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by wilsynet 3414 days ago
> I don't think that there was ever a point where Systems 7, 8 or 9 were worse than Windows 95.

Systems 7, 8 and 9 had better font handling, prettier icons, a more comprehensive GUI experience (eg. drag and drop worked everywhere), and a richer desktop publishing ecosystem.

But with respect to multitasking, 32-bit application support, protected mode, and networking, including support for, you know, the Internet -- Windows 95 was way, way, way better than Mac OS.

Apple had a 11 year head start with the Mac. With Windows 95, Microsoft had finally caught up, and then some.

The only people who thought Win 95 = Mac 84 were Apple fanboys.
2 comments
kls 3414 days ago
Agreed, watching a Photoshop filter lock up an entire machine was painful in those days. Not to mention all of the other random beach balls one would get.

I actually came over to the Mac (for my home machine) for a little while after the writing was on the wall for the Amiga and it felt like a painful step backwards. At work we had been running NeXt boxes for a while, which made it's deficiencies all the more apparent.

I was not a big fan of Win95 but it would be a far stretch to argue that System 7/8/9 where anywhere near it in terms of actual use without regular crashing, which plagued MacOS at the time. Everyone was familiar with the bomb icon back then.

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tambourine_man 3414 days ago
>Not to mention all of the other random beach balls one would get

Beach balls were a Next invention, which was bright along to OS X. It was monochrome originally and supposed to represent the terribly slow CD-ROM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel#From_NeXTSte...

Classic Mac OS had a wrist watch: https://i.stack.imgur.com/orvO6.png

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kls 3413 days ago
We always called the black and white spinner the beach ball and the colored one from OSX the pinwheel. May be a terminology thing, but I was talking about the old black and white spinner in MacOS. If one did any kind of video, image or 3d editing, it was not far behind and pretty much locked the computer up until whatever processing was done.
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kalleboo 3414 days ago
Classic MacOS also had a beach ball https://i.stack.imgur.com/sGdwO.png

It didn't plague the OS like it did in OS X though, usually it was accompanied by a progress dialog box.

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bluedino 3414 days ago
>> networking, including support for, you know, the Internet -- Windows 95 was way, way, way better than Mac OS.

I don't know about that - Macs with Mosaic and then Netscape were the internet surfing tools of choice in the Windows 3.x and 95 days.

Anyone remember winnuke?

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