4 ms·

Back in the 90s macs had a serious virus problem. Two of the things apple did to address it were pretty effective — most importantly they gave a tiny bit of sup

Back in the 90s macs had a serious virus problem. Two of the things apple did to address it were pretty effective — most importantly they gave a tiny bit of support/encouragement to John Norstad who wrote Disinfectant -- a very good and free virus checker -- and they put virus checking into all of their Claris-branded software (including Resolve, MacWrite Pro, Filemaker, and so on). I had a Mac IIfx I got for free from my office (it was six or seven years old at the time) with a radius pivot display. Two once awesome pieces of tech that aged very badly...

salgernon 13y ago
To this day I cringe when the orientation of my iPad or iPhone changes. There were lots if apps that didn't cope well with orientation changes when the pivot first came out, early 90s timeframe and I expect to find myself dropped into tmon (at which point I would probably advance the PC and try to recover from the crash.)
- Tloewald 13y ago
  Actually most apps on the mac coped pretty well — the big exception was Finder (ironically) which would screw up your desktop and window layout every time.
coldtea 13y ago
>Back in the 90s macs had a serious virus problem. Yes, as did Amigas and Ataris. And they had 1/30 the market share OS X has had the last 10 years, and 1/50 the share of early Windows/DOS at the time. Which goes to show that all those people claiming OS X didn't have viruses because "it had too few users" compared to XP so writers weren't interested were full of crap. It didn't have viruses because it made it more difficult than Mac OS/Amiga/Atari to have viruses, with those UNIX permissions et al (basic as they are).
- asveikau 13y ago
  I don't understand this argument. Windows XP has the NT security model. The file permissions are more granular than the Unix equivalent. If this is what is supposed to make the difference it should be the other way.
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    Um, have you ever seen a WinXP box with anything but 'allow all' for every permission on every file? Running with everything as administrator? Simply having a permissions model is not enough if it's never used. If OSX had everything chmod 777 by default then it would be equivalent to WinXP.
    - asveikau 13y ago
      Yeah actually, I have. Unfortunately it let you boot from FAT which doesn't have permissions. But if it was using NTFS you would have non writable system files by default.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >Windows XP has the NT security model Which it enforced badly, since the user was 99% of times the "full blown do anything without any password" administrator.
    - asveikau 13y ago
      Are you sure you are not thinking of the Windows XP that exists in your mind? Because the one I used had permissions and never forced you to log in as admin. If you had said Windows 98 there would be no argument, but XP had real permissions and real accounts. I used to set up XP machines with restricted accounts for family members. They could not write to just any path. They would need to call me to install stuff. They still got malware. Hence, the existence and enforcement of file permissions: not the only factor, not by far. (You'd also be naive to think privilege escalation bugs don't exist or haven't existed in OS X as well.)
      - 13y ago

salgernon 13y ago

To this day I cringe when the orientation of my iPad or iPhone changes. There were lots if apps that didn't cope well with orientation changes when the pivot first came out, early 90s timeframe and I expect to find myself dropped into tmon (at which point I would probably advance the PC and try to recover from the crash.)

Tloewald 13y ago
Actually most apps on the mac coped pretty well — the big exception was Finder (ironically) which would screw up your desktop and window layout every time.

coldtea 13y ago

>Back in the 90s macs had a serious virus problem. Yes, as did Amigas and Ataris. And they had 1/30 the market share OS X has had the last 10 years, and 1/50 the share of early Windows/DOS at the time. Which goes to show that all those people claiming OS X didn't have viruses because "it had too few users" compared to XP so writers weren't interested were full of crap. It didn't have viruses because it made it more difficult than Mac OS/Amiga/Atari to have viruses, with those UNIX permissions et al (basic as they are).

asveikau 13y ago
I don't understand this argument. Windows XP has the NT security model. The file permissions are more granular than the Unix equivalent. If this is what is supposed to make the difference it should be the other way.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  Um, have you ever seen a WinXP box with anything but 'allow all' for every permission on every file? Running with everything as administrator? Simply having a permissions model is not enough if it's never used. If OSX had everything chmod 777 by default then it would be equivalent to WinXP.
  - asveikau 13y ago
    Yeah actually, I have. Unfortunately it let you boot from FAT which doesn't have permissions. But if it was using NTFS you would have non writable system files by default.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Windows XP has the NT security model Which it enforced badly, since the user was 99% of times the "full blown do anything without any password" administrator.
  - asveikau 13y ago
    Are you sure you are not thinking of the Windows XP that exists in your mind? Because the one I used had permissions and never forced you to log in as admin. If you had said Windows 98 there would be no argument, but XP had real permissions and real accounts. I used to set up XP machines with restricted accounts for family members. They could not write to just any path. They would need to call me to install stuff. They still got malware. Hence, the existence and enforcement of file permissions: not the only factor, not by far. (You'd also be naive to think privilege escalation bugs don't exist or haven't existed in OS X as well.)
    - 13y ago