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Youngsters these days! Back in the 1980s and 90s, the differences between MacOS and Windows were as day and night. (Windows 1 didn't even support overlapping w
by cstross 5y ago
Youngsters these days!
Back in the 1980s and 90s, the differences between MacOS and Windows were as day and night. (Windows 1 didn't even support overlapping windows. Windows 3 had weird stuff like icons that didn't map to underlying filesystem objects so when you dragged a "file" to the "trash" you weren't actually deleting a file, you were deleting a symbolic representation of the file. Windows put a separate menu bar in every window, unlike MacOS, which was a significant waste of screen real estate back in an age when VGA -- 480x640 pixel -- screens were normal. And Windows font handling was horrendous.)
Circa Windows 95, Microsoft found workarounds for the most obstructive of Apple and Xerox's patents on GUIs. There were still weird differences, though. Mac had pull-down menus, Windows had drop-down. (Today, macOS has drop-down menus because that ship sailed decades ago.)
Anyway, the story of macOS vs. Windows is one of convergent evolution over a period of about 3 decades, and in the meantime, each of those operating systems has been substantially replaced under the hood -- Windows is no longer a graphical shell running on top of DOS, and MacOS is no longer a cooperative-tasking 68000 based system: Windows has VMS heritage rather than DOS, and Mac has BSD UNIX heritage rather than MacOS.
TLDR: in the age of the dinosaurs (1984-94) Macs clearly were easier to learn and use than Windows. Today, not so much.
- Hammershaft 5y agoWhat is the difference between a pull down menu and a drop down menu?