4 ms·
Wow, that takes me back. I remember installing it on my G3/300MHz. It was so slow. That really can't be over-emphasized. I'd try all sorts of things to get
by mdasen 16y ago
Wow, that takes me back. I remember installing it on my G3/300MHz. It was so slow. That really can't be over-emphasized. I'd try all sorts of things to get more speed like turning off the dock bounce, running prelinking, messing with all sorts of hidden settings. It remained slow.
Having been an Apple customer since the Apple IIc, I was worried. OS 9 had a snappiness to it. OS X would struggle to change windows. At the time, Windows 98 and even moreso Windows NT could run circles around OS X. With XP dropping the same year, Windows consumers were running a really well optimized OS compared to an OS X that needed a lot of work.
Apple has come a long way since those dark times to having a truly enviable OS. They quickly got 10.1 out the door and 10.2 and 10.3 shipped in around 1-year increments (with 10.4 shipping a year and a half after 10.3). Apple really did a lot of work and, at this point, I don't think anyone questions Apple's ability to push a great OS, but there were some really bad times.
I remember people questioning whether it was that the Mach kernel was just inherently slow (igniting lots of micro vs monolithic debates) or whether the compositing window manager was worth anything or coming up with theories that it was because Apple replaced Display PostScript with Display PDF to get around Adobe licensing or whatnot. Today, the majority of Mac users probably never experienced that bad time of trepidation when the future of the Mac platform was in doubt. Today, it's really great to be a Mac user. It's hard to imagine a time when Apple's products were so fringe. At nearly 10% of the market (and nearly all of the premium market), Apple feels so strong and people really know Apple (both for computers and other devices).
Kudos to Apple for taking the risk and getting through the bad transition to what is a really wonderful OS. And kudos for making each new OS version feel better than the previous.
- danilocampos 16y agoGreat retrospective. Change was, indeed, scary. I was so scared of OS X, I stuck around on OS 9 until, I think 10.2. I might have stayed longer but my G3/266 (with AV personality card!) ended up biting the dust. The G4 that replaced it shipped with OS X and I took the plunge. It was tough, at first. At that point I'd been a Mac user for ten years. I was a power user. OS X made me a newb again. It was all for the best. OS X has been perfect for both home and work use. In the end, I give it so much less thought than what System 6 - Mac OS 9 required. It stays out of the way and just lets me work. In addition, Apple gave developers a boatload of APIs and UI classes that let you build a surprisingly solid app with minimal effort. I cranked out a little desktop app a few weeks ago in about 25 hours. This results in an amazing freeware and shareware scene. What a long way to come, for Apple and for all of us.
- city41 16y ago> Kudos to Apple for taking the risk Apple has always taken the risk, it is one thing I love about them. You only need to look to their processor choices to see that: 68k -> PPC -> Intel. All transitions were just as painful as the OS9 -> OSX transition was. All in the name of pushing forward. And I bought one of the first white iBooks (post toilet seat design) with the sole intention of using OSX (I'd used MacOS from 7 through 9, but departed briefly around that time). It was so slow it was literally completely unusable. I do admit though, to this day there are things about OS Classic I really miss.
- pillsy 16y agoThey never really did FTFF, did they?
- jbrennan 16y agoI seem to recall the PPC -> Intel transition going rather smoothly, what with Rosetta instruction translation and Universal/Fat binaries. It took them about 9 months between shipping the first and final Intel Macs, and most apps were Universal within the first year (Photoshop and Office being the most notable, albeit gigantic, holdouts).
- endlessvoid94 16y agoWhat do you miss about OS Classic? I'm just curious.
- 16y ago