Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

All I remember of this early period was just how much OS9 would crash when using "Professional" applications, making any performance increase in the Mac almost pointless.

I took a "fun" elective course in electronic media my senior year of school. It was Photoshop, video editing on VHS + digital video editing, and electronic music production. All my CS work was on IBM RS6000s or SGI Indy & O2s at that point. I had a homebuilt Pentium desktop machine dual booting Linux & Windows NT that I used for my work and a 486 laptop running Linux that was getting long in the tooth by 1999. I was very much used to computers not crashing by that point, NT was pretty good, Linux and the Sun/IBM/SGI workstations would stay up for a year no problem as security updates requiring reboots weren't coming very quickly yet.

I vividly remember greatly preferring doing all the video editing on the analog VHS editing stations because OS9 was so unbelievably unstable. Maybe the ultra expensive Avid workstations were less unstable, but I was in a 100 level course and not allowed to use them. We were saving our work after every operation the Macs were crashing so much.

Of course pretty soon after this OSX started making things right in the world. It's easy to take Mac OS for granted these days!

Heck even an iPhone with iMovie today would run rings around the Avid workstations from 1999!

Back then people would joke that Macintosh was an acronym: Most Applications Crash, If Not The Operating System Hangs

I spent a few years programming for OS8/9 and it was possible to keep things rock solid, but also really easy to fuck things up.

Cooperative multi threading meant that anything going wrong could cause everything to hang. The memory model was only slightly more forgiving etc.

Which meant some software was fine to run for weeks and other stuff was lucky to make it through an afternoon.

BowelsOfTheMemoryMgr

Classic Mac OS was cursed by its memory management. Decisions that made sense pre-multitasking would later haunt them up through Mac OS 9.[^1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Mac_OS_memory_manageme...

SO was W9X and even W98SE. Install a driver? BSOD. Set up something? BSOD. You sneeze at IE5? BSOD. And so on.

Windows users could run NT4 Workstation which was pretty reliable but Macs had no such option.

True but DirectX was pretty limited on NT4. And A/V production too, because everything was tailored to w9x.

NT4 didn't allow DMA to video RAM, which is why it was almost useless for video applications and a bunch of earlier emulators and such.

This. Service packs improved this a little (up to 6a) but the damage was done. You could install DX5 unnoficially but that's.

Meanwhile, Windows 98 supported DirectX versions up to 9.0c.

If anyone patched it to have DX7 support at less, the game compatibility and multimedia would skyrocket for NT4, but it didn't happen.

That's not really true. Windows 9x and beyond had real multitasking and virtual memory that worked.

> All I remember of this early period was just how much OS9 would crash

This just takes me back to working for an Apple reseller and the stream of internal hype around Copland (what was supposed to be OS8) in the mid-90s. It was going to be a microkernel! Memory protection! Pre-emptive multi-tasking! System 7 apps would run in their own microkernel personalities to avoid crashing anything else! You might even be able to run Windows in a separate personality!

Instead it ended with the actual OS8 release which added some theming and 3D effects to System 7.

I used Mac throughout the 90s. System 7, 8, as they called it.

The worst part of Mac crash was they were violet, unpredictable and would result in app crash or more often complete system lockup.

We spent hours carefully curating sets of extensions for particular tasks. It helped.

For the uninitiated, System 6-9 had "extensions" and "control panels," each of which could change OS-level behavior. Color display management, screen savers, font managers, TrueType support, Adobe's font support, or a trash can that, when emptied, played Oscar the Grouch's "I love trash" song. You name it, there was an extension for it.

And they frequently stepped on each other's toes, causing the machine to crash.

People had mythologies around which bits would play safely together. Legends that a stable set of extensions existed, never actually discovered.

Losing unsaved work was commonplace.

Casady & Greene published "Conflict Catcher", which would help you figure out working stable sets of extensions, and quickly enable/disable big groups of them. I remember I had a group of extensions that I would reboot into in order to play a particular game (though I don't remember which one) that had high memory requirements, but needed a couple extensions to be able to do network play…

I remember using a 3rd party control panel that used a kind of bisection method to diagnose bad extensions. It would disable one half of your extensions, reboot, and ask if you could reproduce the problem, you answered yes or no, then (depending on your answer) it would disable the other half (or one quarter) and re-enable the first half and so on, narrowing down until the problematic extension was located.

I don't remember what it was called! Funny that such a bizarre problem could get so bad people developed sophisticated tools to deal with it.

Edit: Ahhh, I think it was Conflict Catcher! Thanks sibling comment!

It was normal to use Photoshop and have the entire system crash several times a day. The G4's along with the iMac had terrible overheating issues which also caused constant crashes in warmer climates. Running these machines in a room without aircon in the Australian summer was a no go.

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