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mapmap | 11 months ago

>Were you using Macs before Jobs came back?

I think he was :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(video_game)

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scarface_74|11 months ago

Well I feel dumb for asking him :)

Yeah I had that game on my Mac LCII back in 1992 and Parena was great too.

The point still stands though. The operating systems were horrible back in the mid 90s and both Macs I had back then - the Mac LCII and PowerMac 6100 - were cripple by being a half speed bus. Back before it was necessary.

JKCalhoun|11 months ago

You're objectively right. I have been running emulators recently with System 6.0 and was surprised at how much crashing I must have just tolerated. I shouldn't have made it appear that I was defending the quality of pre-OSX Mac OS. (Although we were talking about how quality has come down of late.)

As an engineer before Jobs came back — and for a few years too after he was back — there was still a sense that engineers could call the shots with their own frameworks/apps. Copland, Pink, all that — you can dismiss them as failures but they were engineering trying to toss off the "technical debt" of no true multitasking. So, again, it was bottom up and was at least a joy to be an engineer working on the OS at the time.

As I say, for a few years Jobs let engineering call the shots as NeXT became integrated in the OS. I was on the Graphics team then and a whole new graphic architecture and window server were created more or less from scratch (heavily borrowing from NeXT of course since most of the graphics engineering team were NeXT).

At some point though the major changes were in and management began to take over. "Quality" was eventually measured in unit-test code coverage, for example. (Sigh.)