7 ms·

> Compare it to other GUIs at the time, like CDE, IBM's Presentation Manager, or even Mac OS 8 and there's no comparison. Well, I agree that there was no compa

> Compare it to other GUIs at the time, like CDE, IBM's Presentation Manager, or even Mac OS 8 and there's no comparison. Well, I agree that there was no comparison with System 8, but not in the sense you mean. I think that the Mac back then was head-and-shoulders a better system than Windows. It might still be, but they're both so painful to use now that it's very difficult to pick a winner. The Macintosh system was very understandable, very clean. Extensions were an easy-to-understand way to extend one's system, and easy-to-disable too. The window system itself was better-thought-out and less-confusing than Windows's was. The Finder was much more straightforward than the Windows equivalent (was it called the File Explorer back then?). The way that the Mac associated programmes to files (with an application code & a file code) was much better than the extension-based naming of Windows. The way that the Mac used its files' resource fork was great. Programming a Mac back then was very clean & straightforward. I don't think there's anything today as nice, except maybe Cocoa, maybe. Certainly not the Windows 95 API!

pavlov 9y ago
I was using Macs back in the late '90s, and none of the things you say ring true. Extensions could easily bring down the entire system because there was no memory protection. Full OS crashes (what modern macOS calls kernel panics) were a daily occurrence for the typical Mac-using professional who ran complex software. The window system was often difficult to understand because apps tended to use a plethora of little panel windows that could overlap even from different apps. Windows preferred large windows that contained the entire app UI, and users typically maximized them. The Windows 95 Task Bar was much better for actually keeping track of your tasks than whatever the MacOS 8 thing was. File extensions were always a hack, but one that Apple adopted too for Mac OS X. The days of Mac's file-specific associations were numbered when the Internet happened, because Unix servers wouldn't keep track of that metadata, so you needed file extensions anyway. Besides, the file-specific associations were often super annoying because they were created by the editor app even for exported files. You saved a JPEG file from Photoshop, and it forever insisted on launching the full Photoshop when you double-clicked on it, instead of your preferred lightweight image viewer. This would happen even when you copied the file to someone else because the association was in the file metadata. Windows NT 4 and its next version Windows 2000 were just heads and shoulders above MacOS 8 and 9 in terms of performance, stability and usability. (And programming in Mac OS 8... Ugh. No memory protection, no multitasking, APIs originally designed in Pascal.)
- notriddle 9y ago
  We were talking about 95, which is a completely different universe from NT (though current versions of NT have a GUI that's based on 95).
  - pavlov 9y ago
    Windows NT 4.0 had the same GUI as Windows 95 and was released in 1996. That's the version of Windows that sealed the deal for professional applications.
    - bunderbunder 9y ago
      The late '90s I remember had a mishmash of NT, NetWare, and some (or maybe several) variant(s) of Unix on the bits that lived in the room with all the air conditioners. Windows 9x and maybe OS/2 were far and away the dominant OSes on actual workstations. Macs and even aging Amigas at some creative shops, some more Unix workstations at places where most people could recognize and identify the purpose of (if not actually use) a slide rule. But what I essentially never saw on any desktops was Windows NT. Lack of driver support and inability to run many business applications kept it out of that space.
      - pavlov 9y ago
        I suppose it depends a lot on geography and business. I remember Windows NT/2000 rapidly displacing Macs in the creative fields, and being widely used as developer workstations.
        kyberias 9y ago
        Especially developers moved from Win95 to NT in hordes during late 90s.
    - samstave 9y ago
      I’m trying to suss up some old memories... But NT was the first winOS which supported multi-proc, correct? NT4 was the first OS I could have my dual 266 intel procs run softimage IIRC
sysbell 9y ago
> The window system itself was better-thought-out and less-confusing than Windows's was I miss window shades so much.
- NegativeLatency 9y ago
  There used to be some good haxies that would let you do this on OSX, not sure what their current state of support/brokenness is.
  - sysbell 9y ago
    Yup, I remember using them. WindowBlindsX if I recall. It worked alright, but it was never as snappy as shades were.
jandrese 9y ago
Windows 95 was no paragon of stability when you started loading it up with tray apps and running big nasty applications or trying to use the damn printer with its piece of shit driver. We are spoiled these days by how stable our computers are. I agree with you that keeping the file metadata in a separate fork is far superior to keeping the file metadata in a three character extension, but sadly the world zagged on this one when Apple zigged. I especially like that you could have two files of the same type associated with different applications, so if you created a text file in your IDE it would open back up in that IDE instead of launching the word processor. And you could change it (somewhat clunkily) at will. Win95 did have some advantages though. The Start Menu was a better organization system than Apple's Application folder for example. Macs of that era were also slow and badly overpriced.
- Momquist 9y ago
  > I agree with you that keeping the file metadata in a separate fork is far superior to keeping the file metadata in a three character extension Since we're talking about Win95, then the 3 characters limit doesn't apply (long filenames was a major new feature of this OS after all). .jpeg and .html were relatively common for example at the time, and worked fine. I find the extension system still kludgy, but arguing than it was worse in part because of the limited pool, is incorrect starting from Win95.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    Yet for the same compatibility reasons most people stuck with .jpg and .htm, at least in the Windows world. Even now it's very unusual to see a .jpeg extension on a filename. The metadata that Macs kept in the resource fork go way beyond file type and creator too. It included things like the file's Icon, creation/modification information (so it would survive a trip over the Internet!), loads of stuff for applications (menus, graphics, sounds, etc...), formatting for plain text documents (so they fall back to plain text on unsupported systems), and so much more. Fun fact: NTFS supports the concept of a resource fork on files, but almost nothing in Windows uses it. I think I've seen more malware hiding stuff in there than legitimate uses in the wild. Worse, even the obvious case of loading a Mac file on a Windows machine it usually fails and falls back to creating the clunky separate directory instead.
hungerstrike 9y ago
Windows has always been head-and-shoulders above the Mac and that's why it won the 90s desktop wars and that's why just about every business on earth uses Windows and not Macs. You are in a tiny minority if you think Mac window and file management are any good. File extensions are the most pragmatic way of dealing with associations and that just about sums up the difference between Mac and Windows: Microsoft made Windows to be practical whereas Apple has always focused on style above all else.
hota_mazi 9y ago
> I think that the Mac back then was head-and-shoulders a better system than Windows. I completely disagree. First of all, Windows 95 had preemptive multitasking (the Amiga was the only computer that had this at the time), Mac OS was single task and used a terrible scheduling and it would be years before Mac OS gained preemptive multitasking because of terrible architecture choices that made this extremely challenging. From a GUI standpoint, Windows 95 was a total revolution and made Mac OS look completely antiquated: rendering, scrolling speed, font types, menu items and dialogs, etc...
- burfog 9y ago
  From 1991, Linux had preemptive multitasking. The Amiga was exotic hardware, like the BeBox. If you want to include those, you might as well include SGI and Sun hardware. Preemptive multitasking was common on non-PC hardware.
  - hota_mazi 9y ago
    Well yes and Minix had preemptive multitasking a decade before. We're talking about consumer facing computers, and at the time, the market was pretty much only Windows, Mac, OS/2, Amiga and Atari.
_sdegutis 9y ago
Cocoa is pretty painful compared to web UI alternatives like Electron. I feel stupid for mastering it considering there’s no jobs there and the Mac App Store is probably impossible to make any money off of anymore.

pavlov 9y ago

I was using Macs back in the late '90s, and none of the things you say ring true. Extensions could easily bring down the entire system because there was no memory protection. Full OS crashes (what modern macOS calls kernel panics) were a daily occurrence for the typical Mac-using professional who ran complex software. The window system was often difficult to understand because apps tended to use a plethora of little panel windows that could overlap even from different apps. Windows preferred large windows that contained the entire app UI, and users typically maximized them. The Windows 95 Task Bar was much better for actually keeping track of your tasks than whatever the MacOS 8 thing was. File extensions were always a hack, but one that Apple adopted too for Mac OS X. The days of Mac's file-specific associations were numbered when the Internet happened, because Unix servers wouldn't keep track of that metadata, so you needed file extensions anyway. Besides, the file-specific associations were often super annoying because they were created by the editor app even for exported files. You saved a JPEG file from Photoshop, and it forever insisted on launching the full Photoshop when you double-clicked on it, instead of your preferred lightweight image viewer. This would happen even when you copied the file to someone else because the association was in the file metadata. Windows NT 4 and its next version Windows 2000 were just heads and shoulders above MacOS 8 and 9 in terms of performance, stability and usability. (And programming in Mac OS 8... Ugh. No memory protection, no multitasking, APIs originally designed in Pascal.)

notriddle 9y ago
We were talking about 95, which is a completely different universe from NT (though current versions of NT have a GUI that's based on 95).
- pavlov 9y ago
  Windows NT 4.0 had the same GUI as Windows 95 and was released in 1996. That's the version of Windows that sealed the deal for professional applications.
  - bunderbunder 9y ago
    The late '90s I remember had a mishmash of NT, NetWare, and some (or maybe several) variant(s) of Unix on the bits that lived in the room with all the air conditioners. Windows 9x and maybe OS/2 were far and away the dominant OSes on actual workstations. Macs and even aging Amigas at some creative shops, some more Unix workstations at places where most people could recognize and identify the purpose of (if not actually use) a slide rule. But what I essentially never saw on any desktops was Windows NT. Lack of driver support and inability to run many business applications kept it out of that space.
    - pavlov 9y ago
      I suppose it depends a lot on geography and business. I remember Windows NT/2000 rapidly displacing Macs in the creative fields, and being widely used as developer workstations.
      - kyberias 9y ago
        Especially developers moved from Win95 to NT in hordes during late 90s.
  - samstave 9y ago
    I’m trying to suss up some old memories... But NT was the first winOS which supported multi-proc, correct? NT4 was the first OS I could have my dual 266 intel procs run softimage IIRC

sysbell 9y ago

> The window system itself was better-thought-out and less-confusing than Windows's was I miss window shades so much.

NegativeLatency 9y ago
There used to be some good haxies that would let you do this on OSX, not sure what their current state of support/brokenness is.
- sysbell 9y ago
  Yup, I remember using them. WindowBlindsX if I recall. It worked alright, but it was never as snappy as shades were.

jandrese 9y ago

Windows 95 was no paragon of stability when you started loading it up with tray apps and running big nasty applications or trying to use the damn printer with its piece of shit driver. We are spoiled these days by how stable our computers are. I agree with you that keeping the file metadata in a separate fork is far superior to keeping the file metadata in a three character extension, but sadly the world zagged on this one when Apple zigged. I especially like that you could have two files of the same type associated with different applications, so if you created a text file in your IDE it would open back up in that IDE instead of launching the word processor. And you could change it (somewhat clunkily) at will. Win95 did have some advantages though. The Start Menu was a better organization system than Apple's Application folder for example. Macs of that era were also slow and badly overpriced.

Momquist 9y ago
> I agree with you that keeping the file metadata in a separate fork is far superior to keeping the file metadata in a three character extension Since we're talking about Win95, then the 3 characters limit doesn't apply (long filenames was a major new feature of this OS after all). .jpeg and .html were relatively common for example at the time, and worked fine. I find the extension system still kludgy, but arguing than it was worse in part because of the limited pool, is incorrect starting from Win95.
- jandrese 9y ago
  Yet for the same compatibility reasons most people stuck with .jpg and .htm, at least in the Windows world. Even now it's very unusual to see a .jpeg extension on a filename. The metadata that Macs kept in the resource fork go way beyond file type and creator too. It included things like the file's Icon, creation/modification information (so it would survive a trip over the Internet!), loads of stuff for applications (menus, graphics, sounds, etc...), formatting for plain text documents (so they fall back to plain text on unsupported systems), and so much more. Fun fact: NTFS supports the concept of a resource fork on files, but almost nothing in Windows uses it. I think I've seen more malware hiding stuff in there than legitimate uses in the wild. Worse, even the obvious case of loading a Mac file on a Windows machine it usually fails and falls back to creating the clunky separate directory instead.

hungerstrike 9y ago

Windows has always been head-and-shoulders above the Mac and that's why it won the 90s desktop wars and that's why just about every business on earth uses Windows and not Macs. You are in a tiny minority if you think Mac window and file management are any good. File extensions are the most pragmatic way of dealing with associations and that just about sums up the difference between Mac and Windows: Microsoft made Windows to be practical whereas Apple has always focused on style above all else.

hota_mazi 9y ago

> I think that the Mac back then was head-and-shoulders a better system than Windows. I completely disagree. First of all, Windows 95 had preemptive multitasking (the Amiga was the only computer that had this at the time), Mac OS was single task and used a terrible scheduling and it would be years before Mac OS gained preemptive multitasking because of terrible architecture choices that made this extremely challenging. From a GUI standpoint, Windows 95 was a total revolution and made Mac OS look completely antiquated: rendering, scrolling speed, font types, menu items and dialogs, etc...

burfog 9y ago
From 1991, Linux had preemptive multitasking. The Amiga was exotic hardware, like the BeBox. If you want to include those, you might as well include SGI and Sun hardware. Preemptive multitasking was common on non-PC hardware.
- hota_mazi 9y ago
  Well yes and Minix had preemptive multitasking a decade before. We're talking about consumer facing computers, and at the time, the market was pretty much only Windows, Mac, OS/2, Amiga and Atari.

_sdegutis 9y ago

Cocoa is pretty painful compared to web UI alternatives like Electron. I feel stupid for mastering it considering there’s no jobs there and the Mac App Store is probably impossible to make any money off of anymore.