Comment by trm42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trm42 | Hacker News Reader

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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 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 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 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.

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