The animations were there, but they were frame-based with the number of frames carefully calculated to show UI state changes that were relevant. For example, wh

The animations were there, but they were frame-based with the number of frames carefully calculated to show UI state changes that were relevant. For example, when you would open a folder, there would be an animation showing a window rect animating from the folder icon into the window shape, but it would be very subtle - I remember it being 1 or 2 intermediate frames at most. It was enough to show how you get from "there" to "here" but not dizziingly egregious the way it became in Aqua. Truth be told, I do have a suspicion that some folks (possibly - some folks close to Avie or other former NeXT seniors post-acquisition) have noticed that with dynamic loading, hard drive speed, and ubiquitous dynamic dispatch of ObjC OSX would just be extremely, extremely slow. So they probably conjured a scheme to show fancy animations to people and wooing everyone with visual effects to conceal that a bit. Looney town theory, I know, but I do wonder. Rhapsody was also perceptually very slow, and probably not for animations. There were also quite a few tricks used all the way from the dithering/blitting optimizations on the early Macs. For example, if you can blit a dotted rect for a window being dragged instead of buffering the entire window, everything underneath, the shadow mask - and then doing the shadow compositing and the window compositing on every redraw - you can save a ton of cycles. You could very well have do-wait-do-wait loops when custom text compositing or layout was involved and not thoroughly optimized - like in early versions of InDesign, for instance - but it was the exception rather than the rule.