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Comment by hedgehog | Hacker News Reader

For reference this is roughly period correct for the early iMac models (G3 and DV) that came out in 1998 and 1999, though MacOS 9 didn't ship until later. Impressive porting work.

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Always weirds me out to see an iMac running an OS older than OS X. The physical design language really ended up dictating the OS X look, didn't it? Still does, in a way, with Liquid Glass bringing back clear.

I think the technology also dictated it. It’s easy to forget that in those days the idea of window chrome being full color, full transparency, with live window dragging and visuals not locked to tiling 8x8 or at best 32x32 elements was incredibly novel. And that was as much about preemptive multitasking and expecting and allowing every application to keep its windows up to date as it was about Quartz.

Aqua was garish and in your face, but it needed to be in order to be a symbol of what the system had achieved, which I think was especially important because that came at the cost of being a buggy, immature OS that had to run crucial apps in a hideous compatibility mode while it was getting established.

Edit: and if I can be a cranky old codger for a moment, I think that Liquid Glass unintentionally serves just as well as a symbol for what Apple has become: a company grasping to relive the memory of innovation without remembering how to innovate.

At the time there was also a major push to bring desktop computing and the web to the general population, remember this was a time when cutting costs enough to market a $1000 PC ($2000 adjusted for inflation) was considered a major achievement, the very bottom of the market. I get the sense that Apple was trying to distance its design as much as possible from square-cornered beige boxes as possible to signal that the products were for normal people.

This; and that WIndows 2k was as stable as OSX (compared to w9x and the ME disaster) but... it looked functional but boring , as a brutalist building in any European neighbourhood. Mac OS X blended both the incredible FX you would get from an SGI machine... with all the A/V and printing/design Mac tools, most common PC software (Office, Photoshop)... AND being able to run damn LaTeX, X11, Unix tools and the like. Of course even Windows XP wasn't a match against a G4 with OSX Tiger. They tried with VIsta (after Compiz and KDE3 tried to get tons of OSX' inspiration under GNU and BSD) and it was a disaster.

The Aero effects on Vista were cool enough (to this day, my two favorite Windowses are 2000 and 7), the problem with Vista is that it was extremely unstable. If you treat Vista as an open alpha for 7, things feel a lot better.

Each original iMac color came with an associated default OS9 background that matched it.

The G3 iMac that came out in this time period had much weaker 3D rendering capability than a contemporary PC gaming video card like a TNT2. Their video ability was closer to the 2D/office oriented video cards sold for non gaming use...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_TNT2

Or a voodoo2...

Yes, but Half-Life was designed to be somewhat playable with software rendering even on a 133MHz Pentium and that would have been the better rendering path on the earliest iMacs. In my opinion in that generation Half-Life's software renderer looked better than most of those cards due to the blurry textures and poor scaling (lack of VRAM basically unless you had cash for the 32MB versions) so no big loss for single player play.

To bring up an almost three decade old debate, it would be fascinating to see the performance difference between PPC and x86 in software rendering. Probably mostly bandwidth limited at this point still.

PPC ended up being a brilliant design done mediocre, while x86 is a mediocre design done very well.

I don't know the details but I would imagine that the comparison would shift quite a lot over those years due to the rollout of SIMD features on both sides along with the other microarchitectural improvements. I'm not sure I would characterize PPC as being mediocre, I think the designers hit more or less the target they wanted even if the top line performance numbers weren't hands down higher than the contemporary x86 parts and it didn't have the shine of IA64. There's a reason we still fly PPC 750 variants in some critical systems. If you think back to that period Apple was moving from 68k (where they were both one of the biggest customers for the chips but also not enough volume to field a part competitive on desktop) to PPC where they were no bigger (maybe declining unit volume) but at least part of a stronger coalition of users. The group's interest diverged (no laptop roadmap) and I'm guessing Apple wanted to switch to x86 as early as 2002 and it just took a few years to get the company stabilized enough to make the jump.

Edit: It would be interesting to look at the software rasterizer and game engine problems in a modern context of big compute and superoptimizers and see what is possible. I'm guessing not much above what the hand-tuned code of the era got, but maybe significant in the context of doing these kinds of retro-ports on a small budget.

The 1998 release required a 500MHz processor at a minimum... 133MHz might be pushing it.

Pentium 133MHz was coincidentally the fastest machine I had at the time but also the minimum spec labeled on the box. (my laptop had a Chips & Technologies 65550, so no 3D help there)

There were no 500MHz x86 processors in 1998. Pentium III wasn’t launched until the early 1999 and it wasn’t until well into the 2000s before games started requiring such beasts.

Myself, I played Half-Life on a 233MHz Pentium MMX, software rendered. It ran… adequately.

https://archive.org/details/halflife1998ownersmanual/page/n3...

Minimum: 133 Recommended: 166+

500MHz was not a thing in 1998, an expensive desktop PC was a slot based Pentium 2 350MHz in 1998. The 500MHz P3 came at least a year later and was quite high end for its time.

In early 1998 a more normal baseline home gaming desktop PC was like a Pentium 266 MMX.

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