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I liked a much of classic macOS and the software. Maybe it's just childhood nostalgia, and perhaps it's also because I never had to really develop for it. When
by tayistay 3y ago
I liked a much of classic macOS and the software. Maybe it's just childhood nostalgia, and perhaps it's also because I never had to really develop for it.
When you installed an app, it usually just went in a folder. Sometimes it was just one file. There wasn't a mass of dependencies and complex systems to manage them. Just some libraries built into the system.
Modern macOS is a bit like that too, except it has all the unix under there too, so there's a mess of files all over the place. There are many files hidden from the user (which the user wouldn't understand anyway). Whereas classic macOS had a beautiful simplicity where you clicked on the system folder and there was Finder and other things which were at least somewhat understandable to me as a kid.
I had Strata 3D, which I got with an educational discount. That was the software used to make Myst. Our Quadra 700 only had 8mb of RAM and I was trying to render a spaceship flying through mountains on a distant planet. I managed to replace the Finder with Strata (using RezEdit) and boot into Strata. The machine would crash if I clicked on the apple menu, but this got me a bit more RAM.
Anyway, something like NixOS addresses the flaws of Unix package management, but it requires quite some complex machinery to do so. AFAIK, we didn't have the versionitis issues on classic macOS, but again, I was just a kid. It was a simpler time.
- cortesoft 3y agoYeah, except those simple 'apps' that went into a folder had a resource fork that was hidden away from users, and could be accidentally lost if you copied it to a disk formatted for windows and suddenly your application wouldn't work anymore and you had no idea why.
- tayistay 3y agoI didn't say it was perfect :)
- itwillnotbeasy 3y agoThis, and also when you delete an "application", all its remnants clutter up the disk space.
- ndiddy 3y agoClassic Mac OS had multitasking shoehorned into an operating system originally designed for single-tasking. This meant that if one program locked up, it would never give up the processor and your whole system would lock up. The only way to recover was to hard power off the computer. It also meant that you couldn't do things as basic as listening to MP3s while web browsing, because whenever you loaded a new webpage your browser would hog the CPU to render the page so your MP3 player would skip.
- tayistay 3y agoThe point I was making here is to consider what was good about it, not the bad that everyone already knew about.