3 ms·
Eh, all of his examples are from the Macintosh world which was indeed much much easier to get on with than pretty much all personal computing today.
by amatecha 6y ago
Eh, all of his examples are from the Macintosh world which was indeed much much easier to get on with than pretty much all personal computing today.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago80s Macs, maybe. But not 90s. I had to help admin an office full of System 7.5 & 7.6 PowerMacs in 1996/1997, all constantly crashing because FileMaker could not run in a stable way at the same time as Netscape, or some extension in the System folder would freeze up the system randomly. Classic MacOS had no memory protection, memory management itself was terrible and not particularly dynamic (reserve N bytes for this app etc.), and the multitasking in System 7 was bolted on in an awkward way, and the migration from 68k to PowerPC introduced a boatload of bugs. The screenshots on the article's page shows System 7.5. Those were the dark ages for the Macintosh frankly. The _concept_ was "it just works" and "computer for the rest of us" but that was the reality only if you stayed on a fairly narrow path, frankly. System 8 was a major improvement.
- pmarreck 6y agoYou had extension conflicts all the damn time. There was a utility called Conflict Catcher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_Catcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_Catcher) that would identify the culprit by doing basically a binary search and turning off half the extensions and rebooting (many times) and noting if there was a crash, and deducing the problem extension that way. It was kind of like "git bisect" before that was a thing. This craziness is no longer necessary. I mean... when you DID get like 20 extensions all running together stably though, it was AWESOME.