| > If you create a folder in an open dialog, and the Windows Defender kicks in or it's a network mount, the inner window of that dialog freezes Oh, nice. Just what you want. There was context at the time of Win98, good and bad. Jobs had just come back to Apple. He cancelled most of its WIP projects. His other company's OS, NeXTstep, was set to replace classic MacOS. But he didn't just axe everything, and among other things, he set the classic MacOS developers to salvaging as much as they could from the failed "Copland" project to make a multitasking next-generation classic MacOS. They took quite a lot of the UI tech from the MacOS "Finder", broadly its desktop. The result was MacOS 8, and one of the big things in its new desktop, as well as loadable themes and pop-up drawers (which never made it across to OS X) was... multithreaded file operations. This was a huge win in the day: Macs were a bit slow anyway so being able to keep working while the Finder kept copying was a huge boost. So, that was new out in July 1997. Microsoft was left behind: the Win95 desktop couldn't do that, and neither could the fancy pre-emptive multitasking NT 4, released in 1996. I do miss the era of bold OS experimentation like that. Now, it's just "how can we embed as many cloud services they'll have to pay for?" |