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I still have my 6100, tempted to try exploring this. Always felt like that era was the last of the "fun macs" when things weren't all busybody fussy unixy with
by kerblang 4y ago
I still have my 6100, tempted to try exploring this. Always felt like that era was the last of the "fun macs" when things weren't all busybody fussy unixy with hi-res gradients and hyperslickness and so forth. The new macs just took the "personal" out of personal computing, as I see it. Take that with a grain of salt, of course.
- jeffbee 4y agoNothing about that first generation of Power Mac reminds me of "fun". It reminds me more of "kernel panics right before CD-R is finalized" or "kernel panics whenever the network cable is unplugged" or sometimes "kernel panics whenever any network cable anywhere on campus is unplugged" and quite frequently "kernel panics if I try to scan a slide" oh and from time to time "installing MS Office from 60 floppies is a bit of a chore". Really cannot think of anything in my personal history of computing that was less fun than a mid-90s Mac.
- sharikous 4y agoI am not even sure there was something that you could call a kernel in that time. Apple was failing in their quest to secure a modern successor to MacOS 7. It sure was a lot of fun looking at what they threw at it, and MacOS 9.2 was polished for sure. But without MacOS X, MacOS would have gone the way of BeOS and Amiga...
- theodric 4y agoStill a pity it didn't literally go the way of BeOS by acquiring Be, like might have happened. I used both NeXTstep on 68k and BeOS on Intel, and much preferred the latter. NeXTstep was a crawling horror of abstractions, which might have made it more portable, but also made it clunky. Anyone else remember having a top-spec iMac G4 in 2002 that couldn't even scroll or resize a window smoothly? Pathetic, and painfully slow. I gave up on 10.1.x and just ran Yellow Dog for about a year until I managed to lay my hands on a copy of 10.2, which was marginally better, but still much slower than Linux at the time. The iLamp was a wonderful machine, but very much let down by its intended OS.
- lproven 4y ago> Still a pity it didn't literally go the way of BeOS by acquiring Be I disagree. I loved BeOS. I still miss it. It was a great OS, and I preferred it to NeXTstep. But it wasn't just the OS. NeXT had 2 key things Be didn't: [1] state-of-the-art dev tools [2] Steve Jobs. Stealing from my own blog post on the subject... Apple's then CEO Gil Amelio was considering buying former Apple VP Jean-Louis Gassée's company Be, for BeOS, or Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' company NeXT Computer, for OpenStep, the successor to NeXTstep. They went with NeXT. BeOS was excellent - small, fast, efficient, modern, streamlined, and ran on Apple kit. The company was small, with some excellent engineers. The snag is, Gassée wanted a lot more for it than Apple was offering. Although this was bad - terminal - news for Be, it was probably all for the best for Apple. BeOS was a great OS, but if Apple had moved to it, its 3rd party developers probably would not have, for the most part, and it would have killed the company. Apple needed a follow-on for classic MacOS, it needed it urgently and it needed to be a blinder. BeOS did not have one crucial advantage that NeXTstep offered, and as such, it would not have had the same appeal, the devs probably would not have fallen in love with the new Apple OS, and Apple would have withered and died. What didn't BeOS have that NeXTstep had? Well... NeXT was going cost a packet anyway - it was doing better and had some big names on board. Some were working for it, including several people who worked on the Mac in the early days, including, of course, Jobs himself. It also had some serious clients, including CERN - where Tim Berners-Lee developed the WorldWideWeb on a NeXTstation, and corporate clients such as the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS). NeXT's OS was also beautiful, sophisticated & very hi-tech - but didn't run on Macs, nor even on the Mac's PowerPC processors. It offered 2 major advantages over Be, though: #1, getting Steve Jobs back, and #2, one of the great strengths of NeXTstep was its world-class, industry-leading development tools. Be had nothing to rival these. Amelio went with NeXT. If the Mac had to move to a new OS, then all Mac developers would have to learn to code for the new OS. Mac devs were pretty wedded to their platform, as were Mac users. And transitioning to a whole new OS, Apple really needed to get the devs on board. Classic MacOS's dev tools were nothing special and quite hard work. Be was moving its dev tools over to GCC but whereas this was good, it was nothing amazing. But NeXT's Objective-C and Interface Builder were in a whole different league. Getting the Mac 3rd party devs to move to NeXTstep would be vastly easier than to BeOS, as NeXT's dev tools were almost universally recognised as among the best in the industry. So that's what Amelio did, and history has proved him right.
- lateralux 4y agoThey were wonderful computers for graphic software like Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop and QuarkXpress, video editing or music recording.
- smm11 4y agoI always wondered if Apple/Be could have had OS X running faster than Apple/NeXT did. The excuse was always that Be had no software. But NeXT stuff getting into OS X wasn't exactly perfect. Part of me thinks that at least one or two looked at getting A/UX or MAE or something on top of Be, just like Blue Box or whatever got onto OS X.
- simondotau 4y agoApple and the Macintosh platform was on a downhill trajectory in the mid-1990s. Whether a hypothetical Be acquisition could have resulted in a successful operating system is kind of moot, because there's nothing to suggest that a Be acquisition would have arrested the overall decline. The high order bit in Apple's resurgence was Steve Jobs. He's mostly known for his charisma on stage, but he was instrumental in restructuring the company from the ground up. Despite early pains, the NeXT technology stack has proven to be an incredibly capable platform which has served Apple extraordinarily well as the basis for two decades of macOS development, and as the software foundation for the iPhone and iPad. The fact that it was underpinned by UNIX was how the Mac got taken seriously by developers in the mid-2000s.
- tambourine_man 4y agoThere were no kernel panics back then. There was hardly a kernel per se until 8.6. We had “Sorry, a system error occurred” bombs. It was “funny” that those errors remained in 1 bit color even though the entire system had full color support for decades.
- mceachen 4y agoYou got that dialog only if you were (un)lucky. System 6, 7, and 8 could crash in spectacularly visual ways, as some off-by-one memory access wrote into the VRAM. I remember it was a point of pride that macs crashed in ways that Windows BSODs could only dream of.
- tambourine_man 4y agoMost common for me was a frozen cursor, actually. Probably once a week or more.
- bombcar 4y agoIt was at the heyday of the "personal" computer on both sides of the divide; a single upgrade could make your machine magically more capable in ways we don't really have now. Adding a new processor could be a huge speed improvement, adding a new graphics card would greatly expand your screen capabilities, etc. This site alone has a system with a 601 at 60MHz replaced with a G4 at 300 MHz, and RAM from 8MB to 264MB. That's like going from 8GB to 256GB today, just insane difference to how you use the system (and RAM was much faster than the disk back then, so RAM disks made sense, etc). I remember our last DOS computer had enough RAM that it made sense to RAMdisk most of the most commonly used programs we had, even though it slowed boot up copying them into the RAM disk.
- majormajor 4y agoYeah, performance advanced much faster then. That 601->G4 was a 5x clockspeed jump that was way more than 5x faster in certain areas, too! That's a computer that came out in 1994 upgraded with a processor from 1999. Even if you could put a 2022 chip in a 2017 Mac laptop, it wouldn't be the same sort of improvement. IMO this slowdown in the pace of single-component improvements is what has killed upgradability - buying a computer in the 90s, you knew that within a generation or two you'd probably be looking at at least a doubling in general-purpose or capacity, applicable-everywhere performance within the same socket/graphics card interface/hard drive/memory interfaces. So not having component upgradability, like, say, in some eMachines without an AGP port, was a big limiting factor for the usable lifespan, in a way it just isn't anymore.
- cmiles74 4y agoI had a 7200 and it never really performed very well. The "software" modem/telephony device was interesting, but the backing software was too crashy. Mostly I remember it seeming slower than the last generation of 68k Quadras; I had one of those on my desk at my day job. The first generation iMac, on the other hand, I did think was a lot of fun. All of the sudden the UI was responsive and the software was surprisingly reliable.
- tablespoon 4y ago> The "software" modem/telephony device was interesting, but the backing software was too crashy. I had a Mac from that era that sipped with a software modem, and at some point I upgraded to a serial modem for exactly that reason.
- pcurve 4y agoNot sure why you are getting downvoted. Some people here get so touchy over post next jobs era macs. I do disagree with your timing though. I think the best of times was in the early to mid 90s. With radius graphics card. Daystar accelerators on Nubus slots. For some macs, separate math coprocessor. Asante network card. APS and LaCie external scsi hard drive and Daisy chaining them. Adb port devices. Nostalgia!!
- kerblang 4y agoActually I bought my 6100 somewhere around '93-'95. I know it was before 1996. But I'm not actually saying the 6100 was "the best of" anything; it was the bottom-of-the-line cheapest one you could get at the time. I'm really just talking about pre-OSX. The early Macs were and are fun too.
- dylan604 4y agoOver the weekend, some of us old timers were reminiscing about the bad old days of the early Avid NLEs. The damn chain of ADB dongles to enable the software and various plugins that to the uninitiated looked a lot like S-Video and would ultimately get plugged into the wrong port, bending pins ruining the dongle, then being told by support that a dongle could not be replaced. Striping 7 full height media drives in a SCSI enclosure just to get enough bandwidth to record the video, but not enough for audio that got saved to yet another drive. Also, SCSI chains requiring terminators (or not), and internal SCSI drives with the jumpers in the wrong pins. Original Wacom tablets built like tanks. 21" CRT monitors that weighed a bazillion pounds, had half-a-mile of bezels, and sitting 2 side by side caused EMI so the images were disturbed. ProTools requiring DSP boards that numbered more than slots in the computer. Expansion chasis to handle all of the extras. All now outpowered by your damn social media device, er, smart phone
- azalemeth 4y agoHappy memories indeed. I always thought ADB was ahead of its time and although it really wasn't hot-pluggable it was, in fact, almost hot-pluggable. Much moreso than the AT PC keyboard connector at any rate. And it just made so much sense having one connector for all input peripherals, unlike DB-9 mice and DIN keyboards! I also fondly remember DIP switches being added onto SCSI external drives along with their block-like 50Ω resistor terminations. Woe betide you if you pushed the case back against the wall and flipped one of those mid-write...
- haroldp 4y agoI was thinking it was the end of the era of fun websites too. That is overstated, but...
- linguae 4y agoI greatly appreciate the Jobs-era Mac OS X, with its Unix and NeXT heritage; in fact I personally think the high water mark of the Mac from both a software and hardware perspective was the Mac OS X Snow Leopard era. Nowadays I use FreeBSD and Windows, but I would be glad to use a variant of Snow Leopard with HiDPI support, updated browsers, and security patches if such existed. With that being said, there is something warm-feeling and even whimsical about the classic Mac OS and classic beige Macs. I truly think the Apple Human Interface Guidelines of the 1990s were well written and are timeless recommendations for making great, usable software. I believe designers of today's user-facing software tools should acquaint themselves with a classic Mac running contemporary programs like Microsoft Word 5.1 and the ClarisWorks suite to see great examples of well-designed software. I also like both the System 7 and Platinum themes, with a slight preference toward Platinum. I'm really curious about A/UX, which married the classic Mac OS and Unix, and I'm also curious about Rhapsody, a predecessor to Mac OS X that was based on NeXTSTEP but featured the Platinum theme from Mac OS 8.
- yodsanklai 4y agoIn what sense recent MacOS are worse than snow leopard?
- linguae 4y agoTo be honest, my switch to FreeBSD and Windows had more to do with hardware (notably the lack of upgradeability in many Macs since Tim Cook took over) and less to do with software. macOS is still a good OS; I use Monterey on my work-issued MacBook Pro. However, my biggest gripes are: 1. The increased iOS-ification of the user interface. I believe a desktop operating system should support desktop workflows and not import at wholesale UI elements that don't make sense outside of touchscreen environments; I have a similar complaint about modern Windows and GNOME. 2. The introduction of notarization. 3. Over the years I've noticed that macOS has gotten more annoying when it comes to notifications. Back in the Leopard era there was a classic commercial mocking Windows Vista's "Cancel or Allow" dialogs. Yet it seems I have to wade through many notifications whenever I'm using Macs these days. In my opinion, it seems that the old guard from the days of the classic Mac, NeXTSTEP, and early Mac OS X with their deep knowledge of the UI guidelines of those eras has less and less influence at Apple these days, while younger software developers with little-to-no experience with these operating systems but who have extensive experience with the Web and newer operating systems are having more influence on the Mac's UI/UX. Unfortunately the Mac is becoming more like iOS and less like an operating system completely tailored to the desktop computing experience. Don't get me wrong, modern macOS is still a good OS, but I prefer the Snow Leopard era of Mac OS X.
- cesaref 4y agoYeah, good memories of that era. I had a 7500, which was a very upgradeable machine, taking lots of memory and CPU (and cache cards - remember them?). Mine had an annoying beat, like two fans running at slightly different speeds. Apart from that, it was a great machine, and ran Logic really well which was it's main job.