9 ms·

MacOS System 6, Version 6.0.8: run in browser

178 points by akeck 8y ago

cm2187 8y ago
One thing that I still miss from the system 7 area is an OS where the system folder is simple and accessible, with readable full text folders. Installing a driver was a simple as moving a single, self contained, extension file to the extensions folder. Uninstalling was moving it out. You could observe the full state of the system and manipulate it.
- wsc981 8y ago
  I miss it as well. Mac OS 7 was awesome in it's simplicity. I also thought maintaining the machine was pretty simple in case there was some driver issue. Just do a kind-of safe boot (by pressing shift on start-up IIRC) which would disable all extensions and control panels. And then one could try to disable all or some extensions during the next start-up and see if that would solve the issue. All in all it worked rather well and that was pretty much all there was to managing the system. Though nowadays I would miss having a decent terminal. Perhaps A/UX [0] was decent, but I never tried that. --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX
  - chongli 8y ago
    Yes, and I really miss the classic Mac OS finder with its spatial metaphor. Icons stayed where you left them, every window remembered its position, shape, size, view settings, etc. You could recognize, at a glance, what folder a window belonged to based on these strong visual cues, without needing to read any of the text on the screen. For anyone reading who never used a spatial desktop before, it's kind of difficult to describe how good it was. There is this incredible feeling of solidity, reliability, etc. Things don't move around behind your back; everything is right where you left it. I miss it so much!
    - gisely 8y ago
      Maybe they'll bring it back one in VR/AR.
      - jackvalentine 8y ago
        Maybe! One thing Adi Robertson at The Verge said about Magic Leap is that she put things down... and then forgot where she put them! The limited FOV means you have to be basically looking right at something to see it.
    - Fnoord 8y ago
      > For anyone reading who never used a spatial desktop before Its been a while since I've used Nautilus, but back in GNOME 2 it had spatial design.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      John Siracusa has been talking about the “spatial Finder” for over 15 years.... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
    - chuckdries 8y ago
      Surely, such file browser can't be that hard to develop as a user space application, right? I mean there are explorer alternatives on windows, a plethora of GUI file browsers on linux, and I have no idea but I can only assume there's at least one finder alternative on mac. I wonder why this hasn't been done yet.
      - speedplane 8y ago
        If no one has done it, it can’t be that easy.
        genericid 8y ago
        Let's go further: If no one has done it, it must be impossible.
  - mattl 8y ago
    There was no Mac OS 7. You mean System 7.
    - philwelch 8y ago
      There was Mac OS 7.6.
      - mattl 8y ago
        That isn’t Mac OS 7. Mac OS 7.6 was a precursor to Mac OS 8 and released in the era where Apple was working on Rhapsody. System 7 was released in 1991.
- ASipos 8y ago
  Was that behaviour present also in OS 8 and 9?
  - peterkelly 8y ago
    Yes. OS X's Finder was an adaptation of the NeXTSTEP file manager.
    - valleyer 8y ago
      That doesn't really jibe with the fact that it was based on Carbon (which of course didn't exist in NeXTSTEP) until Snow Leopard, so I don't think it's true. https://web.archive.org/web/20150711154619/http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/apple-moving-finder-to-cocoa/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150711154619/http://www.cnet.c...
      - derrasterpunkt 8y ago
        It is true. The functionality of the macOS Finder is based on the NeXTSTEP file manager. You are talking about the API with which Finder was programmed for. Carbon was introduced for programmers to transition to Mac OS X.
        valleyer 8y ago
        That is true, but it's not how I interpreted the word "adaptation" here. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
    - mrpippy 8y ago
      It adopted features from the OPENSTEP file manager (column view, inspector vs Get Info) but I doubt shared much if any code with it. It was written in Carbon and IIRC built with CodeWarrior (at least at first)
- johnpowell 8y ago
  And also you could just format a disk and drag and drop the System Folder over and it would boot from the copy with no real fuss.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Right? We've come a long way in the technology and the OS underpinnings, but in terms of having these kinds of simple abstractions that are easy to reason about and manipulate we have regressed significantly. Compare the System 7 OS installation procedure to any modern OS. In System 7, you format the disk, then you copy the System folder to it. That's it. Compare application installation. In System 7, you copy the application folder to the disk. That's it. What the hell is wrong with all the people developing OSs these days? Do they just fetishize complexity? Do they just have too much contempt and condescension for users? It makes me loathe computing as an industry.
  - sergiomattei 8y ago
    > Right? We've come a long way in the technology and the OS underpinnings, but in terms of having these kinds of simple abstractions that are easy to reason about and manipulate we have regressed significantly. > Compare the System 7 OS installation procedure to any modern OS. In System 7, you format the disk, then you copy the System folder to it. That's it. Compare application installation. In System 7, you copy the application folder to the disk. That's it. > What the hell is wrong with all the people developing OSs these days? Do they just fetishize complexity? Do they just have too much contempt and condescension for users? It makes me loathe computing as an industry. No, our requirements have changed and so have we.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      Bullshit. There is no reason at all that these things cannot be done today, we simply choose not to make it so simple. Portable applications are reasonably common on Windows, MacOS still uses Application Bundles, even Linux has AppImage, and those work pretty much just like applications did on System 7, yet so many developers insist on using broken installers, or needlessly complicated package management systems. There is no reason that bootloaders can't just look for a directory to boot the system from, even present the user a graphical menu to choose between the ones it found. FFS, UEFI can run a browser or NES emulator.
      - 8y ago
- Fnoord 8y ago
  On the bottom it says "SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)" which lists 3 different MacOS 7 versions for me. YMMV, but probably you'll be able to find those as well.
mambodog 8y ago
For anyone who is interested in some technical background, I wrote about porting this emulator to browser a little while ago: https://jamesfriend.com.au/porting-pce-emulator-browser https://jamesfriend.com.au/porting-pce-emulator-browser
geuis 8y ago
SO many good memories. Treats mobile touches as click-drags though.
- kkylin 8y ago
  Many happy memories of my SE/30 running System 6... (System 7 started to feel a little slow on it.)
  - macintux 8y ago
    The SE/30 was a remarkable machine. My mother used hers for many years.
thefurman 8y ago
I pressed ⌘-Q and quit my browser. Good morning.
hliyan 8y ago
Does anyone else feel that these interfaces now look a lot less dated than they did five years ago (as we move away from skeuomorphic designs toward more flat, functional designs)?
- scroot 8y ago
  I still think the Platinum look is one of the best ever
mchannon 8y ago
This takes me back. 6.0.8 was the last version of the Macintosh System and Finder that I really loved. System 6 did support color as well as larger screens, and I fondly remember phonebook sized white gloss books called Inside Macintosh. This _was_ Stack Overflow at the time. You had to crack a manual or know somebody if you got stuck. Before even Xcode's progenitor Metrowerks CodeWarrior came along, Symantec Think C was my favorite coding environment. Microsoft Basic was a thing, as was Hypercard. System 7 was ushered in with Inside Mac volume VI, a boat anchor of a paperback (never seen another this heavy) that threw everything akilter. I look at the Macintosh SE on the shelf (no 30) and look forward to firing it up again. Hope its caps and hard drive haven't died. System 7 was basically unusable on the 68000's- too dog slow, and virtual memory was just a bad tradeoff. There's a kind of "snappy" about the old single threaded Mac that newer computers just can't pull off.
EamonnMR 8y ago
Classic Mac OS was where I had a lot of my initial experience with conputing, so I'm excited to see that the fine folks at the internet archive have turned their attention to it.
colmvp 8y ago
Might be nostalgia speaking, but I recall as a youngter crawling every folder to figure out what the heck each thing did. Without the internet or search engine, I resorted to reading text files, manuals, etc.
pmarreck 8y ago
Wonder if there's any way to have it emulate the earliest Mac II color screen.

178 points by akeck 8y ago

One thing that I still miss from the system 7 area is an OS where the system folder is simple and accessible, with readable full text folders. Installing a driver was a simple as moving a single, self contained, extension file to the extensions folder. Uninstalling was moving it out. You could observe the full state of the system and manipulate it.

wsc981 8y ago
I miss it as well. Mac OS 7 was awesome in it's simplicity. I also thought maintaining the machine was pretty simple in case there was some driver issue. Just do a kind-of safe boot (by pressing shift on start-up IIRC) which would disable all extensions and control panels. And then one could try to disable all or some extensions during the next start-up and see if that would solve the issue. All in all it worked rather well and that was pretty much all there was to managing the system. Though nowadays I would miss having a decent terminal. Perhaps A/UX [0] was decent, but I never tried that. --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX
- chongli 8y ago
  Yes, and I really miss the classic Mac OS finder with its spatial metaphor. Icons stayed where you left them, every window remembered its position, shape, size, view settings, etc. You could recognize, at a glance, what folder a window belonged to based on these strong visual cues, without needing to read any of the text on the screen. For anyone reading who never used a spatial desktop before, it's kind of difficult to describe how good it was. There is this incredible feeling of solidity, reliability, etc. Things don't move around behind your back; everything is right where you left it. I miss it so much!
  - gisely 8y ago
    Maybe they'll bring it back one in VR/AR.
    - jackvalentine 8y ago
      Maybe! One thing Adi Robertson at The Verge said about Magic Leap is that she put things down... and then forgot where she put them! The limited FOV means you have to be basically looking right at something to see it.
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    > For anyone reading who never used a spatial desktop before Its been a while since I've used Nautilus, but back in GNOME 2 it had spatial design.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    John Siracusa has been talking about the “spatial Finder” for over 15 years.... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
  - chuckdries 8y ago
    Surely, such file browser can't be that hard to develop as a user space application, right? I mean there are explorer alternatives on windows, a plethora of GUI file browsers on linux, and I have no idea but I can only assume there's at least one finder alternative on mac. I wonder why this hasn't been done yet.
    - speedplane 8y ago
      If no one has done it, it can’t be that easy.
      - genericid 8y ago
        Let's go further: If no one has done it, it must be impossible.
- mattl 8y ago
  There was no Mac OS 7. You mean System 7.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    There was Mac OS 7.6.
    - mattl 8y ago
      That isn’t Mac OS 7. Mac OS 7.6 was a precursor to Mac OS 8 and released in the era where Apple was working on Rhapsody. System 7 was released in 1991.
ASipos 8y ago
Was that behaviour present also in OS 8 and 9?
- peterkelly 8y ago
  Yes. OS X's Finder was an adaptation of the NeXTSTEP file manager.
  - valleyer 8y ago
    That doesn't really jibe with the fact that it was based on Carbon (which of course didn't exist in NeXTSTEP) until Snow Leopard, so I don't think it's true. https://web.archive.org/web/20150711154619/http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/apple-moving-finder-to-cocoa/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150711154619/http://www.cnet.c...
    - derrasterpunkt 8y ago
      It is true. The functionality of the macOS Finder is based on the NeXTSTEP file manager. You are talking about the API with which Finder was programmed for. Carbon was introduced for programmers to transition to Mac OS X.
      - valleyer 8y ago
        That is true, but it's not how I interpreted the word "adaptation" here. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
  - mrpippy 8y ago
    It adopted features from the OPENSTEP file manager (column view, inspector vs Get Info) but I doubt shared much if any code with it. It was written in Carbon and IIRC built with CodeWarrior (at least at first)
johnpowell 8y ago
And also you could just format a disk and drag and drop the System Folder over and it would boot from the copy with no real fuss.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Right? We've come a long way in the technology and the OS underpinnings, but in terms of having these kinds of simple abstractions that are easy to reason about and manipulate we have regressed significantly. Compare the System 7 OS installation procedure to any modern OS. In System 7, you format the disk, then you copy the System folder to it. That's it. Compare application installation. In System 7, you copy the application folder to the disk. That's it. What the hell is wrong with all the people developing OSs these days? Do they just fetishize complexity? Do they just have too much contempt and condescension for users? It makes me loathe computing as an industry.
- sergiomattei 8y ago
  > Right? We've come a long way in the technology and the OS underpinnings, but in terms of having these kinds of simple abstractions that are easy to reason about and manipulate we have regressed significantly. > Compare the System 7 OS installation procedure to any modern OS. In System 7, you format the disk, then you copy the System folder to it. That's it. Compare application installation. In System 7, you copy the application folder to the disk. That's it. > What the hell is wrong with all the people developing OSs these days? Do they just fetishize complexity? Do they just have too much contempt and condescension for users? It makes me loathe computing as an industry. No, our requirements have changed and so have we.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Bullshit. There is no reason at all that these things cannot be done today, we simply choose not to make it so simple. Portable applications are reasonably common on Windows, MacOS still uses Application Bundles, even Linux has AppImage, and those work pretty much just like applications did on System 7, yet so many developers insist on using broken installers, or needlessly complicated package management systems. There is no reason that bootloaders can't just look for a directory to boot the system from, even present the user a graphical menu to choose between the ones it found. FFS, UEFI can run a browser or NES emulator.
    - 8y ago
Fnoord 8y ago
On the bottom it says "SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)" which lists 3 different MacOS 7 versions for me. YMMV, but probably you'll be able to find those as well.

mambodog 8y ago

For anyone who is interested in some technical background, I wrote about porting this emulator to browser a little while ago: https://jamesfriend.com.au/porting-pce-emulator-browser https://jamesfriend.com.au/porting-pce-emulator-browser

geuis 8y ago

SO many good memories. Treats mobile touches as click-drags though.

kkylin 8y ago
Many happy memories of my SE/30 running System 6... (System 7 started to feel a little slow on it.)
- macintux 8y ago
  The SE/30 was a remarkable machine. My mother used hers for many years.

thefurman 8y ago

I pressed ⌘-Q and quit my browser. Good morning.

hliyan 8y ago

Does anyone else feel that these interfaces now look a lot less dated than they did five years ago (as we move away from skeuomorphic designs toward more flat, functional designs)?

scroot 8y ago
I still think the Platinum look is one of the best ever

mchannon 8y ago

This takes me back. 6.0.8 was the last version of the Macintosh System and Finder that I really loved. System 6 did support color as well as larger screens, and I fondly remember phonebook sized white gloss books called Inside Macintosh. This _was_ Stack Overflow at the time. You had to crack a manual or know somebody if you got stuck. Before even Xcode's progenitor Metrowerks CodeWarrior came along, Symantec Think C was my favorite coding environment. Microsoft Basic was a thing, as was Hypercard. System 7 was ushered in with Inside Mac volume VI, a boat anchor of a paperback (never seen another this heavy) that threw everything akilter. I look at the Macintosh SE on the shelf (no 30) and look forward to firing it up again. Hope its caps and hard drive haven't died. System 7 was basically unusable on the 68000's- too dog slow, and virtual memory was just a bad tradeoff. There's a kind of "snappy" about the old single threaded Mac that newer computers just can't pull off.

EamonnMR 8y ago

Classic Mac OS was where I had a lot of my initial experience with conputing, so I'm excited to see that the fine folks at the internet archive have turned their attention to it.

colmvp 8y ago

Might be nostalgia speaking, but I recall as a youngter crawling every folder to figure out what the heck each thing did. Without the internet or search engine, I resorted to reading text files, manuals, etc.

pmarreck 8y ago

Wonder if there's any way to have it emulate the earliest Mac II color screen.