7 ms·
Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.
by geerlingguy 11mo ago
Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.
- inferiorhuman 11mo agoMacOS 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 agoTo 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 agoW95 and W98 werent' much better until W98SE. Linux distros were rough but mega-stable.
- deaddodo 11mo agoWin98 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 ago98'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 agoWell, 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 agoAnd yet, OS 8 and OS 9 couldn't even match that joke.
- anthk 11mo agoAhem, 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...
- icedchai 11mo agoI worked at a company that was delivering a client-side app in Java launched from IE. I think we had an ActiveX plugin as the "launcher." This predated "Java Web Start." It was hysterically bad. We were targeting 32 meg Win 98 systems and they were comically slow and unstable. Most of our developers had 64 and 128 meg boxes with NT 4.0. I mostly worked on the server side stuff, and used them as a terminal into the Solaris and Linux systems.
- deaddodo 11mo ago
- Y-bar 11mo agoMac 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 agoI 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 agoYup. 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 agoWell, 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 ago7.6.x was pretty cool
- julik 11mo agoI'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 ago8.1 was peak MacOS Classic for me as well. 8.5 was like Windows 98. Just added stuff that made it slower.
- bri3d 11mo agoMac 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 agoI 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 agoSomewhere 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 agoI 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 agoI'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 agoOh, 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 agoThere 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 agoWhoever 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 agoSystem 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 agoThat 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 agoThis 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.