The trashcan comments reminded me of a comment by the late Douglas Adams about how it was better not to know that the trashcan had things in it. You're tempted to empty it right away, defeating the purpose of having it there in the first place.
Based on the screenshots, it's amazing how little the Mac System UX has changed between 1.0 -> 6 -> 7.1 (and to some extend even the newer versions, the latter UX changes were mostly theme-remake + little usage helpers).
Now it's good time to go and check out screenshots of Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3 and 3.1 to see how "ready" System 1.0 was compared to the Windows.
Other good thing to note is that the window manager of System was really good getting lots of windows to fit the puny 512x324 resolution. Something the Mac OS X is really bad at even with the 5k resolutions =(
I'm always impressed with how the Mac menu bar + Apple menu has remained in the same place since 1984 [1], performing pretty much the same functions for over 30 years!
Compare that to the lack of concrete UX decisions in the world's other major OS, unable to settle on a single menu style and so much flip-flopping on key features (cough-Start Menu-cough); removing them in one version and bringing them back in the next.
Is the Mac OS Menu a design that simply cannot be improved on, or are the users just not clamoring enough for a change?
I find it amazing that the bitmap fonts that shipped with Macintosh OS 1 (and System 0.85 for that matter: different 'Chicago' and the strange 'Swan Song') still work on OS X with only a trivial modification: Splice the NFNT from the resource fork into a FontForge-readable system (7 I think?) bitmap resource fork and you are left with something that is easily exportable into a modern datafork bitmap font. I've converted them all (Taliesin and Mobile were hardest to find in their original form. I still haven't found Toronto on an install disk anywhere) and they all work perfectly on 10.11.
Here's System 0.85 Chicago being used in emacs, for example. Looks great in acme as well.
It's interesting to see the Apple aesthetic of abstracting and hiding things from the user in general is many decades old and was there since the beginning. No command line, paths, or even a simple debugger is present. (Compare MS-DOS' DEBUG and EDLIN, which were included in version 1.0.)
Apple's way is inherently more idiot-proof, but makes a sharper division between developers and users. PC magazines in the late 80s and early 90s had articles consisting of short assembly-language programs the user could create with DEBUG, and I think in general it encouraged somewhat more open culture of tinkering and learning with their machines than Apple's philosophy of opaqueness.
It wasn't anything like the walled gardens of today, but I remember the effort required to even get started writing applications (or just modifying existing ones) on the Mac was significantly higher than the PC.
While the UNIX and Windows GUIs of the time were abstractions on top of command lines, thr Mac GUI of the time WAS the native UI. It was literally burned into the ROM of the machine. There was nothing lower they were hiding aside from the machine code.
There was a debugger BTW, the very limited programmer's key (which most users only used to kill the current app if it crashed). It could be replaced with the more powerful Macsbug.
There's an old deep division between people who think everyone ought to learn the depths of a computer and people who think that's unreasonable and maybe not even good.
I used to be in the former camp and have moves to the latter. Consider cars. There are lots of "car people" who love to tinker with them, but most people just want to get where they are going.
It would be unreasonable to expect everyone to be a car expert, and it would also mean everyone would have to spend the time required to learn it. That would cut into time spent doing other things, which would be narrowing and wasteful. Instead of composing music or starting businesses or writing novels, people would be futzing with cars.
First, as already pointed out by others, the Mac was really a graphical system. The Finder was the shell.
But there were other tools, too. E.g., ResEdit for manipulating program resources (I customized many programs using this, back in the day), eventually there was also an enhanced version including an assembler/disassembler. Also, there was the Mac Programmer Workshop (MPW) including all the developer tools, and it came for free. And inside this package was finally the MPW shell, a true shell for the Mac by Apple. (But this was now quite the other way round an indirect access to the machine.) It should be noted that the MPW wasn't available for early Macs, since there wasn't room to do actual programming. Commonly, the LISA (or "Mac XL") was used for this.
[Edit] Moreover, it was amazingly simple to change the configuration of the Mac, especially with System 7 and higher. Just drag things in out of the System Folder and you had already set up the system to your exact needs.
You were lucky to get what you got in System 1.0, they had to fit it on a floppy disk and had to take some things out to make it fit.
Later on when SCSI hard drives became more common there was more features to the Mac System.
System 1.0 was like a proof of concept. It just worked and you were lucky if you didn't get a system bomb error message.
The old Macintosh laptops had to power them on to show airport security they weren't a bomb, and hope the system bomb error message didn't come up and confuse the security guards.
What I still find fascinating about the Apple machines of the OldWorld era is not how small the on-disk system was but how much they tried to stick in ROM. My Centris 660AV had QuickTime burnt into the ROM chip. Of course, before anyone used the machine there was a software update to QuickTime so there was no point.
We also had a Mac Classic that has a whole system disk in ROM that you could boot from if you held down a secret key combo.
>system 5.0 never existed (typical Microsoft ignorance)
Microsoft Works was not written by Microsoft, typical random blog ignorance :P
Microsoft Works was developed and licensed from Productivity Software, company launched by ex Apple employees Don Williams & Gene Carter. Microsoft threatened to destroy their company if they didnt sell. From horses mouth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai24F4Nel7U&feature=youtu.be...
Mac OS revolutionary? Not really, try AmigaOS with preemptive multitasking on ~same level of hardware. Mac OS was a quick hack and a kludge, whole switcher/multifinder ordeal was just sad for a modern 32bit operating system :(
> try finding a PC that can run operating systems from 1984 all the way through 1996
Why would this be hard? The x86 CPU boots into 16-bit real mode, the video card emulates the IBM PC text mode, the hard drive supports ISA, and everything else is ignored, right? The PC architecture is notorious for supporting weird old backwards-compatibility stuff.
He's actually incorrect about the "Set Startup" option being removed. The author claims it was not replaced by "startup items" in the system folder but that is another thing entirely.
Why does he say that folder icons were "much, much rounder" in System 1-6? This [1] is System 7. The only thing they did was add colour and make the tab a little taller. Same shape, and not very round at all.
> Nowadays, a full system folder easily tops 100 megs, and can easily have over a thousand items in it. A thousand! That's a far cry from the six that made up the original system folder.
And now, on El Capitan, I've got a /System that's 8 GB, with just over 296,000 items in it. And that's not even the whole OS these days, since there's the unix-y stuff in /, a few bits and pieces in /Library, and some more stuff that ships with the OS in /Applications.
Yeah... And I can edit 4K video, encode/decode dozens of video/image formats, render a web page, etc. I get a JavaScript JIT, Perl, Ruby, and Python. I also get frameworks for mapping, photo editing, asynchronous execution, and many others.
it feels really strange to me how mac people actually only talk about the visual appearance...
...considered to be not a good trait between civilised people.
[+] [-] justinhj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trm42|10 years ago|reply
Now it's good time to go and check out screenshots of Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3 and 3.1 to see how "ready" System 1.0 was compared to the Windows.
Other good thing to note is that the window manager of System was really good getting lots of windows to fit the puny 512x324 resolution. Something the Mac OS X is really bad at even with the 5k resolutions =(
[+] [-] Razengan|10 years ago|reply
Compare that to the lack of concrete UX decisions in the world's other major OS, unable to settle on a single menu style and so much flip-flopping on key features (cough-Start Menu-cough); removing them in one version and bringing them back in the next.
Is the Mac OS Menu a design that simply cannot be improved on, or are the users just not clamoring enough for a change?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_menu
[+] [-] jd3|10 years ago|reply
Here's System 0.85 Chicago being used in emacs, for example. Looks great in acme as well.
http://i.imgur.com/EuO2bvF.png
[+] [-] rasz_pl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|10 years ago|reply
Apple's way is inherently more idiot-proof, but makes a sharper division between developers and users. PC magazines in the late 80s and early 90s had articles consisting of short assembly-language programs the user could create with DEBUG, and I think in general it encouraged somewhat more open culture of tinkering and learning with their machines than Apple's philosophy of opaqueness.
It wasn't anything like the walled gardens of today, but I remember the effort required to even get started writing applications (or just modifying existing ones) on the Mac was significantly higher than the PC.
[+] [-] kalleboo|10 years ago|reply
There was a debugger BTW, the very limited programmer's key (which most users only used to kill the current app if it crashed). It could be replaced with the more powerful Macsbug.
[+] [-] api|10 years ago|reply
I used to be in the former camp and have moves to the latter. Consider cars. There are lots of "car people" who love to tinker with them, but most people just want to get where they are going.
It would be unreasonable to expect everyone to be a car expert, and it would also mean everyone would have to spend the time required to learn it. That would cut into time spent doing other things, which would be narrowing and wasteful. Instead of composing music or starting businesses or writing novels, people would be futzing with cars.
[+] [-] nine_k|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masswerk|10 years ago|reply
But there were other tools, too. E.g., ResEdit for manipulating program resources (I customized many programs using this, back in the day), eventually there was also an enhanced version including an assembler/disassembler. Also, there was the Mac Programmer Workshop (MPW) including all the developer tools, and it came for free. And inside this package was finally the MPW shell, a true shell for the Mac by Apple. (But this was now quite the other way round an indirect access to the machine.) It should be noted that the MPW wasn't available for early Macs, since there wasn't room to do actual programming. Commonly, the LISA (or "Mac XL") was used for this.
[Edit] Moreover, it was amazingly simple to change the configuration of the Mac, especially with System 7 and higher. Just drag things in out of the System Folder and you had already set up the system to your exact needs.
[+] [-] orionblastar|10 years ago|reply
Later on when SCSI hard drives became more common there was more features to the Mac System.
System 1.0 was like a proof of concept. It just worked and you were lucky if you didn't get a system bomb error message.
The old Macintosh laptops had to power them on to show airport security they weren't a bomb, and hope the system bomb error message didn't come up and confuse the security guards.
[+] [-] kalleboo|10 years ago|reply
We also had a Mac Classic that has a whole system disk in ROM that you could boot from if you held down a secret key combo.
[+] [-] rasz_pl|10 years ago|reply
Microsoft Works was not written by Microsoft, typical random blog ignorance :P
Microsoft Works was developed and licensed from Productivity Software, company launched by ex Apple employees Don Williams & Gene Carter. Microsoft threatened to destroy their company if they didnt sell. From horses mouth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai24F4Nel7U&feature=youtu.be...
Mac OS revolutionary? Not really, try AmigaOS with preemptive multitasking on ~same level of hardware. Mac OS was a quick hack and a kludge, whole switcher/multifinder ordeal was just sad for a modern 32bit operating system :(
[+] [-] cbd1984|10 years ago|reply
Why would this be hard? The x86 CPU boots into 16-bit real mode, the video card emulates the IBM PC text mode, the hard drive supports ISA, and everything else is ignored, right? The PC architecture is notorious for supporting weird old backwards-compatibility stuff.
[+] [-] tbrock|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lobster_johnson|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/ipod/images/1/13/Macinto...
[+] [-] JonathonW|10 years ago|reply
And now, on El Capitan, I've got a /System that's 8 GB, with just over 296,000 items in it. And that's not even the whole OS these days, since there's the unix-y stuff in /, a few bits and pieces in /Library, and some more stuff that ships with the OS in /Applications.
Makes for an interesting contrast.
[+] [-] xenadu02|10 years ago|reply
The OS is bigger but it sure is more capable.
[+] [-] philoye|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digi_owl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fastflo|10 years ago|reply