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I recently ran Mac OS 9 on an emulator, out of curiosity, after having been using modern macOS/OS X/whatever you call it for the last 10 years. Now, to set the
by grishka 6y ago
I recently ran Mac OS 9 on an emulator, out of curiosity, after having been using modern macOS/OS X/whatever you call it for the last 10 years. Now, to set the context, I'm Russian, and back when classic Mac OS was current, Apple computers were generally stuff of legends. "Insanely expensive beautifully made things, very good with colors and fonts, that professional designers sometimes use and most people can't afford". Macs only started gaining popularity around the very end of 00s — probably not least because of the Intel transition and the ability to try out the OS as hackintosh.
Anyway. It was interesting to see how it evolved. There definitely are familiar elements and patterns, but it's... different. There's no dock. You can't minimize windows. The menu bar is there, but the item with the current app name is to the right and it's an app switcher; what is now in that item, is under File, so you do File -> Quit. There are no status/tray icons in the menu bar, they're instead in a separate bar at the bottom left. There are desktop shortcuts to programs, something that feels Windows-only to me because no one does that in the modern macOS. Files don't have extensions, but instead rely heavily on extended attributes in the file system to remember what type the file is and what program it opens in. There's some third-party software installed with the system, and craploads more bundled on the installation CD for you to install manually. Inclusion of third-party software with the OS felt very un-Apple to me. And, the most perplexing thing, there's no support for scroll wheel and right mouse button! I understand that Macs of the time came with single-button mice, but c'mon.
- yakz 6y agoIt wasn't so much evolved from OS 9 as copied; macOS is an evolution of NeXTSTEP/OpenStep, not the classic OS.
- grishka 6y agoOf course the internals are entirely different, I meant UI/UX evolution.
- monocasa 6y agoYeah, the UI/UX arguably evolved more from Next than OS9. Jobs wasn't going to embrace the UX of the company that stagnated with him gone for a decade. Even at launch of OSX the old Carbon based applications felt behind the times compared to the rest of the OS.
- salamandersauce 6y agoA lot of the UI is pulled out of NeXTStep. That's where the dock comes from. That's where Finder's column view comes from. The early Mac OS X's were even more like NeXTStep but users revolted a little and they nudged it more towards classic Mac OS.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI’d encourage you to also take a look at one of the very early versions of Mac OS, up to System 4 or so, from before they added multitasking. IMO, it was better designed—masterfully well designed, really—and a lot of the UI decisions make more sense.
- desert_boi 6y agomacOS is macOS because the latest version is now 11.2.3. They could have gone with OS XI though.
- grishka 6y agoI've always read is as "mac os ex" anyway.
- city41 6y agoMacOS classic had some nice UX touches that modern MacOS lacks though. For example having the close button on the opposite side of the window, so there's no questioning you meant to close the window. Same with the trash can being in the corner of the screen, if you dragged something there, there really was nothing else that could have been your target. Apple really thought about those things a lot back then. In some ways, modern MacOS is a step backwards on details like this.
- philistine 6y agoI did the same thing recently too and felt elated. I ran System 7.5.5 and Mac OS 9. The simple fact that a drive with System 7 installed is completely empty, save for the System folder, made me see my macOS drive structure in a whole new way. Mac OS 9 is clearly made by people who were also working on OS X at the time, and it includes a ton of little hints of it which kind of hide the simple zen of System 7. I hope you give 7.5.5 a try with Basilisk.