I was hoping I could use Netscape Navigator to go to Hacker News and post a comment from it, but it has no network connection. And I guess it probably wouldn't be able to HTTPS.
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Infinite Mac
101–110 of 340 posts
Re: Infinite Mac
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while vectors are infinitely scalable.
Sounds like he used to be younger and needs to see an optometrist.
Not necessarily; I fired up some old devices last month, and the way their bitmap icons and apps and screens appeared, can only be defined as "Crips" and "Sharp". I'm not saying prettily or beneficially so! But they were definitely very stark and constrasty (let alone colourful and "stand-out-ish"!) holding them next to my modern phone or PC.
I don't think "Vector vs bitmap" is necessarily the cause - more of design sensibility. When I look at the lineup of google apps on my phone which all look EXACTLY the same (3 primary colours in random rotation; I can only effectively use / distinguish them if I memorize location of icon), and then the same as slack and my son's daycare app which also use swirls of same 3 primary colours; and when I compare my Windows desktop and icons and browsers to old apps - there's a definite brutal sharpness to old stuff.
Re: Infinite Mac
#103I'm not sure how many people will remember this, but macOS 8 came with a program called Hotline, who's main activity was "publishing and distribution of a multi-purpose client/server communication software." Most people I knew used it to pirate software and MP3s. The way most of us used it was we'd find a server that had something we wanted (software, a crack, or music), and the login would be password protected. The…
Hotline was full of warez and such, but it was also home to a number of vibrant, welcoming communities. I was a little bit late to the BBS heyday, but Hotline served that purpose for me and for many others. There was one called REALbasic Cafė centered around a commercial cross-platform programming language that I spent a lot of time it. I even attended conferences with other members, flying across the country alone as a high school kid. I have nothing but fond memories of Hotline.
Re: Infinite Mac
#104I was hoping I could use Netscape Navigator to go to Hacker News and post a comment from it, but it has no network connection. And I guess it probably wouldn't be able to HTTPS.
https://oldweb.today/ gives you that experience, using some of the same building blocks.
Re: Infinite Mac
#105Creator of the site here. There's a blog post with the technical details if you're curious about how it works and whose work it builds on: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html There are also a couple of variants that boot either System 7.5.3 or KanjiTalk 7.5.3 (the Japanese version of MacOS): https://system7.app/ and https://kanjitalk7.app/
Thank you for the magnificent trip down memory lane!
Re: Infinite Mac
#106What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. Of course you can always run dwm on linux with a hodgepodge of makeshift utility apps, write your own keybinds to set your brightness and volume and other such inanities, but in order to g…
> but in order to get a 'complete' desktop experience you kinda have to opt-in to GNOME/KDE
try XFCE, it works.
Re: Infinite Mac
#107It's exactly how I remember the Macs my grade school was using back then. Click around a little bit, and boom, it is frozen. Do you wait? Do you force quit? The watch gives little feedback.
Cooperative multitasking architecture. If the frontmost thread doesn't `WaitNextEvent`, not even the OS gets a chance to update the UI (with some key exceptions... I think the mouse was interrupt-driven?).
OS 8 started to add preemptive multitasking, but it wasn't mandatory and apps had to buy-in to it (so they didn't break backwards compatibility).
Incidentally, games would squeeze a few more cycles out of the computer by using `getNextEvent` or accessing the input drivers directly, which wouldn't give other processes a chance to do things. This would lead to the hilarious consequence (especially when the networking era came along) that you'd play a game for a couple hours, quit it, and be greeted by several error dialogs as various processes that had been wanting to poll for timed events discovered they'd missed their polling windows because they essentially just came out of suspended animation.
The need for always-available network access finally spelled out the death of the non-preemptive architecture; networking simply couldn't tolerate the client dropping out of the universe for ages at a time.
Re: Infinite Mac
#108As a Mac user since about 1988, this brings back memories!
It's sad but the UI feels almost futuristic.
Re: Infinite Mac
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like he used to be younger and needs to see an optometrist.
Not necessarily; I fired up some old devices last month, and the way their bitmap icons and apps and screens appeared, can only be defined as "Crips" and "Sharp". I'm not saying prettily or beneficially so! But they were definitely very stark and constrasty (let alone colourful and "stand-out-ish"!) holding them next to my modern phone or PC. I don't think "Vector vs bitmap" is necessarily the cause - more of design…
Because the pixels are larger on old display devices, I suspect.