6 ms·

Why use old computers and operating systems?

42 points by ColinWright 6y ago

Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
I've just bought an old PowerBook G4 precisely so that it could boot Mac OS 9 and I could install some old programs to play with. As I switched it on to see if it's OK, I was impressed by how quickly it started up its current Mac OS 10.4. I still think classic Mac OS was a truly gem of UI and UX and things just went downhill from there :)
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  The article seems dead, so maybe it's answered there, but can't you install OS 9 in a virtual machine?
  - monocasa 6y ago
    I've found that the PowerMac era of hardware is emulated at a 'technically works but pretty janky' level. Particularly when emulating OS 9 rather than OS X.
  - stan_rogers 6y ago
    It would need to be more than just a virtual machine, it would need to be an emulator. Different architecture, different endianness, etc.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      I'd say it's a virtual machine employing emulation, just different vernacular.
  - Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
    This was my first attempt, but a) SheepShaver doesn't quite emulate the experience, e.g. the mouse movements appear to have a slight lag, some icons don't draw, etc. and b) I didn't manage to set up network there and found no guide of how to get files to that VM in any other way. So overall I decided to just try a real machine and got it for around ~$50 in the local fleamarket. Tried Ebay first, found a great candidate (Powerbook G4 1Ghz/Ti, last model capable of booting Mac OS 9), but there was quite a few bidders and the price went up to ~$450, so I passed.
  - iachimoe 6y ago
    For me QEMU works very well for running OS9 on a contemporary mac. I don’t use it heavily so I can’t promise that it’s glitch free, but I’d recommend trying it before seeking out old hardware, unless you particularly want to run old hardware.
- smoldesu 6y ago
  I'm very much in agreement. Classic MacOS had a lot of great ideas, and it fit much better with Apple's unapologetic rhetoric. The switch to Unix was cool, but it represented a larger conflict of interests that made OSX and onward feel... wrong.
  - Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
    They employed right principles. Stability, for example or direct control. I'm reading the "Patterns" book by Christopher Alexander, it's about architectural patterns that feel human and it very much relates to what's happening in the UI/UX area. E.g. a lot of traffic around tends to move people inside houses as they feel the outside is not theirs anymore. Similarly UI that jumps around or reduces the interaction to answering questions also changes the behavior of users as they feel powerless. The current Mac OS is less guilty in this aspect, I guess, I'm ranting about the overall trend.
- albertkoz 6y ago
  I just bought Macintosh Classic. I want to do some retro programming at some point using old hardware & software.
- tim333 6y ago
  My first laptop had OS 7 I think and it was a bit of a nightmare of UX crashing totally daily or so. High Sierra that I'm now on is rock solid in comparison. The one thing I miss was the find feature. You could do find and start typing a filename and the thing would pop up in a fraction of a second. The modern experience of that isn't nearly so good.
tigeba 6y ago
I used to frequently boot up my SGI and NeXT and try random sites with super old browsers to see if they still work. Sadly SSL everywhere has largely killed that experiment.
- neilv 6y ago
  You could rig up a proxy that turns HTTP requests into HTTPS (when needed) and also rewrites `https:` scheme URLs in HTML to `http:`. If your vintage browsers support some old JS, you could also have the proxy to do a a very simple kludge to patch JS going through it to fix some URLS, but not all (because The Halting Problem). Bonus of a transforming proxy: if there are bad known vulnerabilities in some vintage browsers that can't be fixed, the proxy might be able to filter at least some exploits. (But you might not tackle cross-origin vulnerabilities in any case, so keep that in mind.)
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  I still run HTTP on my sites, preceisely for that reason. If you're ever in that mood again, please have a browse and let me know how it goes. I have tested for compatibility back to Netscape 2.0 and IE 3.0, and only HTTP/1.1 is currently supported, but it may improve in the future.
- jkepler 6y ago
  Agreed. I would still use my old Nokia N900, but its browser can't deal with what it sees as all the expired SSL certs... so that phone's become primarily a small digital music player.
  - makeva 6y ago
    Wouldn't it be possible to import the new certs? It's a debian base so I think you could just download the ca-certificates package from the debian website and dpkg -i the file.
petecooper 6y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20210319083317/http://john.ankarstrom.se/desktop/2021/03/18/why-old-systems/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210319083317/http://john.ankars... (Site was throwing a Wordpress error)
- ColinWright 6y ago
  I suspect it's the HN "Hug of death"
  - fractalf 6y ago
    Nah, he's probably running the web server on an old computer with an old OS ;)
raoa 6y ago
I just got Office 2011 for Mac running on my iMac and it's sort of a pleasure. If nothing else it provides a lot of ambient nostalgia for middle school (well, because 2011 looks like 2008). For simple word processing tasks it also seems as good as anything modern, and in fact faster when opening a new file, copying and pasting between documents and such. (Faster may be the wrong term... less clunky might be the right one. Clunky being the general experience of what happens when you try to do things in Apple Mail).
forgotmypw17 6y ago
Archive: http://archive.is/ErT0D http://archive.is/ErT0D As I mentioned in several other comments, I use Word 97 to do most of my writing. It is a pleasure to use, frictionless, accessible, and never nags me. (As much as I miss Clippy, I unchecked that option in the installer.) I've read it runs great in Wine, but I thought it would feel more at home in a Windows ME virtual machine. (Since the hardware is virtualized, there are no stability issues.) Compared to anything released today, both FOSS and payware, it is leaps and bounds ahead. And, of course, it is no surprise, since during its development, including thousands of hours of user studies, the primary goals were accessibility, usability, and polish. Also, running inside a VM, and sharing resources with my development toolkit, it's still more responsive than anything else I've tried.
- AussieWog93 6y ago
  >Also, running inside a VM, and sharing resources with my development toolkit, it's still more responsive than anything else I've tried. One of the memories I have from adolescence is of a laptop that one of grandparents' friends showed me in around 2010. It was a decade old at that point, and ran both Windows and Office 2000. I remember booting up Excel, which loaded almost instanteously, and immediately started entering formulas into the cells with no input lag whatsoever. Word 2000 was a similar experience. Keep in mind this was on late 90's to early 00's _laptop_ hardware - maybe an 800MHz single core Pentium at best, and was an order of magnitude more responsive than Office 2010 on a then-current 3.33Ghz Core2 Duo. It seems things have become even worse since then - IM Apps that chew up 2GB of RAM (and I'm not just talking about Slack), email apps that cause games to lag if they're running in the background, and websites that scroll at 10fps.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    I am optimistic about it. I think the frustration with the situation will keep building, until it reaches a point when developers have had enough, and things start rapidly improving again. I think the software world is large and complex enough for these cycles to take a while, but it's very much a case of the old saying: Bad software creates strong developers, strong developers create good software, good software creates weak developers, weak developers create bad software. This pattern comes in macro and micro cycles. A good example of the micro cycle can be observed in Windows releases, which generally have alternated between solid and weak starting with 3.1 (counting 95b and 98b as separate releases from 95a and 98a.) The macro cycle seems to take much longer, and we're just now starting to swing the other way. The beauty of the software world, as this article illustrates, is that it's feasible to freeze your environment at a good place and keep it there until the next solid software cycle. It's not possible with everything, but I've found that if I stick to either FOSS or emulated abandonware, I am in a pretty good place. I've abandoned Apple and Windows except for testing, and am very happy for it.
fuball63 6y ago
I’m currently experimenting with FreeDOS as a possible OS for an offline home computer. I want to have something to write on (poems, recipes, journals), code on (using BASIC or something else completely usable without using the web for libraries or docs), and to play and make little games. If it turns put to be really useful and fun, you probably wont hear about it online.
- shrubble 6y ago
  If you like outliner software, try Grandview. Very zippy and works well.
- stevekemp 6y ago
  That's pretty cool. I've been dabbling with running CP/M 2.2 on a single-board z80-based computer recently. I've got a working Turbo Pascal compiler, C-compiler, and Microsoft BASIC. Of course it isn't standalone, as it needs a host computer to communicate with it over a serial-port, but it's still surprisingly useful.
ggeorgovassilis 6y ago
Ironically, virtualisation for all the agility it adds to infrastructure management also makes it easier to perpetuate old architectures.
vagrantJin 6y ago
Old OS just 'feel' less delicate. Something like XP might be slow but you feel like you know it's working. Theres a robustness in the UI.

42 points by ColinWright 6y ago

I've just bought an old PowerBook G4 precisely so that it could boot Mac OS 9 and I could install some old programs to play with. As I switched it on to see if it's OK, I was impressed by how quickly it started up its current Mac OS 10.4. I still think classic Mac OS was a truly gem of UI and UX and things just went downhill from there :)

boomboomsubban 6y ago
The article seems dead, so maybe it's answered there, but can't you install OS 9 in a virtual machine?
- monocasa 6y ago
  I've found that the PowerMac era of hardware is emulated at a 'technically works but pretty janky' level. Particularly when emulating OS 9 rather than OS X.
- stan_rogers 6y ago
  It would need to be more than just a virtual machine, it would need to be an emulator. Different architecture, different endianness, etc.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    I'd say it's a virtual machine employing emulation, just different vernacular.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
  This was my first attempt, but a) SheepShaver doesn't quite emulate the experience, e.g. the mouse movements appear to have a slight lag, some icons don't draw, etc. and b) I didn't manage to set up network there and found no guide of how to get files to that VM in any other way. So overall I decided to just try a real machine and got it for around ~$50 in the local fleamarket. Tried Ebay first, found a great candidate (Powerbook G4 1Ghz/Ti, last model capable of booting Mac OS 9), but there was quite a few bidders and the price went up to ~$450, so I passed.
- iachimoe 6y ago
  For me QEMU works very well for running OS9 on a contemporary mac. I don’t use it heavily so I can’t promise that it’s glitch free, but I’d recommend trying it before seeking out old hardware, unless you particularly want to run old hardware.
smoldesu 6y ago
I'm very much in agreement. Classic MacOS had a lot of great ideas, and it fit much better with Apple's unapologetic rhetoric. The switch to Unix was cool, but it represented a larger conflict of interests that made OSX and onward feel... wrong.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
  They employed right principles. Stability, for example or direct control. I'm reading the "Patterns" book by Christopher Alexander, it's about architectural patterns that feel human and it very much relates to what's happening in the UI/UX area. E.g. a lot of traffic around tends to move people inside houses as they feel the outside is not theirs anymore. Similarly UI that jumps around or reduces the interaction to answering questions also changes the behavior of users as they feel powerless. The current Mac OS is less guilty in this aspect, I guess, I'm ranting about the overall trend.
albertkoz 6y ago
I just bought Macintosh Classic. I want to do some retro programming at some point using old hardware & software.
tim333 6y ago
My first laptop had OS 7 I think and it was a bit of a nightmare of UX crashing totally daily or so. High Sierra that I'm now on is rock solid in comparison. The one thing I miss was the find feature. You could do find and start typing a filename and the thing would pop up in a fraction of a second. The modern experience of that isn't nearly so good.

tigeba 6y ago

I used to frequently boot up my SGI and NeXT and try random sites with super old browsers to see if they still work. Sadly SSL everywhere has largely killed that experiment.

neilv 6y ago
You could rig up a proxy that turns HTTP requests into HTTPS (when needed) and also rewrites `https:` scheme URLs in HTML to `http:`. If your vintage browsers support some old JS, you could also have the proxy to do a a very simple kludge to patch JS going through it to fix some URLS, but not all (because The Halting Problem). Bonus of a transforming proxy: if there are bad known vulnerabilities in some vintage browsers that can't be fixed, the proxy might be able to filter at least some exploits. (But you might not tackle cross-origin vulnerabilities in any case, so keep that in mind.)
forgotmypw17 6y ago
I still run HTTP on my sites, preceisely for that reason. If you're ever in that mood again, please have a browse and let me know how it goes. I have tested for compatibility back to Netscape 2.0 and IE 3.0, and only HTTP/1.1 is currently supported, but it may improve in the future.
jkepler 6y ago
Agreed. I would still use my old Nokia N900, but its browser can't deal with what it sees as all the expired SSL certs... so that phone's become primarily a small digital music player.
- makeva 6y ago
  Wouldn't it be possible to import the new certs? It's a debian base so I think you could just download the ca-certificates package from the debian website and dpkg -i the file.

petecooper 6y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20210319083317/http://john.ankarstrom.se/desktop/2021/03/18/why-old-systems/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210319083317/http://john.ankars... (Site was throwing a Wordpress error)

ColinWright 6y ago
I suspect it's the HN "Hug of death"
- fractalf 6y ago
  Nah, he's probably running the web server on an old computer with an old OS ;)

raoa 6y ago

I just got Office 2011 for Mac running on my iMac and it's sort of a pleasure. If nothing else it provides a lot of ambient nostalgia for middle school (well, because 2011 looks like 2008). For simple word processing tasks it also seems as good as anything modern, and in fact faster when opening a new file, copying and pasting between documents and such. (Faster may be the wrong term... less clunky might be the right one. Clunky being the general experience of what happens when you try to do things in Apple Mail).

forgotmypw17 6y ago

Archive: http://archive.is/ErT0D http://archive.is/ErT0D As I mentioned in several other comments, I use Word 97 to do most of my writing. It is a pleasure to use, frictionless, accessible, and never nags me. (As much as I miss Clippy, I unchecked that option in the installer.) I've read it runs great in Wine, but I thought it would feel more at home in a Windows ME virtual machine. (Since the hardware is virtualized, there are no stability issues.) Compared to anything released today, both FOSS and payware, it is leaps and bounds ahead. And, of course, it is no surprise, since during its development, including thousands of hours of user studies, the primary goals were accessibility, usability, and polish. Also, running inside a VM, and sharing resources with my development toolkit, it's still more responsive than anything else I've tried.

AussieWog93 6y ago
>Also, running inside a VM, and sharing resources with my development toolkit, it's still more responsive than anything else I've tried. One of the memories I have from adolescence is of a laptop that one of grandparents' friends showed me in around 2010. It was a decade old at that point, and ran both Windows and Office 2000. I remember booting up Excel, which loaded almost instanteously, and immediately started entering formulas into the cells with no input lag whatsoever. Word 2000 was a similar experience. Keep in mind this was on late 90's to early 00's _laptop_ hardware - maybe an 800MHz single core Pentium at best, and was an order of magnitude more responsive than Office 2010 on a then-current 3.33Ghz Core2 Duo. It seems things have become even worse since then - IM Apps that chew up 2GB of RAM (and I'm not just talking about Slack), email apps that cause games to lag if they're running in the background, and websites that scroll at 10fps.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  I am optimistic about it. I think the frustration with the situation will keep building, until it reaches a point when developers have had enough, and things start rapidly improving again. I think the software world is large and complex enough for these cycles to take a while, but it's very much a case of the old saying: Bad software creates strong developers, strong developers create good software, good software creates weak developers, weak developers create bad software. This pattern comes in macro and micro cycles. A good example of the micro cycle can be observed in Windows releases, which generally have alternated between solid and weak starting with 3.1 (counting 95b and 98b as separate releases from 95a and 98a.) The macro cycle seems to take much longer, and we're just now starting to swing the other way. The beauty of the software world, as this article illustrates, is that it's feasible to freeze your environment at a good place and keep it there until the next solid software cycle. It's not possible with everything, but I've found that if I stick to either FOSS or emulated abandonware, I am in a pretty good place. I've abandoned Apple and Windows except for testing, and am very happy for it.

fuball63 6y ago

I’m currently experimenting with FreeDOS as a possible OS for an offline home computer. I want to have something to write on (poems, recipes, journals), code on (using BASIC or something else completely usable without using the web for libraries or docs), and to play and make little games. If it turns put to be really useful and fun, you probably wont hear about it online.

shrubble 6y ago
If you like outliner software, try Grandview. Very zippy and works well.
stevekemp 6y ago
That's pretty cool. I've been dabbling with running CP/M 2.2 on a single-board z80-based computer recently. I've got a working Turbo Pascal compiler, C-compiler, and Microsoft BASIC. Of course it isn't standalone, as it needs a host computer to communicate with it over a serial-port, but it's still surprisingly useful.

ggeorgovassilis 6y ago

Ironically, virtualisation for all the agility it adds to infrastructure management also makes it easier to perpetuate old architectures.

vagrantJin 6y ago

Old OS just 'feel' less delicate. Something like XP might be slow but you feel like you know it's working. Theres a robustness in the UI.