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Nah. Once you got creative users to stop installing scads of extensions, Macs were way more stable than Win95 boxes. The problem was that creative users had n
by GeekyBear 5y ago
Nah. Once you got creative users to stop installing scads of extensions, Macs were way more stable than Win95 boxes.
The problem was that creative users had no concept of "some extensions just aren't compatible with others".
- smilespray 5y agoIt's not as simple as that. We ran a tight ship, extension-wise. There were plenty of bugs in QuarkXPress, Photoshop and Illustrator to make our Macs bomb, and the fundamental lack of memory protection, process isolation and preemptive multitasking in Mac OS meant that the whole system was wobbly from the bottom up. Also, my post wasn't meant as a comparision between Win95 and Mac OS. I just responded to a question about what Mac OS was like to work with on a daily basis in the decade of the 90s. Win95 wasn't around for half of it.
- simondotau 5y agoIt’s slightly weird and unnerving to realise that modern macOS is older today than classic MacOS was when it was obsoleted.
- smilespray 5y agoUnnerving indeed. How time flies.
- grishka 5y agoAnd it's been through 2 CPU architecture transitions.
- mattl 5y agoMore than that when you consider modern Mac OS X initially ran on 68k black NeXT hardware, then 486, PA-RISC and SPARC... plus PPC and Apple Silicon.
- vetinari 5y agoThere was also the thing with virtual memory. Some apps did run with it (so you had "more memory") and some didn't. Enabling or disabling it meant reboot. So you rebooted based on which app you needed to run.
- GeekyBear 5y ago> I just responded to a question about what Mac OS was like to work with on a daily basis in the decade of the 90s. Your experience does not match my own. I had way more issues supporting users on Windows, at least until Windows 98SE landed. It was a happy day indeed when Windows 2000 finally landed with memory protection, process isolation and preemptive multitasking.
- smilespray 5y agoYou keep bringing up Windows. I avoided it like the plague. It also wasn't an option for our use. (Until, as you point out, Windows 2000 came around. Then I started working on Mac and PC simultaneously.)
- dylan604 5y agoWoz has a chapter in his book about how a stable system magically became unstable after install IE. "Without making accusations" he says, but goes into some detail on how IE being installed caused a lot of chaos.