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If I mentioned every operating system that Apple was involved in, my original post would be twice as long. Acorn, Psion, Newton, and Palm in particular are hist

If I mentioned every operating system that Apple was involved in, my original post would be twice as long. Acorn, Psion, Newton, and Palm in particular are historically relevant today[0] but have no bearing on what Neal Stephenson was writing about. He was talking exclusively about desktop operating systems running on personal computers. That's where I drew the line. If you didn't ship something that ran on a normal PC[1], you didn't make the cut. Ok, I also swapped out Be for NeXT, mainly because NeXT was the one that actually got bought by Apple and ultimately had a lot more influence. Xerox, Apple, and IBM were all releasing products concurrently to one another, so I kinda just had to pick a (wrong) order and stick with it. I wasn't trying to make a ding at mopeds, I was trying to make a ding at the classic Mac OS. I guess if you want to fix that metaphor, the classic Mac OS was like a nice moped that had a bunch of shit added onto it until it became a really unstable but nice-looking car, while Microsoft just made a real car that looks like dogwater. If that still feels too American, well, I'm sorry but Neil started with a car metaphor, and I've already exhausted my permitted number of dings at American car centric urban design with the Linux bit. The Homer is a Simpsons reference. The joke is that Homer Simpson designed a car in almost the same way that managers decided what features shipped in Copland. [0] If this was a mobile OS discussion, I'd be dropping IBM, UNIX, and XEROX from the discussion to make way for Psion, Newton, and Palm. Microsoft would be pared down to "Well around the same time they were shipping real desktop OSes they also shipped Windows CE and Windows Mobile". But even then, I almost feel like mentioning the actual inventors of the PDA is overindulgence, because absolutely none of those companies survived the iPhone. Microsoft didn't survive iPhone. Nobody survived iPhone, except Android, and that's only because Android had enough Google money backing them to pivot to an iPhone-like design. Even flipphones run Android now (or KaiOS). It's way more stark and bleak a landscape for innovation than desktop was in 1999 when Windows was king. [1] OK, yes, both early Mac OS and early Windows were built in Pascal, not C. But neither of those are operating systems, and normal users would not be able to tell if their software was written in one or the other unless it crashes.

lproven 11mo ago
OK. A very good response indeed, and I can't really counter any of it. Well, I mean, I can -- e.g. I loved classic MacOS. But that's a personal judgement call. I think I've seen Homer's Car in meme format, now you come to mention it.
- kmeisthax 10mo ago
  Classic Mac OS has a certain charm to it. As a programmer, I can point out all the many, many flaws with its technical architecture. Or how Apple's managerial incompetence let Microsoft leapfrog them technologically. Or even how Microsoft eventually figured out how to give Windows its own visual identity[0]. But at the end of the day, people were buying Macs despite the company making them. Apple had built an OS that made everything else look like a copycat, by worrying about the little details that few else cared about. It's the only reason Apple survived where literally every other non-Wintel PC company died. Atari STs and Amigas might have been fondly remembered, but their fanbases all jumped ship for PC the moment DooM came out, and the companies in question all got sold off for peanuts. [0] My personal opinion regarding Windows visual design: - Windows 1.x-3.x (and also OS/2 1.x): Really clunky and piss-poor attempt at cloning the Mac. It has the "programmer art" feel all over it. 3.x is slightly better in that they actually figured out how to pick a good default color scheme, but it still doesn't even have a proper desktop, instead using the root window as minimized window storage. - Windows 9x/NT/2000: Not only does Windows finally get a real desktop, but it also gets a unique visual design, and a good one. Hell, they actually leapfrogged Apple on this one; as Mac OS 8 would take a few more years to ship its Platinum appearance. - Windows XP: Cheap. Toylike. Microsoft saw OSX's Aqua and realized they needed something for Whistler, but they didn't seem to know what, and this is what we got. Media Center Edition would ship a slightly less toylike Windows visual theme. - Windows Vista / 7: The absolute pinnacle of Microsoft's visual design chops. Aero is the thing that Liquid Glass wishes it could be. The glass effects were a perfect way to show off the power of GPU compositing, and Microsoft managed to do it without sacrificing readability or usability. - Windows 8/10/11: Flatslop.
  - lproven 10mo ago
    Totally agreed regarding appearance etc. However, the one thing I'd take issue with: > As a programmer, I can point out all the many, many flaws with its technical architecture. I think, since we started out on history here, we must consider the history and its context. 1. Apple does the Lisa: a cheaper Xerox Alto, minus the networking and the programming language. Multitasking, hard disk based, new app paradign. The Future but 1/4 of the price of the original. It's not cheap enough. It flops, badly. 2. Jobs repurposes the parallel information-appliance project into a cheaper Lisa. Remove the hard disk and the slots and all expansion, seal it up, floppy only, remove the fancy new app format & keep it simple: apps and documents. Smaller screen but square pixels. Keeps most of the Lisa good stuff. It's still expensive but it's cheap enough. It sells. It gets Pagemaker. It changes the course of the industry. But to get a GUI OS into 128kB of RAM, they had to cut it brutally. It worked but the result is significantly crippled, and Apple spent the next decade trying to put much of that stuff back in again. Remarkably enough, they succeeded. By MacOS 7.6 it had networking, network-transparent symlinks, TCP/IP, a HiColour GUI, usable multitasking, virtual memory, and more. It was actually a bloody good OS. Yes, it was very unstable, but then, remember so was DOS, so was Windows 3. The snag is, that time was 1997 and by then MS had surpassed Windows NT and Windows 95 with NT 4. NT 4 had no PnP, no power management, no working 3D except vastly expensive OpenGL cards, it lost a lot of NT 3.x's stability because of the frantic desperate bodge of putting the GDI in the kernel, but it was good enough, and it made Apple look bad. Apple was ploughing its own lonely furrow and it made a remarkably good job of it. It was just too slow. When Jobs came back, he made a lot of good decisions. Junk most of the models. Junk all the peripherals. Make a few models of computer and nothing else. Junk Copland, Pink, Taligent, all that. Meanwhile, like Win9x + NT, 2 parallel streams: [a] Win9x parallel: salvage anything good that can be stripped out of Copland, bolt it onto MacOS 7.x, call it 8.x and kill off the clones. [b] NT parallel: for the new project, just FFS get something out the door ASAP: Rhapsody, then Mac OS X Server. All the weird bits of NeXTstep that were to avoid Apple lawsuits (vertical menus, scrollbars on the left, no desktop icons, columnar file browser, etc.): remove them, switch 'em back to the Apple way. Meantime, work on a snazzy facelift for the end-user version. Make the hardware colourful and see-through, and do that to the OS too. I think, looking at the timeline and the context, all the moves make sense. And I used MacOS 6, 7, 8 and 9. All were great. Just such a pleasure to use, and felt great. I didn't care that NT was more solid: that was a boring reliable bit of office equipment and it felt as exciting as a stapler. NT 3.51 was fugly but it worked and that's what mattered.

lproven 11mo ago

OK. A very good response indeed, and I can't really counter any of it. Well, I mean, I can -- e.g. I loved classic MacOS. But that's a personal judgement call. I think I've seen Homer's Car in meme format, now you come to mention it.

kmeisthax 10mo ago
Classic Mac OS has a certain charm to it. As a programmer, I can point out all the many, many flaws with its technical architecture. Or how Apple's managerial incompetence let Microsoft leapfrog them technologically. Or even how Microsoft eventually figured out how to give Windows its own visual identity[0]. But at the end of the day, people were buying Macs despite the company making them. Apple had built an OS that made everything else look like a copycat, by worrying about the little details that few else cared about. It's the only reason Apple survived where literally every other non-Wintel PC company died. Atari STs and Amigas might have been fondly remembered, but their fanbases all jumped ship for PC the moment DooM came out, and the companies in question all got sold off for peanuts. [0] My personal opinion regarding Windows visual design: - Windows 1.x-3.x (and also OS/2 1.x): Really clunky and piss-poor attempt at cloning the Mac. It has the "programmer art" feel all over it. 3.x is slightly better in that they actually figured out how to pick a good default color scheme, but it still doesn't even have a proper desktop, instead using the root window as minimized window storage. - Windows 9x/NT/2000: Not only does Windows finally get a real desktop, but it also gets a unique visual design, and a good one. Hell, they actually leapfrogged Apple on this one; as Mac OS 8 would take a few more years to ship its Platinum appearance. - Windows XP: Cheap. Toylike. Microsoft saw OSX's Aqua and realized they needed something for Whistler, but they didn't seem to know what, and this is what we got. Media Center Edition would ship a slightly less toylike Windows visual theme. - Windows Vista / 7: The absolute pinnacle of Microsoft's visual design chops. Aero is the thing that Liquid Glass wishes it could be. The glass effects were a perfect way to show off the power of GPU compositing, and Microsoft managed to do it without sacrificing readability or usability. - Windows 8/10/11: Flatslop.
- lproven 10mo ago
  Totally agreed regarding appearance etc. However, the one thing I'd take issue with: > As a programmer, I can point out all the many, many flaws with its technical architecture. I think, since we started out on history here, we must consider the history and its context. 1. Apple does the Lisa: a cheaper Xerox Alto, minus the networking and the programming language. Multitasking, hard disk based, new app paradign. The Future but 1/4 of the price of the original. It's not cheap enough. It flops, badly. 2. Jobs repurposes the parallel information-appliance project into a cheaper Lisa. Remove the hard disk and the slots and all expansion, seal it up, floppy only, remove the fancy new app format & keep it simple: apps and documents. Smaller screen but square pixels. Keeps most of the Lisa good stuff. It's still expensive but it's cheap enough. It sells. It gets Pagemaker. It changes the course of the industry. But to get a GUI OS into 128kB of RAM, they had to cut it brutally. It worked but the result is significantly crippled, and Apple spent the next decade trying to put much of that stuff back in again. Remarkably enough, they succeeded. By MacOS 7.6 it had networking, network-transparent symlinks, TCP/IP, a HiColour GUI, usable multitasking, virtual memory, and more. It was actually a bloody good OS. Yes, it was very unstable, but then, remember so was DOS, so was Windows 3. The snag is, that time was 1997 and by then MS had surpassed Windows NT and Windows 95 with NT 4. NT 4 had no PnP, no power management, no working 3D except vastly expensive OpenGL cards, it lost a lot of NT 3.x's stability because of the frantic desperate bodge of putting the GDI in the kernel, but it was good enough, and it made Apple look bad. Apple was ploughing its own lonely furrow and it made a remarkably good job of it. It was just too slow. When Jobs came back, he made a lot of good decisions. Junk most of the models. Junk all the peripherals. Make a few models of computer and nothing else. Junk Copland, Pink, Taligent, all that. Meanwhile, like Win9x + NT, 2 parallel streams: [a] Win9x parallel: salvage anything good that can be stripped out of Copland, bolt it onto MacOS 7.x, call it 8.x and kill off the clones. [b] NT parallel: for the new project, just FFS get something out the door ASAP: Rhapsody, then Mac OS X Server. All the weird bits of NeXTstep that were to avoid Apple lawsuits (vertical menus, scrollbars on the left, no desktop icons, columnar file browser, etc.): remove them, switch 'em back to the Apple way. Meantime, work on a snazzy facelift for the end-user version. Make the hardware colourful and see-through, and do that to the OS too. I think, looking at the timeline and the context, all the moves make sense. And I used MacOS 6, 7, 8 and 9. All were great. Just such a pleasure to use, and felt great. I didn't care that NT was more solid: that was a boring reliable bit of office equipment and it felt as exciting as a stapler. NT 3.51 was fugly but it worked and that's what mattered.