3 ms·
The Apple of the 90's is a poor example since they actually legit bought out several existing utilities to bundle in the OS (SuperClock, WindowShade, Stickies,
by kalleboo 7y ago
The Apple of the 90's is a poor example since they actually legit bought out several existing utilities to bundle in the OS (SuperClock, WindowShade, Stickies, Hierarchical Apple Menu). "Sherlocking" developers didn't come until Steve Jobs returned.
That said...
Connectix Desktop Utilities/Connectix Powerbook Utilities had several features that were later added the OS.
> Speed Doubler
The best feature of Speed Doubler for me is Speed Copy, which adds multitasking to file copies (Finder wouldn't get this until MacOS 8, before that a file copy would monopolize the Finder and you couldn't browse your disk or launch any apps)
- michaelmrose 7y agoThat is a truly strange "feature" when people without running X or even tmux can cp on one tty and ls on another.
- kalleboo 7y agoMac System 7 wasn't so much an operating system as a collection of utility functions (half of which were burned in ROM on each machine). There was no kernel, everything was completely cooperatively multitasked - software ran it's code and then called a function that would jump to the next running process. It was designed originally to run off a 400K floppy drive within 128K of RAM. "Copying files" originally meant swapping back and forth between two floppies in the single internal drive and the system had to evacuate as much code as possible from that 128K RAM to minimize the number of floppy swaps. It took Apple a long time to try to bring that early primitive OS to modern standards while keeping software compatibility, and eventually they gave up and bought NeXT The Lisa, before the Mac, had a proper multitasking OS, but it cost 3 times as much as the already-expensive Mac so it had the luxury of 1 MB(!!) of RAM and a MMU. It was an utter flop.