3 ms·

Absolutely not! The MacOS was terrible; no functioning virtual memory, no memory protection between processes.

• lproven 4y ago
  This is only considering part of the question, which makes it a false comparison. Classic MacOS had pretty much the best UI on any mass-market computer ever made. And that's the part that its users saw all day every day, and interacted with, and which made Macs desirable. Not just the front-end of programs: this extended to how to install new programs, how to add drivers or other system components, how to add fonts; how to connect to printers; how to make or break drive connections to other machines; how to connect new drives, and how to remove them. All the daily tasks of running a computer. But UNIX people, with their gods-awful UI, didn't care about this then and they don't care about it now. UNIX UIs are better than they were but they are still very poor. The real problem is that all the visionary innovators got old and retired and their replacements don't have the overall vision and don't really understand how stuff works, so they randomly tweak things without understanding. So Mac OS X's UI was never as good as Classic's, and it's been getting worse and worse for 10-15Y. Read John Siracusa's excellent in-depth reviews of Mac OS X on Ars Technica for details. The generally accepted high point was Snow Leopard, 10.6, and it's been downhill since. Microsoft never had much of the plot, but what they had hit a high point around 1996-1996 and it's been downhill since. Now, as in the last decade, Windows is a UI train wreck. But still people bang on about largely irrelevant behind-the-scenes stuff, not understanding that it's the whole picture that matters, not just the UI but not just the backend either.