6 ms·

> It is also my opinion Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS, and Mac OS, ever, but not everything that is possible in earlier Mac OS versions is possible in Mac OS

by k310 11mo ago

> It is also my opinion Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS, and Mac OS, ever, but not everything that is possible in earlier Mac OS versions is possible in Mac OS 9.2.2. I had fun with hypercard on MacOS 9. At work, even. The boss was into rapid prototyping, and I cooked up some damn productive stacks in a hurry. It runs on the Cube and under OS 9 emulation on the new stuff. Hypercard scripters did cool things that most users don't do today. And without those monster data centers.

geerlingguy 11mo ago
Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.
- inferiorhuman 11mo ago
  MacOS 9 was awful, a product of a rather unpleasant era for Apple really. I wanna say through 9.2.1 maybe even through to 9.2.2 the OS had a nasty habit of corrupting your disk. Hardware-wise Apple used CMD64x based IDE controllers so when OS9 wasn't screwing with your data the hardware itself would. There absolutely were animations e.g. when closing a Finder window, but they were much lighter weight. As far as I'm concerned System 7 was probably the zenith.
  - tarsinge 11mo ago
    To me it’s the opposite, System 7 crashed all the time and MacOS 9 was rock solid. System 7 was a mess until 7.6, at which point it was basically MacOS 8. And the UI was way more pleasing, the system 7 one had a 80s vibe to me.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - anthk 11mo ago
    W95 and W98 werent' much better until W98SE. Linux distros were rough but mega-stable.
    - deaddodo 11mo ago
      Win98 was head and shoulders above System 9, from a stability perspective. It had protected memory, actual preemptive multitasking, a somewhat functional driver system built on top of an actual HAL, functional networking, etc, etc. To be clear, Win98 was a garbage fire of an OS (when it came to stability); which makes it so much worse that Mac OS 8-9 were so bad.
      - anthk 11mo ago
        98's multitasking and memory 'protection' were a joke. In the same mid high machine for the era, 2k and xp were miles ahead of w98 on mid-high load. Maybe not on a Pentium, but once you hit 192MB of RAM and some 500 MHz P3/AMD k7, NT based OSes were tons better. You only realized that upon opening a dozen of IE windows. W98, even SE, will sweat. 2k will fly. On single tasks, such as near realtime multimedia ones, w98 would be better, such as emulators/games or video players with single thread decoders. On multiprocessing/threading, w98 crawled against W2K even under p4's and 256MB of RAM.
        fabioborellini 11mo ago
        Well, Win NT is an actual operating system, and Win 98 and Classic macOS are just horribly overgrown home computer shells in an environment they should never have been exposed to.
        deaddodo 11mo ago
        And yet, OS 8 and OS 9 couldn't even match that joke.
        anthk 11mo ago
        Ahem, w98 BSOD if you sneezed hard near it. Installing a driver? BSOD. IE page fault? BSOD. 128k stack limit reached? either grind to a halt or a BSOD. And so on...
        11mo ago
  - Y-bar 11mo ago
    Mac OS 9 was certainly not rock solid as far as crashes were concerned, but very much better than System 7, that was clear to me. Maybe it is my rose-tinted glasses colouring my memory but I also remember that there were very few small bug, you know the just annoying kind, than I have today with macOS 15, there may be fewer hard crashes, but the number of paper cuts have increased by many orders of magnitude.
    - tdeck 11mo ago
      I remember it crashing a lot but maybe that's because I came of age around the OS 8/9 era. IIUC OS 9 had no memory protection so it's not exactly a surprise it was fragile.
      - Y-bar 11mo ago
        Yup. It feels like I have traded, on an average week, three hard crashes (enough to need a reboot) and five small bugs back then, with zero hard crashes and ninety minor bugs (some requiring restarting the app) today. Sometimes I feel like I would like to go back because many of the smaller bugs drive me mad in a way that never happened back then.
    - inferiorhuman 11mo ago
      Well, I got my B&W G3 because MacOS 9 lunched the filesystem as it was prone to doing. SCSI drive so it wasn't that other disk corruption fun (which I went through in PC land). As far as I'm concerned MacOS 9 was mostly a bunch of paper cuts glued together. Lots of stuff that would've demoed in OSX if Apple had the time and patience. So yeah Apple had tacked on vestigial multi-user support, an automatic system update mechanism, USB support, etc., etc. but underneath it was still the same old single user, cooperative multitasked, no memory protection OS as its predecessors. Unlike OSX, MacOS 9 (like 7 and 8 before it) still relied on the Toolbox which was a mishmash of m68k and ppc code.
  - Angostura 11mo ago
    7.6.x was pretty cool
  - julik 11mo ago
    I'd rather say the zenith was 8.1 which was not very widely used. 8.5 did add some nice gimmicks like the app switcher palette but for some reason it felt way slower than 8.1.
    - dep_b 11mo ago
      8.1 was peak MacOS Classic for me as well. 8.5 was like Windows 98. Just added stuff that made it slower.
  - bri3d 11mo ago
    Mac OS 9 was Apple Windows ME; too many side ports of new features into the rickety legacy core OS (Win32 / Toolbox Mac OS) and not enough attention paid to detail since the Next Big Thing was already cooking (XP / OS X).
- apatheticonion 11mo ago
  I don't understand why it takes 5 seconds for Chrome to open on my MBP while it's near instant on my Linux and Windows PC. Why is eveything so slow on new MacOS?
  - bluedino 11mo ago
    Somewhere around 2011 when I switched my MBP to an SSD (back when you could upgrade the drives, and memory, yourself), Chrome opened in 1-2 bounces of the dock icon instead of 12-14 second. People used to make YouTube videos of their Mac opening 15 different programs in 4/5 seconds Now, my Apple Silicon MacBook Air is very, very fast but at times it takes like 8-9 seconds to open a browser again.
    - Bluecobra 11mo ago
      I loved the MBP’s from that era. That was my first (easy) upgrade as well in addition to more memory. Those 5400 RPM hard drives were horrible. Also another slick upgrade you could do back then is to swap out the super drive with a caddy to have a second SSD/HDD. It still works fine today, though I had install Linux on it to keep it up to date.
  - todd8 11mo ago
    I'm running the latest MacOS right now on a modest m4 Mini and it doesn't seem slow to me at all. I use Windows for gaming and Linux for several of my machines as well and I don't "feel" like MacOS is slow. In any case, Chrome opens quickly on my Mac Mini, under a second when I launch it from clicking its icon in my task bar or from spotlight (which is my normal way of starting apps). When Chrome is idle with no windows, opening chrome seems even faster, almost instant. This made me curious so I tried opening some Apple apps, and they appear to open about the same speed as Chrome. Gui applications like Chrome or Keynote can be opened from a terminal command line using the open command so I tried timing this: $ time open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app which indicated that open was finished in under 0.05 seconds total. So this wasn't useful because it appears to be timing only part of the time involved with getting the first window up.
  - spockz 11mo ago
- JKCalhoun 11mo ago
  Oh, gotta be super snappy on a Mac mini G4! Yeah, when a coworker and I showed my wife the first OS X preview, she was alarmed at how long it took to shut down (I mean System 7 shut down like you just kicked the cord out). "You'll have to find something else to like about it," was my coworker's response. And to be sure, there was/is a lot to like about OS X. But, probably because of the lack of a kernel, etc., System 7 sits somewhere in that nether/middle region on our personal computer journey. It's rich library of functions (the Toolbox) set it apart from machines before it that might have instead had a handful of ASSM routines you could "CALL" in BASIC to switch display modes, clear the screen, etc. But, as Amiga owners often reminded the Mac community in the day, no "true" preemptive multitasking… I should say too, regarding programming, these days your ability to write safe, threaded code is probably the highest virtue to strive for, hardest to perfect — at least for me (so hard to wrap my head around). It seems to separate the hacks (in the negative sense) from the programming gods. I think wistfully of those simpler times when managing memory well, handling error returned from the system API gracefully were the only hurdles. "You can’t simply add a lock here, because this function can be called while the lock is already held. Taking the same lock again would cause a deadlock…" "The way you've implemented semaphores can still allow a potential race condition. No, I have no idea how we can test that scenario, with the unit tests it may still only happen once in a million runs—or only on certain hardware…" (Since I have retired I confess my memory of those hair-pulling days are getting fuzzier—thankfully.)
  - spockz 11mo ago
    There are plenty of ways to multi threaded code these days. From actors to coroutines on the programmatic interface level to using green threads directly in go or Java. There is very little reason to resort using locks, mutexes, or semaphores outside of frameworks designed to make multi threading easier or very specific high performance code. (Where in the latter case it could be argued that multi threaded probably adds unreasonable latency and context switching.)
    - mietek 11mo ago
      Whoever is downvoting you for speaking the truth should go stand in a corner. Or try maining BeOS for a while, to experience first-hand what happens when application programmers are forced to use threads and locks.
- StilesCrisis 11mo ago
  System 6 had menu blinks, zoom animations (with rect XORs no less), and button blinks when you used keyboard completion. Mac was the original "wasteful animation" OS.
  - anthk 11mo ago
    That xor effect was under FVWM too for moving and resizing windows and doing an xor wireframe was MUCH faster than a full repaint. If you had no X11 acceleration (xvesa for instance), that mode was magnitudes faster than watching your whole browser window repaint on a resize lasting more than 3 seconds on a Pentium.
  - Mikhail_Edoshin 11mo ago
    This is feedback. You press a shortcut; how do you know it worked or not? You do because the corresponding menu rapidly blinked. Or you double click an icon and suddenly a rectangle appears in another part of the screen. Is this related? Here the animation shows that yes, the icon transformed into a window. On the other hand on my mobile Firefox I wait seemingly a half second each time I long press a link, because there is an animation that zooms a context menu. It does not zoom from the link, which could be justified maybe, but always in the same place in the center of the screen. This animation is meaningless and thus wasteful.
dented42 11mo ago
HyperCard is one of my all time favourite memories of Mac OS.
trollbridge 11mo ago
FYI, Trello (or one of the many clones of it) can be used for similar purposes.
jxdxbx 11mo ago
I like System 6: the most complete version of the “real” classic Mac OS before System 7 started to be more “modern.” Dead simple, not a lot of new abstractions and metaphors layered on.
- Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
  I kind of wish there was a version of System 6 without MultiFinder. Classic Mac OS clearly wasn’t built with multi-tasking in mind.
  - StilesCrisis 11mo ago
    You could turn off Multifinder in System 6, no problem. It wasn't until System 7 that it was fully baked-in.
hoistbypetard 11mo ago
You might enjoy decker: https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker
a4isms 11mo ago
Back when Java was the NextBigLanguage, we built Java development tools at KL Group/Sitraka (now a part of Quest). For version 2 of the suite of tools, we were getting rid of the nerdy configuration text file and planned on shipping a configuration wizard (yes, we called them wizards while fondling the onions we tied to our belts). I was the Program Manager, and as usual we were very tightly constrained for time, and in the era of golden master DVDs that had to be ready to distribute at JavaOne in the Moscone Centre... Hard decisions had to be made. The team decided to work on more important features, and drop the configuration wizard from 2.0. Then I did what everyone knows is a no good, very bad, terrible thing. And although I got away with it that time, it's still a no good very bad, terrible thing: I took my work computer home for the weekend and fired up a HyperCard "compiler" called Runtime Revolution that could make executables for Windows and Unix. Come Monday morning, we had a shippable configuration wizard. Leadership blew its top, because one of their values was, "We're a Java shop, which means we use Java to write Java tools." And after I left the company, they rewrote the configuration wizard in Java Swing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode_(company) To this day I consider firing up Electron and a complete React framework for simple tools to be a "Turing Tarpit," a place where absolutely anything you imagine is possible, but nothing of interest (in the domain of simple tools) is easy.
- mietek 11mo ago
  Thank you for writing down this memory. It would fit perfectly on https://folklore.org https://folklore.org but unfortunately it seems that the site is no longer accepting new memories.
theodric 11mo ago
I enjoyed how quick it was on my G4 iMac (Mac OS X 10.1/10.2 was a total dog) but it was never stable enough for my liking. Forced to choose between fast and unstable (OS9) or slow and steady (OS X), I chose to install Yellow Dog Linux instead (reject the premise).
lostlogin 11mo ago
> Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS It still irritates me that command + N does a new window, not a new folder. I wouldn’t even have used that shortcut much, as I was a kid and it’s been 25 years.
- mietek 11mo ago
  1. Go to the App Shortcuts subsection of the Shortcuts section of the Keyboard preferences panel in System Preferences. 2. Add an arbitrary keyboard shortcut (perhaps ⌥⌘N) for the "New Finder Window" Finder menu command. 3. Add your desired keyboard shortcut (⌘N) for the "New Folder" Finder menu command. 4. Restart Finder.
  - lostlogin 11mo ago
    Thank you!

by k310 11mo ago

geerlingguy 11mo ago

Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.

inferiorhuman 11mo ago
MacOS 9 was awful, a product of a rather unpleasant era for Apple really. I wanna say through 9.2.1 maybe even through to 9.2.2 the OS had a nasty habit of corrupting your disk. Hardware-wise Apple used CMD64x based IDE controllers so when OS9 wasn't screwing with your data the hardware itself would. There absolutely were animations e.g. when closing a Finder window, but they were much lighter weight. As far as I'm concerned System 7 was probably the zenith.
- tarsinge 11mo ago
  To me it’s the opposite, System 7 crashed all the time and MacOS 9 was rock solid. System 7 was a mess until 7.6, at which point it was basically MacOS 8. And the UI was way more pleasing, the system 7 one had a 80s vibe to me.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- anthk 11mo ago
  W95 and W98 werent' much better until W98SE. Linux distros were rough but mega-stable.
  - deaddodo 11mo ago
    Win98 was head and shoulders above System 9, from a stability perspective. It had protected memory, actual preemptive multitasking, a somewhat functional driver system built on top of an actual HAL, functional networking, etc, etc. To be clear, Win98 was a garbage fire of an OS (when it came to stability); which makes it so much worse that Mac OS 8-9 were so bad.
    - anthk 11mo ago
      98's multitasking and memory 'protection' were a joke. In the same mid high machine for the era, 2k and xp were miles ahead of w98 on mid-high load. Maybe not on a Pentium, but once you hit 192MB of RAM and some 500 MHz P3/AMD k7, NT based OSes were tons better. You only realized that upon opening a dozen of IE windows. W98, even SE, will sweat. 2k will fly. On single tasks, such as near realtime multimedia ones, w98 would be better, such as emulators/games or video players with single thread decoders. On multiprocessing/threading, w98 crawled against W2K even under p4's and 256MB of RAM.
      - fabioborellini 11mo ago
        Well, Win NT is an actual operating system, and Win 98 and Classic macOS are just horribly overgrown home computer shells in an environment they should never have been exposed to.
      - deaddodo 11mo ago
        And yet, OS 8 and OS 9 couldn't even match that joke.
        anthk 11mo ago
        Ahem, w98 BSOD if you sneezed hard near it. Installing a driver? BSOD. IE page fault? BSOD. 128k stack limit reached? either grind to a halt or a BSOD. And so on...
        11mo ago
- Y-bar 11mo ago
  Mac OS 9 was certainly not rock solid as far as crashes were concerned, but very much better than System 7, that was clear to me. Maybe it is my rose-tinted glasses colouring my memory but I also remember that there were very few small bug, you know the just annoying kind, than I have today with macOS 15, there may be fewer hard crashes, but the number of paper cuts have increased by many orders of magnitude.
  - tdeck 11mo ago
    I remember it crashing a lot but maybe that's because I came of age around the OS 8/9 era. IIUC OS 9 had no memory protection so it's not exactly a surprise it was fragile.
    - Y-bar 11mo ago
      Yup. It feels like I have traded, on an average week, three hard crashes (enough to need a reboot) and five small bugs back then, with zero hard crashes and ninety minor bugs (some requiring restarting the app) today. Sometimes I feel like I would like to go back because many of the smaller bugs drive me mad in a way that never happened back then.
  - inferiorhuman 11mo ago
    Well, I got my B&W G3 because MacOS 9 lunched the filesystem as it was prone to doing. SCSI drive so it wasn't that other disk corruption fun (which I went through in PC land). As far as I'm concerned MacOS 9 was mostly a bunch of paper cuts glued together. Lots of stuff that would've demoed in OSX if Apple had the time and patience. So yeah Apple had tacked on vestigial multi-user support, an automatic system update mechanism, USB support, etc., etc. but underneath it was still the same old single user, cooperative multitasked, no memory protection OS as its predecessors. Unlike OSX, MacOS 9 (like 7 and 8 before it) still relied on the Toolbox which was a mishmash of m68k and ppc code.
- Angostura 11mo ago
  7.6.x was pretty cool
- julik 11mo ago
  I'd rather say the zenith was 8.1 which was not very widely used. 8.5 did add some nice gimmicks like the app switcher palette but for some reason it felt way slower than 8.1.
  - dep_b 11mo ago
    8.1 was peak MacOS Classic for me as well. 8.5 was like Windows 98. Just added stuff that made it slower.
- bri3d 11mo ago
  Mac OS 9 was Apple Windows ME; too many side ports of new features into the rickety legacy core OS (Win32 / Toolbox Mac OS) and not enough attention paid to detail since the Next Big Thing was already cooking (XP / OS X).
apatheticonion 11mo ago
I don't understand why it takes 5 seconds for Chrome to open on my MBP while it's near instant on my Linux and Windows PC. Why is eveything so slow on new MacOS?
- bluedino 11mo ago
  Somewhere around 2011 when I switched my MBP to an SSD (back when you could upgrade the drives, and memory, yourself), Chrome opened in 1-2 bounces of the dock icon instead of 12-14 second. People used to make YouTube videos of their Mac opening 15 different programs in 4/5 seconds Now, my Apple Silicon MacBook Air is very, very fast but at times it takes like 8-9 seconds to open a browser again.
  - Bluecobra 11mo ago
    I loved the MBP’s from that era. That was my first (easy) upgrade as well in addition to more memory. Those 5400 RPM hard drives were horrible. Also another slick upgrade you could do back then is to swap out the super drive with a caddy to have a second SSD/HDD. It still works fine today, though I had install Linux on it to keep it up to date.
- todd8 11mo ago
  I'm running the latest MacOS right now on a modest m4 Mini and it doesn't seem slow to me at all. I use Windows for gaming and Linux for several of my machines as well and I don't "feel" like MacOS is slow. In any case, Chrome opens quickly on my Mac Mini, under a second when I launch it from clicking its icon in my task bar or from spotlight (which is my normal way of starting apps). When Chrome is idle with no windows, opening chrome seems even faster, almost instant. This made me curious so I tried opening some Apple apps, and they appear to open about the same speed as Chrome. Gui applications like Chrome or Keynote can be opened from a terminal command line using the open command so I tried timing this: $ time open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app which indicated that open was finished in under 0.05 seconds total. So this wasn't useful because it appears to be timing only part of the time involved with getting the first window up.
- spockz 11mo ago
JKCalhoun 11mo ago
Oh, gotta be super snappy on a Mac mini G4! Yeah, when a coworker and I showed my wife the first OS X preview, she was alarmed at how long it took to shut down (I mean System 7 shut down like you just kicked the cord out). "You'll have to find something else to like about it," was my coworker's response. And to be sure, there was/is a lot to like about OS X. But, probably because of the lack of a kernel, etc., System 7 sits somewhere in that nether/middle region on our personal computer journey. It's rich library of functions (the Toolbox) set it apart from machines before it that might have instead had a handful of ASSM routines you could "CALL" in BASIC to switch display modes, clear the screen, etc. But, as Amiga owners often reminded the Mac community in the day, no "true" preemptive multitasking… I should say too, regarding programming, these days your ability to write safe, threaded code is probably the highest virtue to strive for, hardest to perfect — at least for me (so hard to wrap my head around). It seems to separate the hacks (in the negative sense) from the programming gods. I think wistfully of those simpler times when managing memory well, handling error returned from the system API gracefully were the only hurdles. "You can’t simply add a lock here, because this function can be called while the lock is already held. Taking the same lock again would cause a deadlock…" "The way you've implemented semaphores can still allow a potential race condition. No, I have no idea how we can test that scenario, with the unit tests it may still only happen once in a million runs—or only on certain hardware…" (Since I have retired I confess my memory of those hair-pulling days are getting fuzzier—thankfully.)
- spockz 11mo ago
  There are plenty of ways to multi threaded code these days. From actors to coroutines on the programmatic interface level to using green threads directly in go or Java. There is very little reason to resort using locks, mutexes, or semaphores outside of frameworks designed to make multi threading easier or very specific high performance code. (Where in the latter case it could be argued that multi threaded probably adds unreasonable latency and context switching.)
  - mietek 11mo ago
    Whoever is downvoting you for speaking the truth should go stand in a corner. Or try maining BeOS for a while, to experience first-hand what happens when application programmers are forced to use threads and locks.
StilesCrisis 11mo ago
System 6 had menu blinks, zoom animations (with rect XORs no less), and button blinks when you used keyboard completion. Mac was the original "wasteful animation" OS.
- anthk 11mo ago
  That xor effect was under FVWM too for moving and resizing windows and doing an xor wireframe was MUCH faster than a full repaint. If you had no X11 acceleration (xvesa for instance), that mode was magnitudes faster than watching your whole browser window repaint on a resize lasting more than 3 seconds on a Pentium.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 11mo ago
  This is feedback. You press a shortcut; how do you know it worked or not? You do because the corresponding menu rapidly blinked. Or you double click an icon and suddenly a rectangle appears in another part of the screen. Is this related? Here the animation shows that yes, the icon transformed into a window. On the other hand on my mobile Firefox I wait seemingly a half second each time I long press a link, because there is an animation that zooms a context menu. It does not zoom from the link, which could be justified maybe, but always in the same place in the center of the screen. This animation is meaningless and thus wasteful.

dented42 11mo ago

HyperCard is one of my all time favourite memories of Mac OS.

trollbridge 11mo ago

FYI, Trello (or one of the many clones of it) can be used for similar purposes.

jxdxbx 11mo ago

I like System 6: the most complete version of the “real” classic Mac OS before System 7 started to be more “modern.” Dead simple, not a lot of new abstractions and metaphors layered on.

Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
I kind of wish there was a version of System 6 without MultiFinder. Classic Mac OS clearly wasn’t built with multi-tasking in mind.
- StilesCrisis 11mo ago
  You could turn off Multifinder in System 6, no problem. It wasn't until System 7 that it was fully baked-in.

hoistbypetard 11mo ago

You might enjoy decker: https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker

a4isms 11mo ago

Back when Java was the NextBigLanguage, we built Java development tools at KL Group/Sitraka (now a part of Quest). For version 2 of the suite of tools, we were getting rid of the nerdy configuration text file and planned on shipping a configuration wizard (yes, we called them wizards while fondling the onions we tied to our belts). I was the Program Manager, and as usual we were very tightly constrained for time, and in the era of golden master DVDs that had to be ready to distribute at JavaOne in the Moscone Centre... Hard decisions had to be made. The team decided to work on more important features, and drop the configuration wizard from 2.0. Then I did what everyone knows is a no good, very bad, terrible thing. And although I got away with it that time, it's still a no good very bad, terrible thing: I took my work computer home for the weekend and fired up a HyperCard "compiler" called Runtime Revolution that could make executables for Windows and Unix. Come Monday morning, we had a shippable configuration wizard. Leadership blew its top, because one of their values was, "We're a Java shop, which means we use Java to write Java tools." And after I left the company, they rewrote the configuration wizard in Java Swing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode_(company) To this day I consider firing up Electron and a complete React framework for simple tools to be a "Turing Tarpit," a place where absolutely anything you imagine is possible, but nothing of interest (in the domain of simple tools) is easy.

mietek 11mo ago
Thank you for writing down this memory. It would fit perfectly on https://folklore.org https://folklore.org but unfortunately it seems that the site is no longer accepting new memories.

theodric 11mo ago

I enjoyed how quick it was on my G4 iMac (Mac OS X 10.1/10.2 was a total dog) but it was never stable enough for my liking. Forced to choose between fast and unstable (OS9) or slow and steady (OS X), I chose to install Yellow Dog Linux instead (reject the premise).

lostlogin 11mo ago

> Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS It still irritates me that command + N does a new window, not a new folder. I wouldn’t even have used that shortcut much, as I was a kid and it’s been 25 years.

mietek 11mo ago
1. Go to the App Shortcuts subsection of the Shortcuts section of the Keyboard preferences panel in System Preferences. 2. Add an arbitrary keyboard shortcut (perhaps ⌥⌘N) for the "New Finder Window" Finder menu command. 3. Add your desired keyboard shortcut (⌘N) for the "New Folder" Finder menu command. 4. Restart Finder.
- lostlogin 11mo ago
  Thank you!