Like the macOS Dock but for macOS System 7 | Hacker News Reader

Like the macOS Dock but for macOS System 7

github.com

127 pointszdw72 comments

Not to diminish the super-coolness of modern FOSS for Classic Macs, but as a fun historical fact the Mac OS X Dock was itself inspired by a Classic Mac application called DragThing.

https://www.dragthing.com/english/tenyears.html sez “The reason there wasn't much DragThing development between 1998 and 2000 is because I was then part of the team working in secret on the Finder and Mac OS X Dock at Apple. I felt then that the Dock would ultimately replace DragThing. However, for a variety of reasons, I left Apple shortly after Aqua and the Dock were announced in January 2000, and very little of my code survives in the current Dock.”

> a fun historical fact the Mac OS X Dock was itself inspired by a Classic Mac application called DragThing.

This simply can’t be true. The dock first appeared in NextStep 1.0, which was released in 1989, six years before dragthing 1.0 appeared in 1995.

James Thomson may have worked on the dock in OSX, but he did not inspire it.

I assumed the Mac OS X Dock was just an evolution of the NeXTSTEP Dock?

Copying [dead] reply here so I can reply to it: “This simply can’t be true. The dock first appeared in NextStep 1.0, which was released in 1989, six years before dragthing 1.0 appeared in 1995.”

The NeXT Dock was removed from Rhapsody and Mac OS X DP1/DP2. The Mac OS X DP3 Dock was a new creation.

See http://www.rhapsodyos.org/misc/docs_and_faqs/Misc_FAQs.html which recommends a third-party dock called Fiend —

Q: Is the OPENSTEP Dock going to be available in Rhapsody?

A: It is actually still there in 5.0 to a degree. In 5.1 and later it has been replace with the Applications Menu (but you can get it back using Fiend[0]). Also you have the option to use the minimize to tile for windows like in NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP instead of window shade.

[0]: http://www.rhapsodyos.org/misc/fiend/fiend_1.html

The reply wasn’t dead, and you’re confirming my point.

James Thomson worked on the OSX dock but dragthing had nothing to do with inspiring it.

It was dead. Someone vouched it so we can now see it.

It was never dead, and nobody vouched for it. HN just has delayed visibility for postings from new accounts.

It’s unfortunate that Lammy hasn’t admitted their error.

_This_ comment was dead until I vouched for it.

Not sure what's going on here.

! MacDock creator here.

I didn’t know this! I’ll read up on that as the name is familiar but I have never used it!

I loved DragThing and hate the Dock. They look superficially similar but they function quite differently. I don't remember the details because it's been too long since I used DragThing, but in DragThing it just worked smoother and more intuitively.

I used to do some hack that made the Dock invisible because I found it to be intrusive and useless. IOW I preferred using the Mac with no docklike thing at all to using the Mac with the Dock. Apple long ago made my hack stop working so now I just live with the stupid Dock.

> I used to do some hack that made the Dock invisible because I found it to be intrusive and useless.

Is there any reason you don't just hide it and never use it?

Hiding it means it comes back if the mouse wanders to the "wrong" area of the screen. That's as good as it gets now.

i remember when microsoft got rid of the start menu because you can just search for whatever you want anyways, and that is exactly what i do in osx too. Of course the start menu came back, but whether it is OSX or windows, all i do is a keyboard shortcut to bring up search to look for the app i want. So what I am left with is that as mad as me and everyone was that the start menu was going away microsoft was right.

For later versions of Classic Mac OS, there was A-Dock[0] which I used quite a lot on my CRT iMac when running OS 9. It was pretty capable, with some features that the OS X dock never had. It supported custom themes[1] and played nice with Kaleidoscope schemes and Appearance Manager themes too, which made it awesome for desktop customization aficionados.

[0]: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/a-dock-301 [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060103080636/http://jerome.fou...

I used A-Dock for years before I could afford a Mac OS X-capable computer, with Kaleidoscope too. Despite my excitement when I actually got 10.2 installed on something, I found myself dual-booting for a while. I didn't find that Mac OS X was quite ready for actual daily use until 10.4, and it took a while for my OS 9 apps to be ported over.

For me the point where I found myself full-timing OS X aside from the odd game that didn’t like Classic was 10.2. It was so, SO dramatically more snappy than 10.0 or 10.1 on my little 400Mhz iMac while also being more stable than OS 9. 10.3 was solid if unremarkable, and while 10.4 was nice, that’s the release where my iMac and its 8MB ATi Rage 128 GPU started creaking.

Upgrading to a 1Ghz Pixar lamp iMac fixed that issue though and on that 10.4 was excellent. If it weren’t for the missing features compared to 10.5/10.6 it’d be my favorite OS X release, because I strongly prefer 10.4’s light-middle-toned take on Aqua to the dingy grays that took over in 10.5/10.6.

So how are folks doing "Classic Mac" development these days?

Was this done on real hardware? Are folks developing within simulators? Just curious what the Classic development experience is like today.

Sometimes I muse it might be fun to dabble, but then I look at that 9" screen and go "Um, nah."

For example, many folks do CP/M development, but almost none of them do it actually on a CP/M machine. I think that's similar for many retro projects.

This app started from our retro programming study group[1] where we're going through the 1992 book "Macintosh C Programming Primer" (come jump in anytime!). Some of us are using real machines (we collect them, also I'm working with SCSI so I need real hardware) or you can grab a premade image and start coding. There's also gcc cross compiler Retro68[2] where you can develop on a modern machine.

[1] https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/study-group-0-getting-yo... [2] https://github.com/autc04/Retro68

> then I look at that 9" screen and go "Um, nah."

System 7 is an interesting beast in terms of the era it spans. On one end, we have the Mac Plus from 1986 with its 9" screen and 68000 @ 8 MHz. It can run System 7. And then there's 200 MHz PPC machines with PCI and Ethernet and 64 MB of RAM and all that, which can also run System 7.

It's a lot more flexible than CP/M, that's for sure. It's surprising how far it stretches to the current day, without snapping. For example, the last time I played around with it in emulation, it was quite happy to drive my dual 1920 x 1080 displays in 32 bit colour. Sure, it'd be hard to find a '90s era card that could actually output that in a real Mac back then, but the OS has no problem with such resolutions, or multiple displays.

I actually have a small stack of Radeon 7000 64MB PCI cards in my basement, capable of driving two displays at (at least) 1920x1080 (up to 2048x1536, I believe).

I used them in Power Macintosh 9600s running (IIRC) System 7.6.

ATI never released a 64MB Mac version of the card — I bought the PC version, desoldered and replaced the flash chip with one large enough for the Mac-compatible firmware, and reflashed them.

> System 7 is an interesting beast in terms of the era it spans. On one end, we have the Mac Plus from 1986 with its 9" screen and 68000 @ 8 MHz. It can run System 7. And then there's 200 MHz PPC machines with PCI and Ethernet and 64 MB of RAM and all that, which can also run System 7.

System 7.5/7.6 have similar flexibility. It’d run on a lot of 68k Macs, and it’ll just as happily run on that 200Mhz PPC Mac you mentioned after it’s had a 400Mhz+ G3/G4 upgrade card installed (System 7 might able to do this too but I’m not certain). Of course this CPUs are bottlenecked by the bus speeds of that hardware, but the gap between the power available and power required without virtualization/emulation is kind of wild.

> but the OS has no problem with such resolutions, or multiple displays

I don't recall the resolution, but there was a weekend where I was able to play around in a lab with several Mac IIfx machines. I was able to get one machine with a full set of video cards and arrange the monitors in 5 of 8 faces octagon and play a flight simulator where it could map different monitors to different viewing angles. So I had the front view, front angles, and shoulder views. It handled it with no apparent problems.

One of the machines that my father used was a IIfx that had a 32 bit color primary monitor, and then a 2 page 16 gray scale (that thing was monstrous) and a 1 page 16 gray scale monitor to either side.

https://lowendmac.com/1989/macintosh-two-page-monochrome-dis...

Hello! MacDock creator here. As another person posted below you can see some of the development details on the two tinkerDifferent threads (one was the study group one and then after I felt my posts were too much of the convo I made a new thread). Anyway i did it mostly on my physical SE (upgraded with an SE/30 motherboard before I started programming and I will say compiling is much faster on that). I admit I did some of it in an emulator but I was interested in giving my machine and awesome M0116 keyboard some real use. Its been awesome fun!

Have you considered sharing this on AmendHub? I'm still trying to come up with a fun project idea to implement and share there.

Hadnt heard of AmendHub. Will check it out

jcs has a very nice series of Classic Mac programming videos, he writes programs in Think C 5 on System 6, on real hardware: https://jcs.org/system6c

He even made a version control system for the Mac called Amend, and a website to share Amend repositories, called AmendHub!

I'm also working on my Mac Plus under System 6, but I haven't finished any projects that I could share.

This shows how advanced the Macintosh was for its time. I've tried using an Apple II for modern development, but it's too antiquated for that. The Macintosh, released just a couple years later, still seems contemporary by comparison.

Glad to see new programs being released for System 6!

> still seems contemporary

https://i.imgur.com/s8Zk7on.jpg

The similarity is pretty amazing.

If you can live with cross-compiling from a modern PC (or Mac) you can use https://github.com/autc04/Retro68 which uses a recent version of GCC.

MPW is probably the way, it emulates just enough to run the classic build tools on OSX

https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20150124-MPW,-Carbo...

I have a Quadra 950 with plenty of RAM and a 100baseT network card.

Quadra 700 with a Radius Pivot display :P

Ha - I love doing CP/M development in turbo pascal on my kaypro. It's shockingly usable with a 9" 80-column display, and no distractions. The edit-compile-run debug loop is somehow on par with doing it in simulation (usually a couple of seconds).

Enjoyed this bit from the README:

> This program is nice-ware. If you enjoy it, do something nice to someone today!

Probably going to get this banned from a lot of companies because the license isn't precise enough for them to ensure compliance with.

Hmm, I remember a little strip that would sit in a bottom corner collapsed. You would push it and it would expand like a toolbar, showing app buttons similar to a dock.

Think it was around System 8 time, as it had purple/blue and gray bevels. Ring any bells?

Edit: Yup, thanks, guess it wasn't apps after all. Though it probably could have included them.

That was the Control Strip, but the objects in it represented system features (like screen brightness, battery life, or audio volume), not running applications.

It was a fairly weird feature, IMO. It was initially added for laptops, but somehow ended up on desktop systems as well, and had a couple of bizarre features added to it later on, like the ability to enable/disable file sharing or control iTunes.

It was kind of like that system tray thing in Windows, wasn't it? I think it was mostly functionality you'd otherwise have in control panels, but I've always hated the Control Strip myself - how often do you really need to change your screen resolution? It was extensible, though, there were many 3rd party control strip modules that did all sorts of things.

> It was kind of like that system tray thing in Windows, wasn't it?

Kind of. Icons in the system tray in Windows were still representing running processes, though; the Control Strip used a plugin system specific to it.

You're likely thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Strip

There are "springloaded" folder tabs as of Mac OS 8.0, originally planned as a Copland feature, triggered by dragging any Finder window into the bottom edge of the screen.

As of Mac OS 8.5 it is also possible to drag the application menu out into a floating palette that can be rearranged by clicking its zoom box while holding various modifier keys. One of the combinations bears a striking resemblance to the Windows 95 taskbar :)

Here's a photo of me using all three at once on my TAM if it helps jog your memory: https://i.imgur.com/sVVbMun.jpg

edit: Almost forgot about At Ease which I personally never really used but does fit your description of having app buttons and being purple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease

I just want my Oscar the Grouch trashcan back...

Re-live your trashcan with "TEN HOURS OF THE GROUCH FOR MACINTOSH" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXwi7xrgyzE

Nice! Works in https://macos8.app/ too.

I miss the other direction, being able to put shortcuts (aliases) in your Apple menu. When OS X was still young there used to be a "haxes" called Fruit Menu that let you do that, but I think that has been gone for a while.

There are probably some menu bar items that I do not know about, but I really miss that functionality.

I've always wondered why no Linux or Windows dock clone ever has the same scaling method which Mac has. Then I realized, Apple patented it! They actually own the patent for that kind of mouse-following scaling!

I'm just amazed that people are still using System 7? For fun/antique computer hobby, I guess?

I mean, you can connect System 7 to the internet, sure. It may be the oldest Macintosh OS that can?

I love the old Macintosh stuff. I never owned a compact mac but when I got one recently and decided to try programming I wanted to do it the way they did it back then using the hardware and whatever ran well on my SE/30 (which at first was System 6 but the textbook that the study group on TinkerDifferent was using was written for 7 so i switched!). No internet needed (and I’m not (un?)lucky enough to own any networking hw for it. Just transfered the files out using floppies or my SCSI to SD device)

You can connect System 6 using MacTCP.

I’m not a fan of System 7 particularly, but I find that 8.0 up through 9.1 make nice “zen mode” operating systems. They have reasonably modern touches like sticky menus (don’t need to hold down mouse button to keep menu open) but are so much more “quiet” than modern operating systems. System 7.5 isn’t too bad and I actually used it back when it was current, but my interest in old macs skews more toward 1997 onward, most of which boot 8.0 or newer.

Earlier OS X releases are decent at this too. I find 10.2-10.6 pretty cozy.

What mac would you recommend for a nice home setup to run os9ish and do things with it (e.g., writing)?

I think AGP or Quicksilver G4s are nice for that use case. They have lots of ports and stuff for expansion, their RAM is easier to get than pre-G3 EDO DIMMs, they can have decent GPUs. I would avoid MDDs, they run very hot and have very noisy fans.

I have a soft spot for the 9600, which can take PCI cards for things like USB or SATA, but their RAM modules are hard to get and their CPUs are very slow. I would also avoid anything older than that, except if you really like the hardware. It’s very difficult to find NuBus expansion cards.

Agree with the sibling comment, though if expandability isn’t as desired or you don’t have the space, G3/G4 PowerBooks and iBooks may be a consideration.

I’d personally say look at models with at least a 400Mhz CPU — PowerBook G3 “Pismo” (I have one of these) or any of the white iBook G3s/G4s (though I’ve heard the keyboards on some of these develop a funky smell with age, which I haven’t verified personally). A Titanium PowerBook G4 may be an option, and they’re historically notable because they basically defined what modern laptops have looked like ever since, but you’ll probably need to do some repair work due to the various issues it’s known for (like hinges that break with time).

iMac G4s are super cool but make sure that the one you’re looking at is one of the models that natively boots OS 9 (some only boot OS X) and that the spring in its screen arm is still in good condition (some have been known to droop with time).

What was the point of minimizing the source code for this

Somethings up with GH’s rendering… when we view the raw sc, it’s un-minified:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/retrospectmike/MacDock/mai...

MacOS traditionally used `\r` for line endings. Unix (and thus macOS 10+) uses `\n` and Windows `\r\n`. Github isn't properly recognizing the files have classic MacOS line endings

Yup, this is it. Newline and CR + NL are the only recognized line endings on Github. You see this often on old source dumps (the Prince of Persia source release stands out, IIRC) of Classic Mac software.

Interesting to read about the issue. This is my first time posting source code on git written on a vintage machine. Honestly the source code tracking, the way Ive done it, is not very useful. I dont blame git and I can’t say there aren’t ways to configure it to be more useful.

Classic Macintosh also used “data forks” and “resource forks” as part of all files. I know Windows strips the resource fork part (by accident as it has no awareness of it) — so any Macintosh file that uses its resource fork will be broken. This includes the THINKC project file and the .rsrc file in the repo! Tldr - anyone interested in using the source code should just grab the .sit file and bring it to their emulator/or vintage machine and unstuff it there to preserve resource forks. But anyone in the vintage mac space knows all this by now :). Sharing it as fyi here! So proud to see my little app make HN!!!!

You could run DockApp.rsrc through DeRez (DeRez DockApp.rsrc Types.r) to get a usable (with Rez) text file.

I thought all editions of System 7 were color!

Apparently I was mistaken :)

System 7.0 supported color, but could run on most black-and-white Macintosh systems.

Specifically the Mac Plus (January 1986), which is the all-time longest-supported Mac[1] in terms of operating systems. It is compatible with 7.5.5, not superseded until 7.6 in January 1997 (!).

[1] The all-time champion among all Apple products is the original Apple II (1977), which ProDOS 8 supported until 1993 (!!).

> Specifically the Mac Plus (January 1986)

More specifically, that's the oldest model which System 7 ran on. (The only unsupported models were the Macintosh 128K, 512K, and 512Ke.) It certainly wasn't the only supported system with a monochrome display; that also included the Mac Classic, SE, SE/30, and a bunch of the early Powerbook models.

Sorry, did not mean to imply that Mac Plus is the only System 7-compatible monochrome Mac; only that it is the longest-supported and (as you said) oldest such.

I do wonder how many Mac Plus owners would have upgraded to System 7 as opposed to staying with, say, System 6. I imagine there is a significant performance handicap.

IIRC it would have mainly been a question of RAM size rather than CPU cycles -- among other new features, the Finder was always running in the background in System 7, so you needed more memory.

I used to use System 7 on a Mac Plus right up until about 2002.

That alongside (and on top of) a huge, noisy 100mb Frog SCSI drive and a StyleWriter II printer made for a surprisingly useful machine.

The Plus still works fine today, though the Frog died long ago.

> I used to use System 7 on a Mac Plus right up until about 2002.

Were you able to run contemporary versions of Netscape? (Well, before it crashed, killing itself and probably the system.)

Probably not. My recollection from my Se is that a lot of http software was limited by the lack of color QuickDraw.

No, that machine was never connected to the Internet.

I did run IE and Netscape on a bondi blue iMac though. IE was the only software that could crash the machine so hard it needed a full system restore.

Weird. My experience was always that Netscape was the unstable one; the Mac version of MSIE 5 was more reliable (and had much better support for CSS).

Hard to read the sources, ha ha.

Yeah. Looks like GitHub can’t deal with classic Mac line endings which is just the CR character.

Windows uses CR+LF and MacOS X is using LF like most UNIX systems.

the code could use some whitespce...

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