something and seeing the results of your click tended to be very fast. Comparatively, early versions of Mac OS X running on the same hardware were incredibly slow/unresponsive. They improved that with subsequent releases, and of course the hardware caught up too.

I installed the Mac OS X public beta on my family's eMac. The computer had 64 MB of RAM while the requirements listed 128 MB IIRC. But I wanted UNIX! It was so unresponsive, I had to learn to use the terminal.

Oh man, that brings back memories of trying the beta on my parents’ 1st gen bondi iMac with 32mb ram and a 4gb hdd.

Looked like it was warped in from the future. Moved at dialup pace.

Now that you mention your iMac, I think it was also a 32 MB iMac (2nd gen, blueberry) that I first tried …

I had a Bondi iMac and a friend had a Pismo, even after maxing our RAM and HD, we’d go back and forth between OS 9 and OS X Because one was crap and the other was terribly slow

It was very responsive, and then nothing else happened in the background while you held a menu open:

https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/popup-stevedev.html (An aside from The True Story of Audion: https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/)

I'm very nostalgic for those times and maintain several classic Macs, but for the most part I'm glad it's in the past.

I just inherited a Powerbook G3 (Wallstreet, 300Mhz G3) from my mother-in-law's closet. Everything is fine and snappy until you have two programs open at once...then all of a sudden everything becomes unresponsive.

It shouldn't be that bad. How much RAM in the machine? Is virtual memory enabled? What OS version? What disk is it booting from? With what disk driver? Which two apps? (Some, like Photoshop, have their own Scratch Disk settings). Is enough RAM allocated to each of them (in 'Get Info'), etc etc. This is a pretty deep rabbit hole.

It's an environment that takes a while to know the ins-and-outs of, but it's also very fun and incredible hackable in ways no OS could be these days. The Wallstreet is a fantastic computer, one of the best Powerbooks ever made. Try it with Mac OS 8.6, at least 64MB RAM (128MB even better), RAMDoubler 8 or 9 with compression disabled (it has a better VM system than built-in), on a mSATA SSD in a JM20330 ATA/mSATA adapter, with the boot partition under 8GB (ATA-5 limitation) using either Apple's Disk Utility driver or Lacie Silverlining 6 if you're feeling adventurous :)

edit: Unless your MIL was unfortunate enough to own the first (non-"PDQ") 233mhz model with no L2 cache, in which case yes it really is that bad lol https://lowendmac.com/1999/cacheless-mainstreet-powerbook-g3...

This one actually has 512mb of RAM, funny enough. No RAM doubler or virtual memory enabled. I was using iCab and Word side-by-side. It's the fastest PDQ model made AFAIK. No RAM doubler.

The main issue with it right now is that the sound doesn't work at all. I was going to take it apart and check the DC / sound card (which is the same module) and see if there's something obviously wrong with it once I get the chance.

Yeah, it's counter-intuitive, but you should turn Virtual Memory on even if you set it down to 1MB. Also make sure the Disk Cache is set as high as you can go.

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?app=forums&module=forums...

"If you disable virtual memory, the system's MMU is disabled. When that happens:

- Every program you launch needs to be 100% loaded from disk when you launch that program, which could cause program launches to take longer, particularly applications which are themselves large. The impact of this will vary based on the speed of the disk or network volume the application file resides on

- The other thing that will happen is all applications will instantly take up their maximum possible RAM allocation, which even in 768, if you're running 9-era stuff, especially anything creative, could have a big impact."

That's why I recommended RAM Doubler since it allows you to disable VM and its own memory compression without hitting this limitation.

What was especially cool was how older (pre-SDRAM) PowerBooks persisted files in RAM Disk across reboots. You could copy a minimal System, your documents, and an app (tiny ones like Word 5.1a), reboot off the RAM Disk, then eject and spin down the internal HDD for a big battery life boost!

I had a 200Hz (?) Performa (maybe it didn’t have cache) and running AOL Instant Messenger and CodeWarrior at the same time was a joke. A new IM would interrupt what I was doing and it took three seconds to switch back to the other app.

Meanwhile on my Pentium 166, I could smoothly have a few IM windows going while doing other things (Visual C++, Netscape...)

Part of this is read/write speeds on mechanical drives of the day

“nothing else happened in the background while you held a menu open“

That was because the OS was hacked (I guess the design looked differently, initially) to run on a 8MHz 68000 in 128k of RAM. To make menu opening and closing snappy (necessary because users will open and close menus searching for a menu option), it was implemented by

1. saving the screen bits that would be clobbered drawing the menu.

2. handling menu selection.

3. copying back those bits.

Drawing to the screen could mean writing directly to screen memory, which couldn’t be detected because there was no MMU, but even if it was done using system calls, programs couldn’t be halted when they made such calls. So, step 3 meant changes ‘under’ the opened menu would be lost, so nothing could be allowed to draw to the screen during step 2.

And of course, little of that mattered for the original OS, as it wouldn’t run multiple programs or multiple threads in a program. Step 2 would be the only thing running that was supposed to do screen drawing (with exceptions for drawing the mouse pointer, a feature that just have been fun to implement. Sound and async disk I/O (with its funny software-controlled floppy rotation speed) also would run, but those were limited in what they were supposed to do)

I’m not 100% glad those times are gone. Things were harder to do, but getting anything done felt way more as an accomplishment.

Especially on the newest hardware that OS 9 runs on (or can be hacked to run on) it's probably the closest you can get to feeling like there's practically nothing between the software button you're clicking and the hardware it's running on. Modern macOS is decent at this but all modern operating systems tend to give the impression of unseen layers because of the latency involved.

BeOS was even better and you could get real work done (with the little software it had)

The UI was very responsive, but things like networking (Open Transport...) and disk access were very slow compared to even the sluggish early OS X versions (I have a PowerBook G3 Bronze Keyboard I still use sometimes)

Classic Mac OS was very slow. I triple-booted my 7600 with Mac OS, Linux, and BeOS and I remember that Netscape was 10x faster on Linux.

10.4 was such a beautiful operating system. I really believe that Apple had the best operating system out there for the short window that 10.4 was around.

10.4 was OK but for my money 10.6 was better.

It was, but the rest of the world had caught up quite a bit by then. Recall that when 10.4 was in its prime your options were Windows XP pre-service pack 2, aka, Swiss cheese Windows. The ecosystem of available operating systems really put 10.4 well above the competition.

I agree, 10.4 seemed "complete" (besides lacking Time Machine, which I didn't know I wanted until it was added).

I played with 10.4 for the first time relatively recently. I was using VMWare Fusion, which isn't supposed to support OS's prior to Leopard, and Tiger crashed frequently as a result. So I can't fairly evaluate stability, although it was definitely speedy.

But, in terms of visual design... I don't think it's as pretty as Leopard, but what I find intriguing is how well it matches the hardware design of the era. On a Powerbook or PowerPC iMac, I can imagine how the contents of the screen would perfectly match the hardware that framed it.

I don't think Apple has done anything quite like that since...

I still use 10.4 on a 2005 PowerMac several times a week for various creative projects.

The ease of use is so much higher than recent MacOS versions it's not even funny.

What software are you using? Is the machine connected to the internet?

I love my Cube. It is one of the best designed device I’ve used. Just opening it to look inside is delightful. As you say, the keyboard/mouse/monitor/speakers combo is gorgeous. But you’re right, it was badly let down by the OS at the time. And by the time OS X had matured, it was close to obsolete. Such a missed opportunity.

I feel like the last Mac Pro was similar to the cube in spirit, but not nearly as good looking. It's still tempting to buy one of them sometimes.

I don't really know what it was trying to accomplish. What needle is being moved here from a "personal computer" perspective?

For example: What I really want is an end to the laptop form factor altogether. Take an RPI4 form-factor with a projection keyboard and a flexible fabric display I can roll up into a map tube and a few cables. Now THAT would be a game changer.

Stopped reading when you said Mac OS 9 was slow. Compared to the current Mac OS on modern hardware, OS 9 was blazing fast even on that old hardware. Most things being single threaded also meant that even if your machine was lagging, you could queue a bunch of keystrokes and clicks and they’d all execute in perfect order exactly as expected as soon as the lag stopped. Nowadays all those keystrokes and clicks just fucking vanish.

> Most things being single threaded also meant that even if your machine was lagging, you could queue a bunch of keystrokes and clicks and they’d all execute in perfect order exactly as expected as soon as the lag stopped. Nowadays all those keystrokes and clicks just fucking vanish.

Actually, on the rare occasion when OS X freezes up, I have experienced this. For a solid minute I mash keys and click my mouse in vain, and then boom, the system wakes up and all of my keystrokes and mouse clicks execute at once.