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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

What I miss the most is System 7-9. The architecture was of course outdated and needed to be scrapped (no protected memory, cooperative concurrency, etc). But what I miss is that the OS directory was meant to be accessible and modified by end users. To install a driver, all you had to do was to drag and drop the driver extension onto the extension folder and reboot, and the opposite to uninstall it. No complex command lines, things left behind that still affect the OS. You could do the same with application settings, fonts, etc.

This simplicity and accessibility of the internals of the OS is what I miss (and I moved to Windows when OSX scrapped that).

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Classic MacOS certainly had its flaws, but there has likely never been a more efficient mass-market general-purpose OS. In many ways, a ~400MHz G3 processor running classic MacOS feels faster and more responsive than a modern high-end workstation.

The ease of OS modification was certainly a double-edged sword...how much of the instability of the OS was because of drivers and other OS mods is hard to say.

> The ease of OS modification was certainly a double-edged sword...how much of the instability of the OS was because of drivers and other OS mods is hard to say.

I submit that this observation also applies to Windows 9x.

I agree. The metaphor for manipulating files, drivers etc has been the pinnacle of the desktop metaphor (maybe with the exception of BeOS but they just copied and made kinda better version of MacOS classic.

I recently bought a Powermac G4/553 DA model and it's really responsive with Classic. One of the last Classic-compatible models. But it feels really simple compared to any modern OS.

And something I've forgotten in 20 years since the last usage of Classic: There's no real multi-tasking. Uncompressing zip or sit packages basically blocks the whole OS until the work is done.

Oh and other things taken for granted nowadays I've forgotten: one can use _the same computer for other things when scanning photos_. Then even the fastest computer was blocked until the scanning was completed :D

> I agree. The metaphor for manipulating files, drivers etc has been the pinnacle of the desktop metaphor

And yet it has now been abandoned in favor of UNIX style "scatter and hide everything, but include an overengineered piece of software to manage it in very limited ways for the user".

I personally think that this is because developers once largely thought of their products as existing to enable users, whereas contemporary developers think of their products as herding or farming users.

I don't think that is necessarily "UNIX style". Just getting what you pay for with FOSS.

The users used to be developers themselves. Now the users are... everyone.

I have a PowerMac G4 1.25 DP that boots Mac OS 9.2.2 natively from an SSD (using a SATA to PATA converter board.)

It absolutely screams (Photoshop 5.5 cold launches in about 1.5 seconds), and I'm not sure how much of this is pure nostalgia, but the look and feel of classic Platinum Mac OS is friendly in a way that's really hard to describe.

Of course this machine is only useful for opening all my old documents from the '90s, but I plan on keeping it in a working state for many years to come, if for no other reason than to let the nerds of the future get a taste of what computing was like before the internet destroyed everything.

I remember that last point from Windows back then too. I had a scanner (hooked up to a parallel port iirc) and when it was working, NOTHING else was.

With every process running under the same security context, I can only imagine how horrific would modern through the web drive-by exploits be.

In reality, we don't need to imagine it. Windows 9x was like that and, unsurprisingly, easily pwned.

Over-automation of the OS is what lead to this big mess we see. Truly simple interfaces and methods are bulldozed and replaced by massive Rube Goldberg contraptions which are supposed to make it "easy" for joe sixpack with a few clicks or taps. The reality is even johnny electron, genius programmer, now has hard time navigating the hellish maze of interconnected binaries full of black-box state when it inevitably collapses under its own weight.

Delete it all.

And replace it with what? Linux and Windows are not much better in this regard.

If only it were possible to create a new OS. But sadly, any competitor to Linux would face an uphill battle from people asking the honest question "why not use Linux?"

I actually think it would be possible to use Linux as a core and build a reasonable userland on top of it, just like MacOS did with Darwin. But it would be a boatload of work.

Cough, Android and ChromeOS.

Yeah, like those. But my dream is an OS that is usable for non-hackers while preserving the Linux ethos of leaving the user with ownership of their machine. That does not currently exist AFAIK.

I don't see that ever happening, because too many just keep rebooting UNIX instead, as seen by all GNU/Linux based phone attempts.

And the companies that have the power to drive it into newer territories, like Google, don't care about providing yet another UNIX clone, just reducing the kernel development costs.

Had Inferno been a success, I bet we would also see blog posts on how to dump Limbo, replace ACME with vim, and have the GNU userland on it.

> I don't see that ever happening

I don't either. But a boy can dream.

Because cloning UNIX is more than done already.

I remember the times of rebooting with extensions disabled because something got corrupted. Can't remember the key combo to hold down during boot to do this. I just remember iteratively dragging half of the extensions out of the folder to find the culprit. I also remember my 4 year old daughter counting the extensions displayed along the bottom to know how much longer it was going to be before she could play her games.

IIRC it was as simple as holding down the shift key on startup.

I seem to remember that when programming this OS; your app was responsible for almost everything; including things like animating the close button when you detected a user clicked on it; and also the slightest mistake you made would crash the entire computer. So the simplicity was only surface deep.

What I miss as alternative universe is Copland having been a success.

Given Windows 10X original design goals, you might need to move to somewhere else eventually, if they go through with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztrmrIlgbIc

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