5 ms·

There were some powerful utilities on the old Mac OS. Sometimes, it was a deal with the devil, like TimesTwo. It did the same thing but for harddrives. It often

There were some powerful utilities on the old Mac OS. Sometimes, it was a deal with the devil, like TimesTwo. It did the same thing but for harddrives. It often corrupted the darned things though... Ah, what we used to do to get another 4 MBs of RAM and 80 MBs of storage.

poulsbohemian 8y ago
This gets to the heart of my beef when people talk about "digital natives." Being able to use a mobile phone and a web browser does not make you a technology expert. There are plenty of Gen Xers or earlier who really knew the hardware and software they were using, even if they were adults when this Internet thing came along.
kalleboo 8y ago
Recently I've been playing around with MacOS 9 for the first time in at least a decade (bought a $10 PowerMac, woohoo!) and have had a good time trying to recreate my old setup. It really brought back to me just how many shareware and freeware utilities there were that changed how some very fundamental parts of the system worked. I've replaced the behaviors of window rendering (Kaleidoscope, Power Windows), text rendering (SmoothText), scrolling (Smart Scroll), drag and drop (Gravite), menus (Menutasking enabler), etc etc. Also how unstable everything becomes once you do that! It really was the wild west and it's still fun to play with.
- angry_octet 8y ago
  Amazingly fast window drawing too. I'd still like to have WindowShade and sounds for it. The endless series of extensions you somehow needed, until there were multiple rows across the screen at boot. (No modern OS matches holding Shift on reboot to disable extensions as a simple diagnostic.) But I'm glad to have forgotten about handles and Carbon and having to buy your compiler -- remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior? Well, I was excited at the time.
gattilorenz 8y ago
When I was a kid my only internet access was at the local library, and for a while they only had an ISDN connection shared between multiple computers/users. Even after they upgraded to DSL, for a long time my only way to carry files home was through floppy disks. I still remember the pure JOY I felt when I found an utility that could format floppies to store 1722 KB!

poulsbohemian 8y ago

This gets to the heart of my beef when people talk about "digital natives." Being able to use a mobile phone and a web browser does not make you a technology expert. There are plenty of Gen Xers or earlier who really knew the hardware and software they were using, even if they were adults when this Internet thing came along.

kalleboo 8y ago

Recently I've been playing around with MacOS 9 for the first time in at least a decade (bought a $10 PowerMac, woohoo!) and have had a good time trying to recreate my old setup. It really brought back to me just how many shareware and freeware utilities there were that changed how some very fundamental parts of the system worked. I've replaced the behaviors of window rendering (Kaleidoscope, Power Windows), text rendering (SmoothText), scrolling (Smart Scroll), drag and drop (Gravite), menus (Menutasking enabler), etc etc. Also how unstable everything becomes once you do that! It really was the wild west and it's still fun to play with.

angry_octet 8y ago
Amazingly fast window drawing too. I'd still like to have WindowShade and sounds for it. The endless series of extensions you somehow needed, until there were multiple rows across the screen at boot. (No modern OS matches holding Shift on reboot to disable extensions as a simple diagnostic.) But I'm glad to have forgotten about handles and Carbon and having to buy your compiler -- remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior? Well, I was excited at the time.

gattilorenz 8y ago

When I was a kid my only internet access was at the local library, and for a while they only had an ISDN connection shared between multiple computers/users. Even after they upgraded to DSL, for a long time my only way to carry files home was through floppy disks. I still remember the pure JOY I felt when I found an utility that could format floppies to store 1722 KB!