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The one which got me was the time I had music playing, a large C++ build going, and transferring video from a FireWire card with a tiny buffer simultaneously …

by acdha 1y ago

The one which got me was the time I had music playing, a large C++ build going, and transferring video from a FireWire card with a tiny buffer simultaneously … and everything not only worked but the UI responsiveness didn’t change at all. For reference, on that same PC I installed Win98 to play Baldur’s Gate. It bluescreened when I plugged in a Microsoft USB mouse. This was a representative experience.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Some seem to remember 95/98(SE) fondly but what I remember is them being unstable messes even on good hardware, an effect which was multiplied on the crappy bargain bin machines sold at Staples and the like. Mac OS of the same vintage wasn’t a paragon of stability exactly, but its stability seemed have more rhyme/reason - there were programs and activities that had a tendency to make your system more crashy while others had little to no impact. You could kinda plan around it, and rebooting after doing the instability-causing thing would clear things up. 95/98(SE)’s instability felt a lot more random which for me made it more day-ruining. Windows didn’t feel appreciably more stable than the competition until they finally ditched that crappy 9x kernel with Windows 2000, but that release wasn’t intended for general users, which is a shame because it was just as stable as the post-SP1 XP was, maybe more. Consumers got cheated with Windows ME.
- acdha 1y ago
  Yeah, macOS 7-9 had known weaknesses (e.g. burning CD coasters or skipping audio if you held down the mouse button, keeping it in an interrupt handler) but they were more deterministic and people could avoid them. The DOS-based Windows versions were just plain bad, and only Microsoft’s illegal product tying kept competitors off of the market. Windows NT 3 was at least stable, but they made it worse moving drivers into the kernel for performance in 4, and it took decades to repair the security damage that caused.

by acdha 1y ago

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

Some seem to remember 95/98(SE) fondly but what I remember is them being unstable messes even on good hardware, an effect which was multiplied on the crappy bargain bin machines sold at Staples and the like. Mac OS of the same vintage wasn’t a paragon of stability exactly, but its stability seemed have more rhyme/reason - there were programs and activities that had a tendency to make your system more crashy while others had little to no impact. You could kinda plan around it, and rebooting after doing the instability-causing thing would clear things up. 95/98(SE)’s instability felt a lot more random which for me made it more day-ruining. Windows didn’t feel appreciably more stable than the competition until they finally ditched that crappy 9x kernel with Windows 2000, but that release wasn’t intended for general users, which is a shame because it was just as stable as the post-SP1 XP was, maybe more. Consumers got cheated with Windows ME.

acdha 1y ago
Yeah, macOS 7-9 had known weaknesses (e.g. burning CD coasters or skipping audio if you held down the mouse button, keeping it in an interrupt handler) but they were more deterministic and people could avoid them. The DOS-based Windows versions were just plain bad, and only Microsoft’s illegal product tying kept competitors off of the market. Windows NT 3 was at least stable, but they made it worse moving drivers into the kernel for performance in 4, and it took decades to repair the security damage that caused.