Mac OS 9
macos9.app
macos9.app
This is an in-progress port of the SheepShaver emulator to WebAssembly/Emscripten, https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/34 is tracking the remaining work.
If you're interested in running older Mac software in the browser, the BasiliskII-based sites at https://system7.app/ and https://macos8.app/ may be better bets. They will boot faster and have fewer compatibility issues (especially System 7).
The main thing that Mac OS 9/SheepShaver brings is PowerPC support. There is also a variant of System 7 for PowerPC with more esoteric mid-90s Apple projects like OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX installed available at https://system7.app/?domain=system7-ppc.app.
Mac: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9osx.html Windows: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9win.html
There's not much in the way of third-party software included in these images, but it's a good starting point.
Still, reminds me of plying with vMac long ago and this weird world of, to our perception then, barely usable machines ;)
And these .app domain names you're all using in this space are great and totally apt. I love to see great usages of my work in the wild like this.
Out of curiosity and ignorance--what is the work you're referring to here which is being used for the project / website? The comment makes me feel it's the (dot)app TLD, in which case--fascinating! But also what does it even mean to work on something like that?
https://nomulus.foo (our open source software that runs our TLDs)
Could this have implement dynamic screen resolutions, like Qemu/Virtualbox/Vmware guest extensions do when virtualising other operating systems ?
Even the window handle bars were subtly shadowed, the window shadows evolved when they were collapsed. Like Windows 95 at the time, Mac OS 9 was a beautiful work of interaction design.
All feels more coherent than anything today. It feels like it was sketched out by a small group of people and executed incredibly well. Meanwhile things today look more disjointed like the product of a lot of design-by-committee.
Susan Kare's 'Chicago' in this rendering hits hard in the nostalgia factor to me a well.
I do agree on all other points :)
They look pretty similar but now that I look it them side by side I see it a bit.
As much as it is the style, it's also that kinda.. not-True-type still-a-bit-pixelated edges look that is the nostalgia factor, I guess.
I have wondered in the years since whether the newer abstractions and UI patterns we find in MacOS and Windows are actually necessary. These days both OSes are trying to be tablet friendly, trying to discourage user-installed/curated software, and trying to promote bundled cloud services, so it's not even clear to me whether the MacOS 9 abstractions are really the correct ones anymore, as evidenced by the many problems with cloud backed file explorer interfaces, synchronization, etc.
The fat borders for the windows and the control strip at the bottom left of the screen took up a lot of space on real monitors of the era. Try running at a more modest 800x600 or 640x480 and it will seem less efficient. Modern Mac OS X is actually quite efficient, with zero-pixel window borders on three sides, and narrower scroll bars.
Worse, a bunch of applications had code that would set up window locations with the assumption that the window borders were 1 pixel wide, like they were prior to Mac OS 8. This often meant that controls which were supposed to be visible would be partially covered by another window’s border.
I remember the Mac OS 8 era as a bit of “excess” that got cleaned up somewhat with the arrival of Mac OS X.
On the other hand, Mac OS 8 came with a fresh batch of standardized widgets (Appearance Manager) which made all the apps look better. These widgets came with guidelines for how they should be sized and placed, something which is missing from a lot of modern UI toolkits.
Although for a while (starting with 10.3?), some windows had a chunky brushed-metal look.
If anything, modern pointing devices are often less precise. We now commonly use trackpads, touch, and pens. In the 1990s, it was usually the mouse, so you find a lot of 1990s UI elements that are very small. The only reason our modern scrollbars on macOS are so small is because it’s assumed that you can scroll without them, either with a scroll wheel or with a touch gesture.
I’m not sure if the list of contemporary operating systems is particularly illuminative. You might look at Windows ’95, CDE (Solaris), or BeOS and find chunky borders. Or you might look at TWM or Window Maker (OpenStep) and see thin borders. The only conclusion I draw is that everyone agreed that you should have borders.
You're discounting the joys of using a dirty mouse, where the mouse would momentarily stick due to gunked up rollers.
> The thick borders took up valuable screen space and weren’t necessary.
Define "necessary". I think you are not considering why they were present in the historical context.
> They weren’t present prior to Mac OS 8
Yes, but there are reasons for that which I will go into.
> and they weren’t present after Mac OS 9.
There was no "after"; MacOS 9 (no space) was the last version. It was replaced.
> You might consider the era of thick borders as a 5-year blip on the timeline from 1997 to 2002.
Which fails to consider what happened in that timeframe.
Up to System 7.x you could only resize a MacOS (note, again, no space; that was important) window from the bottom right corner, where there was quite a big widget for this sole purpose... but in a brilliant bit of UI design, it was at the intersection of the vertical and horizontal scrollbars. Continuing either of them into the space past the end of the other would imply priority and that was a bad thing; the classic MacOS UI thought about this.
Examples: pics of MacOS 1.1.
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos11
Now consider what happened in 1996. Apple was in big trouble, bought NeXT, and Steve Job came back. The primary reason was to replace MacOS with Mac OS. (Note: that's why the space is important. MacOS = classic; Mac OS = OS X.)
Jobs cancelled Copland, the planned MacOS 8, and directed the internal Apple team to start salvaging what could be taken from Copland into what was really MacOS 7.7 or something, renaming it to MacOS 8 in order to make it look big and important.
It wasn't; it was UI tweaks and stuff. E.g. the multithreaded Finder from Copland, and the Appearance control panel that allows skinning of the OS, which MacOS couldn't do before.
(All this while the new NeXT team are porting OpenStep to PowerPC and building a VM to run Classic in, stuff that has no customer impact or benefit yet.
Important point #1: this is adding a lot of customisability to the MacOS UI that wasn't there before. This is not some minor trivial point of graphical design.
Important point #2: this is Jobs aping a Microsoft tactic.
Windows 98 is the same timeframe. Win98 is the same basic OS as 95, but with UI tweaks. Why? Because NT 4 is late, and not ready for consumers, but also, because at the time, MS is fighting the US DoJ over monopoly claims, because MS is bundling IE with Windows.
To fight this MS rewrites bits of the Windows Explorer in IE. Gaining, oh hey look, what a coincidence, a multithreaded Explorer, because window contents are rendered in HTML... which means it gets a selling point to upsell W95 customers to W98.
Apple borrows the adaptable UI stuff from Copland and backports it to MacOS 7.
Result: now you can resize a window from any side, like Windows. Jobs comes back and Apple starts "borrowing" ideas from Windows UI and MS GUIs, something pre-Jobs Apple wouldn't do, and only fair as Microsoft "borrowed" so much from Apple.
So how do you show that a window can be resized from any side, not just from the bottom right corner? Answer: you put big fat draggable window borders on it, just like Windows has.
Pics: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos80
That's why those borders were there.
Because Apple was recycling tech from its own, very expensive, failed new-OS development project, so that it could:
[1] offer UI tweaks that [a] enabled it to upsell customers an OS facelift and [b] showed that it had learned both UI and business methods from MS.
[2] as a byproduct kill the Mac clones as that only covered System 7
[3] find a use for the hundreds of millions of dollars it spent on Copland
[4] show people it could adapt and survive and sell new stuff while the NeXT team worked on Rhapsody, which would in time become Mac OS X.
In other words, there are very good strong reasons by those windows got big fat borders, important reasons that helped to save the company.
Second lump of history you failed to consider.
Why didn't Mac OS X (note, with a space), have those?
Two reasons.
[1] Because NeXTstep didn't have fat window borders, and Mac OS X is NeXTstep. NeXTstep only let you resize from bottom left or bottom right, and to do that, it had a big fat bottom window border with market bits at the left and right end to show you where to grab.
Pics: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42
And why didn't NeXTstep use the bottom right corner? Because NeXTstep doesn't put scroll bars on the right. It puts them on the left.
Why? Because in the late 1980s when Jobs started NeXT, Apple had recently sued Digital Research over GEM, because GEM looked too like MacOS (no space), and it won, and PC GEM was crippled as a result.
So the little startup company founded by the departed leader of the hostile litigious one does things as differently as it can so it can't get sued by the CEO's former employers. Or by Microsoft.
So, no menu bar, menus stack up on the left.
So, scroll bars are somewhere else.
So, windows aren't resizable by the edges and don't have fat window edges.
Aside:
Fun fact: Motif had those fat window edges and resizing from all corners and all edges too, because the design of Motif was licensed from Microsoft by the OSF. This is also why Motif menu bars are inside the window, like on MS Windows. Because back then MS was trying to be Not Like Apple, and Apple wasn't like anyone by default, but both sued anyone who copied their designs.
And that's also why almost all Linux desktops today are recycling the same tired old ideas. Because since the dawn of GUIs on xNix, it's been under the influence of Apple and Microsoft designs.
Sun did interesting stuff in OpenWindows and OpenLook but it wasn't really "open" despite the name and it's gone now. Damned shame.
SGI did some, in other areas, in IRIX. Also not really open. Also gone now. Also a shame, although there is the Maxx desktop, but nobody cares because everyone else did an end-run around it and the industry moved on. By 1993 it was a little throwaway gag in _Jurassic Park_ -- "hey, this is Unix, I know this!"
End of aside.
Mac OS X dropped that clunky bottom bar, because when the litigious company that sues copiers owns you you don't need to worry. So, scrollbars move back to the right. Menu bars go on the top screen edge, like MacOS and GEM and AmigaOS, and where Fitt's Law of ergonomics says they are easy to hit.
Result: Rhasody copies the MacOS 8 design.
Pics: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/rhapsodydr2
And then Mac OS X one point zero, sold as Mac OS X 10.0, uses 3d shading to show the edges of windows, because by the 21st century you could assume the display was in 24-bit colour and could do stuff like that.
Pics: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosx100
And truecolour icons and things, and shading everywhere, because when you control the hardware you can assume stuff like this and show it as the only way of showing window edges.
Fun fact: we early adopters of Mac OS X used little utilities to turn off the window shadows because it sapped performance on the low-powered old Macs we were using to run this stuff.
But oh hey look, the window corner widget has come back because we need to tempt Mac users onto the new OS, too.
Because Jobs _thought_ of stuff like this. How can I use any of the failed OS project my company rendered obsolete? How can I salvage some of all that wasted R&D budget? How can I sell interim releases? How can I make MacOS (no space) a little bit more familiar to Windows users? MS is making money selling small UI innovations to Windows customers, so how can I do that too?
There are good solid reasons for all this stuff, reasons totally driven by business models and IP ownership and tech of the time.
It wasn't accidental. It wasn't a blip. It was all for very good reasons, all of which you just skipped over with your rash assumption that it was a glitch of late-1990s design cosmetics.
Not to say it was perfect, but overall old computer interfaces were more information dense than todays one.
> Why the Z X C V keys? — They were close on the keyboard. We did X because it was a cross out (CUT). We did V because it pointed down like this [he makes a ‘V’ shape with his hands], and you were inserting; it was like an upside-down caret (PASTE). And Z was the closest one, because we figured you’d UNDO a lot. And C for COPY — that was easy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4 via http://morrick.me/archives/8432
https://i.imgur.com/WwFdpJH.png
They even offered a crazy "Memphis" art themed option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLWbFUG_ig "High-tech" wasn't very pretty either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBUgDnPT8Ps
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appearance_Manage...
There was a fairly healthy third-party theming community, though, and the Apple-developed themes (Memphis, High-Tech, and a sketch-styled theme called Drawing Board) would still work if you got your hands on them.
It appears purplish, but it's actually a desaturated blue with hue right at 240°. Something about the lack of saturation and brightness gives it a purplish cast.
The other two themes were basically unusable, though, and it's very clear why they were never officially released.
At least a small amount of C knowledge is sometimes helpful for getting those old projects working. Sometimes a new compiler or new libc will expose old bugs.
My experience with old window managers is they need tweaks to work reasonably on modern high dpi displays.
Iirc mlvwm builds with imake, which is positively ancient. It's the build tool that X.org got rid of after taking over from XFree86.
To get consistent usage out of a dbus-based global menu (KDE's or that one XFCE panel plugin) one would need to fork quite a number of packages, and for proprietary Electron apps you'd probably just be stuck.
Not sure about the state of things with Electron. I'm sure you're generally right and there are some gaps, and of course, on Mac OS you do only very rarely encounter an app with an empty menu bar (I have though).
You can theme XFCE to look really, really close. Won't behave identically, of course.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937562
I'm aware of unfinished efforts and mockups, e.g.
Later versions of HyperCard let you choose the size of the window. Various extensions would let you use a borderless window for the stack, and put a big black window behind it covering the rest of the screen.
The Motorola 68000 does not have a barrel shifter. You want to shift by 4 bits? That’s four cycles, buddy! Avoiding shifts keeps you on the fast path for CopyBits().
Later on, there was DrawSprocket. It solved the problem of figuring out how to do “portable” and “fast” at the same time, and let you use features like page flipping, if the hardware supported it (saving you the call to CopyBits).
>Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows thing.
Nope. It’s just that maximizing—single action to expand a window the whole screen minus the OS docks/taskbars—is present in every widely used OS except for Mac OS.
>they haven’t let go of the idea that all apps need to use the whole screen at all times
Not sure where you’re getting “at all times” from. Windows and Linux desktops all easily support having windows take up less than the whole screen. In fact, it’s easier than in Mac OS because of window snapping to sides and corners. It’s only that Mac OS makes it very clumsy to get the effect that maximizing has on every other OS.
Single-click maximizes to the content size.
Option-click maximizes to full screen minus menu bar and desktop volume icons.
Apps like games and screen savers don't seem top have trouble covering up the entire desktop and menu bar.
I prefer it to the current macOS Finder where zooming covers up the menu bar and desktop volume icons, and where there doesn't seem to be an easy way to zoom to content.
Most 21st desktop UIs are, to a greater or a lesser degree, Windows ripoffs. Most of Win95 or later, but sometimes you can trace a specific version -- e.g. KDE apes Windows 98 in program design as well as function.
(Rendering filer window contents as HTML before displaying them using the browser engine: this was designed by Microsoft to evade prosecution by the US DOJ for anticompetitive bundling of IE with Windows. It tried to claim that IE was integral by, for example, rejigging Explorer to render using IE. The Win 95 and 95B versions do not do it; nor did NT 4 at launch.)
If you believe that all GUIs do this, that suggests that the only desktop GUIs you've seen are ones that are copies of the Windows design.
To the best of my ability to recall that long ago, before Windows 3 and OS/2, most GUIs didn't have a maximise function.
Examples: AmigaOS; DR GEM; classic MacOS; Sun OpenLook; Acorn RISC OS.
I read somewhere that the reason Apple finally added full-screen support to macOS (back then OS X), wasn't because of the Windows switchers. It was to get a bit more real estate out of the MacBook Air's small screen size.
And iOS. Funny, that!
What do you mean by this?
How did screen savers and games work?
Back even then I used my desktop heavily too.
There wasn’t a default folder structure in the early days. Your hard drive had a “System” folder with merely a few hundred files in it (in a hierarchy) that you can ignore day-to-day. Otherwise the whole drive was your playground.
Back in the day, Finder used to remember whether folders were open on the desktop or "put away". It was a direct, one-to-one mapping between your spatial awareness of objects in the real world and the representation of objects in the computer. Meaning that things were left exactly where you put them on-screen, just like in the real world and, hence, it was easy to find your applications because they will be right where you left them.
But you don't need to launch applications, you just double-click on documents. Mac OS remembered which program was associated with each document -- not each document type or extension, each document. Each file had distinct type and creator codes associated with it, so that a JPEG created in Photoshop will be opened in Photoshop, and a JPEG downloaded off the web might be opened in a browser, when double-clicked.
Mac OS, pre-X, was quite simply the best UI ever designed. It took advantage of pioneering research into human-computer interaction and the underlying psychology of how humans relate to objects in a way that nobody today -- not even Apple -- is doing. It is what all UIs should aspire to be like, even today.
But I don’t know if it would scale to the terabytes of today.
To add to this, even after I "maximimze" windows, I have an ugly menu bar at the top, in addition to the windows own titlebar. Allow apps to have a menu in their own window, but don't force an ugly global menu. For the clock/systray, integrate it like windows in the bottom app bar.
I could keep listing frustrations. Many of these are objective.
Note: I'm not talking about app installation, or malware, or "polish". Mac is superior, will agree.
Classic Mac OS apps did not put the entire application UI in a single full screen window. Instead, it was typical for an application to contain multiple windows that could all be visible at once.
> To add to this, the "top" menu bar is lame.
This is related. In Windows, the entire UI of the app is contained in a single window, which you would typically maximize to fill the screen. In classic Mac OS, apps have multiple windows open at the same time, but the menu bar pertains to the application and not to the window.
This advice is actually rarely followed by apps regardless of whether they are on Windows or Mac. Consider Microsoft Word; if you open two Word documents, does Microsoft Word open two windows or does it open one main app window and then contain both documents in a single window? Are you aware of this Microsoft concept called MDI?
It sounds like you were used to iOS where each app has but one window and you'd prefer that to be the case on desktop operating systems like Mac or Windows. There's nothing with preferring that, but it's against decades of desktop computing tradition.
Why would I want a webpage which stops showing additional content after ~1200 pixels wide to take up the entire of my 2560px wide monitor?
Just another instance of different users having different patterns.
Personally, 80% of my web usage these days is hacker news and wikipedia. Neither of which do this.
The rest is probably majority dev docs (crystal atm), and I'm not aware of any dev docs that do this either.
The point here being that not all websites exhibit this behavior.
There’s nothing wrong with that! You’re allowed to prefer particular approaches. It’s like when I use Windows or Ubuntu, and get frustrated at how particular interactions work. It’s not because the Mac is objectively better, but because I’m used to it.
(Except for the keyboard shortcuts. Distinct control/option/command keys is objectively better and I will die on this hill.)
https://www.wired.com/2000/10/eek-a-two-button-mac-mouse/
"In recent years, the company has added "contextual menus" to the Macintosh operating system. But to activate them, users must hold down the control key while pressing down the mouse button, which more or less defeats the purpose."
Oct 31, 2000
For example, I learnt that, completely different than Windows, on MacOS you're not really supposed to minimise windows, at least not as you would on Windows. Instead, you open the command centre or whatever its called and switch between them. Workspaces also arent an optional extra, they're pretty crucial to using the OS if you have multiple windows open. Its for these reasons I can see why people praise the trackpad so much, its actually preferable to use over a mouse because its so deeply embedded in the flow of the OS.
I'm not saying MacOS is objectively better in its workflow, for that I'm still not sure what I'll end up using as my main computer, just that its different and should be treated as such.
I was a macOS 9 user before I switched to Windows ... and I have to say: I had a fonder memory of it than what I see in this emulation. All operating systems came a long way since. But hey, it is 20 years, is not it.
What the hell happened to modern GUIs, man. We peaked in the 1990s.
That's what always annoys me. I have a computer that's easily 100x or 1000x more powerful than my 1995 desktop yet so many actions have noticeable lag.
Like, try it, resize outlook right now (just stretch the side left and right). You'll see so much jank and jitter. How is something like that not instantaneous?
Sometimes there are accessibility options that speed it back up (don’t redraw until mouse let go) - I know you can turn off animations but not sure you can disable that one.
JS can run full GPU accelerated graphics with WebGL (and soon WebGPU), with shaders, complex geometries, textures, etc at 60 FPS: https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_animation_keyframes.
The MacOS 9 demo as shown, is impressive, but it is far from optimized, given that it is a side project. But it's impressive all the same that it's emulating a full Mac environment in the browser. Read the developer's own comments on it: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html
The discussion was to answer, "And why is everything just so slow!"
> The web has a reputation for being slow, thanks to a traditional lack of GPU acceleration as well as 25 years of legacy code attached to its Document Object Model, that are pretty gnarly for browser vendors to deal with. That has nothing to do with JS itself.
That's not exactly true, though, as many discussions here on HN have demonstrated. The web is not slow due to, "a traditional lack of GPU acceleration." The DOM is the execution environment of JS in the browser. This isn't a discussion about JS in any other environment.
While you may have a vested interest in JS, that doesn't change its properties. Please, let's get back to the actual discussion.
I would hazard that the vast majority of "jank" you see in desktop apps today is due to cross-platform code. A large portion of this is webviews (ex. Slack), but some of it is also poorly-implemented shims between the platform's native APIs and shoehorning that into some cross-platform library (ex. Photoshop).
It's just so much faster than any other GUI-based editor.
Wondering which model you have? Is it fanless? I’ve never used until o got my 2022 m2 air. It’s the best computer I’ve ever used.
Before that, 10 years of Mac Pro, and they’ve all been old (2010 models) and fast.
The 2010 Mac Pro doesn’t run macOS 11+, that might be its X factor.
The Mac Pro can run newer os with the help of open core. I can do many things with it like run Mac osX 10.6 using my modern amd rx570.
I can also run macos 12+ which I do. It runs great!
It’s more pronounced while recording but that’s the idea.
The Early 2020 MacBook Air is a joke from a CPU/Graphics perspective - even compared to other Intel Macs.
I still think something's wrong with your computer, as I have worked with multiple of that model and they weren't nearly this bad (even accounting for screen recording) - perhaps your cooling is worse?
Sure, under the hood Electron is powered by Chromium V8 (which also powers Node.js), which is written in C++. But that is just the basic packages and services available to all Electron desktop and Node.js apps.
The current macOS is humungous, kernel aside. There is a variety of systems running under the hood (Spotlight, fsevents, Apple Events, duet, launchd, MIGs, XPCs, caches, endless network services, launch services, anti-malware background programs, AppleID agents, diagnostics, cloud/AppleID integration, auditing, RAM compression, energy management, backups, filesystem snapshotting, COW,.... not to mention that huge OS inside the OS that is the browser) that is more than a surgeon can know about the human body.
Of course most of that is spying on you and telemetry... But you just have much more features these days and stability and security increased a lot. If that is not added value for you just work on one of those "minimal" OSes that appear from time to time. I guarantee you that you will miss a modern "bloaty" OS in no time.
This is all very close to the metal. On early 68K Macs, this is driven by QuickDraw, some very tightly coded assembly routines in ROM. Invoking them is only 2 bytes of code, as they're simply CPU opcodes (trap instructions). Render this string at this point size with this font at this X, Y location. Redraw the menu bar. Draw a rectangle. And so on. If you sequence these Toolbox invocations correctly, as a great master programmer of coroutines who never mistreats a handle as a pointer, you can render a complex scene with hundreds of polygons and a full screen of text in 200 milliseconds at 8 MHz.
But it takes thousands of lines of hand-holding the machine to do it.
Today, all of this is typically handled by instantiating a window object which draws into a private framebuffer which the system composites. That right there is tens of megabytes of RAM overhead. Then you use a thread to handle the UI and a thread to draw and etc. There's almost no boilerplate to just show a window. Perhaps one line of code. And it doesn't get overwritten by intrusive neighbour windows. Creating frameworks that can do all that bookkeeping in a flexible and general way (don't forget you want to be able to render vector fonts for any Unicode language) has a tremendous overhead.
There was an extension to enable window previews whilst dragging.
FWIW the slowest spec of DDR3-800 transfers 100MB is about 15ms.
Outlook is old, old code and still does things network I/O in the same thread as window repainting. I wouldn't treat it as a reference of anything other than how much Microsoft has struggled with the baggage from a bunch of mistakes they made in the 90s.
If you use Safari, Apple Mail, or almost any other macOS app, it is instantaneous — and unlike the older Mac apps like the Finder which did the rubber-band overlay until you released the mouse button, that means things like Safari seamlessly reflowing the entire Mac OS 9 emulator the whole time.
However in support of Apple's M1/M2 macs, I dont have this problem so much!
Apart from Electron based apps...
Which is why I find the wide spread love of VS Code so befuddling!
It's fine.. but so laggy when redrawing windows, switching tabs and so on!
Maybe it doesn't seem slow when in isolation, but compared to a GUI editor like Sublime Text, it's very noticeable!
But yes - your broader point stands and drives me nuts!
Somewhat gone are the days of upgrading your computer and everything being noticable faster because the software is the same! (to be fair, the M1 upgrade from Intel was impressive)
These days to have a decent experience (as a self confessed geek with high standards) you need an M1 Mac or on Linux and Windows a modern CPU, decent GPU and as much RAM as you can fit!
People of this opinion will probably enjoy using the latest version of XFCE4 on a Linux or BSD environment.
It's "less terrible" than most other modern GUIs that waste space and are full of bubble shaped smooth looking jellybean UI elements.
Mate desktop might also be something they'd enjoy. I personally recommend the Ubuntu-Mate version since it inherits a lot of the papercut fixes from when it was used in Ubuntu as Gnome 2.x. I was very excited to hear that the lead developer of Ubuntu-Mate was working with Debian to port those changes over.
Minimalism is a good thing for an OS as it really makes it easier to use.
Another thing to note: there’s a lot or duplication in modern software. For instance, each OS file browser has a search bar to help find files. But tragically, the browser also has one, and so do many websites in the browser. So we have a recursive, ever-expanding set of search bars—yuck.
And also tragically, so do many apps have built-in file browsers. Ideally there should be one mechanism to find things, one mechanism to organize things, etc. It should be simple but flexible, and apps shouldn’t have to roll their own, they should be able to gracefully use the one provided.
We’re at a weird point in software where the browser is basically the OS for many people. ChromeOS was an interesting thought but it’s more like a limited-feature OS designed to sell Google services.
We need to take a step back and kind of assess the situation more—and then make a nice little OS :)
As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched, I partially blame OSX and the whole "make everything round and groovy and graphical goodness" trend that started us down the path of making GUI's 'form over function'.
This is bleeding over from OS into power-user-oriented software like CAD and engineering tools and most everyone hates it. The whole "lets take away buttons and make the ribbon icons bigger and more graphically pleasing" to make products look more modern is a cancer for power users and productive people who just want access to everything as best and fast as possible. It's a delicate balance that I do indeed believe peaked well over a decade ago.
This reminds me: There was pretty interesting community of Linux users customizing X11 desktops in the late 90s and the very early 2000s... When the first screenshots and demos of OS X and Aqua came out, almost immediately, people tried to imitate that.
I ran windowmaker on my linux systems around 2000 to get that same look, but I had serious NeXT envy.
I'm not sure they had it literally "better" than everybody else, but they certainly had something unique, well executed, etc.
You can still recognize NeXT patterns in modern Mac GUIs. They're usually not surface level anymore.
Still a disaster compared to System 7, 8, or 9.
https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/beos-1....
It started as apple's knockoff but quickly spun out of control with amount of stuff you could setup with compiz/beryl.
Then people figure out most of it while very cool is not all that practical.
I didn't have too many major complaints about working on MacOS, but I've always preferred windows. I used Windows 3.1 before MacOS. It's probably since I used Windows first, but I've always preferred the Windows approach of window management. Whenever using a Mac, I would always end up with a jumble of windows and I'd frequently click the wrong one when and it would pop to the front and hide what I was looking for. Then the wrong application's tab strip would be visible. Arrrgggh! It was a common point of frustration for me when using Photoshop and Illustrator since there are a number of similar Windows.
In Windows 11, I like that there is reasonable support for dark UI and multiple desktops. I haven't used OS X that much in the past 10 years, so I can't comment on the improvements that have been made since then.
I appreciate that dropping a user in a window with 150 unlabelled icons is intimidating for them, but needing to hover over the magic space or find the correct icon abstraction of "junk drawer" to find core features is hardly intuitive either.
Good times.
Except it was just a webpage designed to look like a Mac with some very basic GUI features.
It was an extremely popular prank, I just can't remember the name of the website now.
And today we have actual real MacOS in a browser.
So asking me for something to fix a broken old thing usually involves me making a cross face, handing you whatever it is, and then taking a nap after washing my hands twice.
I'm not exactly sure the origin of the smell. Perhaps its the silicon/plastic they use on the electronics? Maybe even the heat combined with all the rest of the components produces that unique smell that I love so much.
But old Macs hit me hard and it’s something I can’t seem to build an immunity to. The aesthetics, the simplicity, the cohesion of the metaphors… so good.
I still believe Classic Mac OS (culminating with OS 9) was way easier and more pleasant to use. Everyone knows the story though: it didn't keep up on the back-end. Application crashes would frequently bring down the entire operating system. Multi-user security was non-existent (you were basically always running as "root").
But when Mac OS X came along they abandoned the dedication to ease-of-use and focused on power user features to go along with a more modern (UNIX-based) kernel and userland. That led to the computers we have today: for more complicated, mixed metaphors, and borderline unusable by grandma.
Sure! And so can Uncle Joe and Aunt Mable! But why should they have to?
We used to have this thing called 'sane defaults' and configuration options, which allowed people to set things to their preferred level. Why is it now suddenly that everything is hardcoded to behave one way? Nothing is allowed to be configurable?
So much of this is about configurations and not about the age of the software being used.
But! I do have a similar feeling about old Windows versions. The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser (not yet ruined by the existence of touchscreens) and much more thought out. They actually felt like extensions of your mind, not something you have to fight all the damn time.
Two things frustrate me immensely about modern computers: the dumbing down of everything, and the insistence on using touchscreen-inspired UI controls and patterns where they don't belong. The third thing, that kinda encompasses the second one, is the erosion of affordances. Is it a label? Is it a button? Is it a text input? You never know!
Being a Mac die hard I despised DOS and Windows 3.11. But I remember seeing Windows 95 and being as impressed as my young self would allow itself to be while still exhaling my Mac superiority fumes.
I’m not so sure about that. The pixel density was lower so apparent size was the same for the “denser” UI. A 14 inch vga monitor in the late 90’s would run 800x600, where a modern 14 inch laptop runs 1920x1080.
The once extremely common 1280x1024 19" monitors are 86.27 dpi.
My modern 14" laptop has a resolution of 3024x1964@2x. That's an effective resolution of 1512x982. And it's 128.78 dpi, ignoring the retina thing. But then the thing to keep in mind is that you usually sit closer to a laptop screen than to a monitor. I have no trouble reading 11px font on that screen from my usual viewing distance.
And yes there is an issue with some Windows laptop manufacturers shipping their laptops without the correct DPI set in the system, thus everything becoming way too small with default settings, and thus designers designing those gigantic UIs to compensate for that.
Plus, everything had lots of contrast without feeling harsh. One of the things that bugs me about modern UIs is the lack of contrast. I don't need a high-contrast mode, but it would be nice to get back to the contrast of 90s operating systems.
I feel similarly. The Win9X gray is just a touch too dark, it reminds me of a dark overcast day or something.
Platinum's shade of gray is great, and the shade that they switched to in Windows 2000 is also very good. For this reason on the Windows side of the fence I've always considered Win2K's UI the peak of Win9X-type UIs.
That said, you _could_ customize all the colors in Win9x if you liked, which you couldn't do with Macs.
Well, until Kaleidoscope[0] was created way back in 1991, followed by Apple's own Appearance Manager[1] in Mac OS 8.5 in 1998, both of which allowed all-encompassing theming that could stop just short of changing colors or radically change your UI's appearance. Windows wouldn't get an equivalent until the addition of visual style themes in XP in 2001 (which still had to be hacked to allow arbitrary third party themes) and was by predated the third-party WindowBlinds[2] by three years.
To date I've not seen OS theming that was as capable as Kaleidoscope was. Kaleidoscope schemes could change practically any aspect of the Mac OS UI (e.g. moving titlebars to the bottom or left/right edges of windows) which led to the creation of some extremely creative and zany schemes. Even the theming systems of modern Linux desktop environments which are built with customization as a central tenant aren't as capable as Kaleidoscope was.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds
My exposure (but there was a lot of it) to classic Macs was the ones at my school which notably didn't have Kaleidoscope.
There's seamless file copy in/out, and a really clever setup where accessing the same subdomain as someone else puts you in an AppleTalk zone together.
Extremely cool stuff.
The integration portions are pretty nice, no doubt.
Edit: https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac#building-the-emulator... reveals that it is indeed built using Emscripten.
"Sosumi is an alert sound introduced by Jim Reekes in Apple Inc.'s Macintosh System 7 operating system in 1991. The name is derived from the phrase "so, sue me!" because of a long running court battle with Apple Corps, the similarly named music company, regarding the use of music in Apple Inc.'s computer products."
Our physical tools of the trade were Iomega Zip drives and Iomega Zip disks (100 MB then 250 MB IIRC), Apple II Extended keyboard (the M3501, with ALPS switches: incredible keyboards for the time), HP LaserJet printers (600 and then 1200 dpi) and Sony Trinitron CRTs.
Also, you can still get EV Nova on a Mac as far as I'm aware. The price hasn't decreased in about 20 years though.
There's also an open-source clone, Endless Sky [0], and a recently-Kickstarted project to re-create EV Override for modern systems, Cosmic Frontier: Override [1].
0: https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky
1: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cosmicfrontier/cosmic-f...
Impressive that it runs in a web browser, but it seems that it has some quirks.
I was in a job that was mostly analysis and presentation and writing, and Win95/98 on a laptop was just a NIGHTMARE of freezes and crashes and excruciatingly long boot times. I had a colleague, though, that was using a Mac (because his background was design), and while OS 9 definitely did crash, too, it was far less frequent -- and boot times were faster. Plus, sleep actually WORKED.
Maybe 18 months later, that firm tanked, OS X came out, and I was keeping the lights on with freelance LAMP work using that same Mac as a dev environment. I'm on OS X to this day.
Didn't work, either on Firefox or Chrome (memory access out of bounds at void powerpc_cpu::execute_loadstore) but I get it, playing AW is not the ultimate purpose of this emulator!
Would really bring back that OS 9 feeling.
What a difference 26 years makes.
I love using it when I need a break from GNOME.
Ah, the old days of watching extensions load and single-tasking.
EDIT: Stable Google Chrome on a M1 MAX with a bazillion other tabs open is ~7-78x faster than real hardware. Chrome beats Safari beats Firefox.
Spent a lot of time in this world a few decades ago....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168646
1038 points, 323 comments
Still, very very nice! And as others have pointed out, the UI/UX design is immaculately well thought out, discoverable and very clean.
It's not that Apple didn't experiment in earlier days, but this was a time when the push to the next OS and design was really strong after so many failed efforts to get a next-gen OS out the door.
Had a lot of fun with this some time ago.
edit to add: also when windows 10 came out microsoft was like "we're done with the versions! forever!" and then a couple years later "windows 11!"
Too bad it doesn't work -- hope that's a temporary thing.
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/11531-shapeshifter-osx-t...
The same developers also had a UI skinning utility called ShapeShifter, which is probably what you're getting WindowShade X confused with.
It runs impressively fast in this compared to what I remember in period.
Anybody else do the same?
I don't remember the key bindings very well (or if it works with a mouse), but I did make it into the air before crashing.
What a wonderful hit of nostalgia. I'll have to try to play again when I have a free second.
1. Are you being serious, or are you being sarcastic?
2. If you're being serious, what about it is terrible?
Some examples (imagine you've never used a computer before):
- "file explorer" on Windows, "finder" on Mac. This is just an example of naming that I think it's just confusing to users, among many other names
- a red "X" to close a program on windows, a random square with no color differentiation on the Mac
- a clear view of what programs are running in the taskbar on Windows vs. the current active program in the top right
- taskbar showing date + time and the calendar "on click" on Windows vs. time, date on click & no calendar on the Mac
... and the list can go on. I honestly believe they screwed up by acting too smart, when people wanted something simple that makes sense to them.
The top right current program name has the running programs in a dropdown on click. You can 'tear off' the dropdown menu to create an always-visible task bar, either in the dropdown format or as nice little icons.
These are all features that work how I would expect on Windows 98. I'm sure if I had used a mac back then this would all make sense to me, but even as someone who uses modern macs, I was very lost in the old UI.
>Why do folders all open in a new window?
Spacial Finder (see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/). It remembers window position, icon positions within the window, and the like.
>Why can't I maximize a window by double-clicking the title bar? Why can I only resize windows with the little handle in the bottom corner?
Nobody really thought about maximizing by double-clicking, as there was the maximize button available, that maximized not to the screen but to the content being presented (at least that was the intent). Double-clicking on the title bar made the contents of the window disappear while keeping the title bar hovering there. This was great on small screens so that you didn't have to click between windows that had information in them but could hide the top one, read the one below, and go back to the top one without moving the mouse.
As for the little handle, that was for a) the sake of consistency, and b) because that was the one way the OS did things; resizing windows worked just that way. Not sure if that was purely intent or if it was due to system resources, especially in earlier Systems.
>What is the point of the settings dock in the bottom left of the screen? Do I really need to change resolution and colors that often?
I remember using settings much, much more than on current machines — there were a lot of little tweaks one might want to make for performance or ease (changing colors or resolution might be necessary due to a game, for instance, whether for speed or compatibility if it were older).
>Why do I have to browse the whole hard drive to find any of my applications? Why can't I right-click files/folders?
That was simply the way of things, though there were plenty of extensions out there that put application links (or links to pretty much anything) into the Apple menu, which became a catch-all that Apple has pared down (in response?) to almost nothing.
>What is the point of the bigger/smaller window button, why not maximize? Why does minimizing just collapse windows to their title bar?
See above.
>How do you even turn off the computer?
Choose shut down, and turn it off with the switch when it told you it was safe to do so.
Although, like I mentioned, all those features do work on Windows 98, which released over a year before Mac OS 9, so I think the parent's comment of "no wonder Windows kicked their ass so hard" does have a point. Windows 98 feels far more "modern" than this, at least in my opinion.
Also, in response to "Choose shut down, and turn it off with the switch when it told you it was safe to do so." That's what I was asking, where do I choose "shut down"? I expected it to be in the Apple menu but it wasn't there. After searching some more I eventually found it in the "Special" menu, still seems like a weird place for it.
Also, spelling error on my part: spatial Finder.
Now let's look at a few things that never made it into Windows :)
The desktop was special. If you move a folder or a file there, it would remember the original location of it. Later you could select things on the desktop and choose "Put Away" from the menu to move them back into their original locations. The idea was that you could do that to organize the work the way you do it traditionally: bring the current work on the desk, work on it, then file away.
If this sounds like it would break file references, no, it wouldn't. On Mac applications normally remembered files by their internal ID, so you could rename a file or even move it into a different folder and still find it via the 'recent' files in your app.
Files and folders were "things"; this is why there was always one window for a folder. If you open a file or a folder, the icon of it changed into an outline to show that it is currenly open and there is a full-scale window for it somewhere. If you clicked the icon, it would trace the way to that window.
The window of a folder remembered its settings, including the manual arrangement of icons inside. Together with color labels they made it very easy to organize small sets of files. (I do realize this won't scale to today's millions of files, but I indeed miss it for smaller projects.)
That’s an evolutionary left-over from the first Mac. It ran only a single program at the time [1]. It booted up running the Finder. From there, you could launch a single program. If you quit that program, it launched the Finder again.
[1]: except for desk accessories, a special kind of device driver (!) that could present an UI (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...)
If you hold down the Option/Alt key, it will try to resize to the largest possible size, similar to maximize.
Windows 95 was like this too unless the Internet Explorer 4.0 Desktop Update was installed: http://toastytech.com/guis/win95desktop3.png