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by DaiPlusPlus 976 days ago
MacOS 9 was a dog's breakfast of an OS. OS X wasn't released until 2001, so until then all those Mac users were forced to run a cooperatively schedulding OS without even protected memory (!!). A typical PowerMactinosh's uptime was measured in the single-digit hours, not the weeks you'd get from NT, or months for a Unix box.

...there's no excuse for that given Apple's vertical-integration.
2 comments
jwells89 976 days ago
That's all true, but nonetheless it was a ton of fun for those of us who were into desktop customization at the time. With how system extensions worked in Classic Mac OS (they could overwrite bits of the system in memory) there was practically nothing they couldn't do, and as a result it was one of the most effortlessly extensively customizable desktops to ever exist. Even 22 years later, in some ways Linux, the long reigning champion of customizability, has yet to beat it.

Of course, that extension model was hilariously insecure and wouldn't have worked in the modern era, but it had its perks.

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dansalvato 976 days ago
This was popular on Amiga as well, although maybe less clean and "officially supported" compared to Mac OS system extensions. There were Amiga utilities that remapped OS system calls to custom functions with performance optimizations, enhanced functionality, or different behavior altogether.

The 68000 series CPUs didn't have an MMU built-in until the 68030, which I guess was far too late to see much use in consumer OSes. Pretty shocking that the jump to PPC wasn't enough for Apple to take care of that stuff, but I guess that was going to be Copland before it was canned. At least Amiga had preemptive multitasking from the beginning.

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solardev 976 days ago
Ah, I can believe that. The Macs we did have at school did not impress much. We saw the sad Mac face quite a lot, and had to use the debugger often ("g finder" IIRC).

I never had experience with NT until Windows XP. Did play around with MS-DOS, PC-DOS, Win 3.x and 9x, OS/2 Warp, and early Slackware though. None of those were particularly user-friendly or stable, lol, especially by today's standards. At the extreme end, I've fried a motherboard (shorted it somehow on first boot) and melted a laptop (tried to install Linux on it, apparently didn't have the fan drivers or something). Then early 3Dfx cards were also a pain to get working reliably, especially with SLI.

It was just a rough time for everyone, lol. I think the only things from that era that actually worked well were my PalmPilot and Casio calculator watch :)

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