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Swift on Mac OS 9 (2020)

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31–39 of 39 posts

Re: Swift on Mac OS 9 (2020)

#31

Mac OS 9 was really aging even at that point in time, was crashing all the time from what I heard, and so on, but. It looks amazing. Monterey wishes it looked half as good as OS 9 looks like

I want to counter the idea that OS 9 was either stable or not stable. I made money in grad school fixing people's Mac OS 9 setups, and I had many satisfied customers. Basically, one bad Apple spoils the barrel. If you add "crazy media network extension from hell" alongside all your dozens of working apps, then yes, the whole OS becomes unstable. Similarly with low-quality Photoshop plugins, OS startup services, odd hardware drivers or even corrupt font files.. yes, the whole OS can crash "daily".

On the other hand, like a great day at a public theater act, when it goes well, it really does go well. I have OS disks and applications saved to this day, in their own filing system in a drawer, that run great, look great, and are a joy to use. And so you know, months of daily, extensive use, with no crashes.

Re: Swift on Mac OS 9 (2020)

#32
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

go is one of the rare language i can imagine using on a 20+ yo hardware / software stack. The whole go tooling is so much focused on simple and performant design that i think it wouldn't be too bad of an experience.

Apart from it being an absolutely terrible programming language

Go is a wonderful language, what are you talking about

Cloud native language of choice for a reason ;)

Re: Swift on Mac OS 9 (2020)

#33
post #24
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it wasn't robust by todays standards (or any standards really), but it would be wrong to infer from that that the quality of OS9 was inferior to OS8, OS7, rotting, etc.

I say as a Mac user, while not inferior to other MacOS’s, it was however inferior to the stability of the counterpart versions of Windows, more-or-less since inception. The stability gap got wider and wider as the years went on and Windows 2k made OS9 look like a joke. OS X closed that gap and then quickly surpassed it.

> stability gap got wider and wider as the years went on

no mention of virus here?

Re: Swift on Mac OS 9 (2020)

#34
post #10

CodeWarrior was such a cool name. I wish Apple kept it over Xcode :)

CodeWarrior was commercial software, Apple's pre-OS X developer tools were called "Macintosh Programmer's Workshop". It was bought up by Motorola/Freescale around the turn of the century and lived on as tools for embedded processors until fairly recently, although the later releases were based on Eclipse.

I wrote MPW tools integration for MetroWerks on contract; I delivered it to the VP Engineering for MWerks in person.

Re: Swift on Mac OS 9 (2020)

#35

Mac OS 9 was really aging even at that point in time, was crashing all the time from what I heard, and so on, but. It looks amazing. Monterey wishes it looked half as good as OS 9 looks like

I want to counter the idea that OS 9 was either stable or not stable. I made money in grad school fixing people's Mac OS 9 setups, and I had many satisfied customers. Basically, one bad Apple spoils the barrel. If you add "crazy media network extension from hell" alongside all your dozens of working apps, then yes, the whole OS becomes unstable. Similarly with low-quality Photoshop plugins, OS startup services, odd h…

I didn't start using a mac until iPhone development started, so the earliest version was 10.5 for me, but in that and later versions, the entire system could be crashed by corrupted fonts, not even system fonts.

Re: Swift on Mac OS 9 (2020)

#36
post #18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS9 was very stable, but some apps weren't e.g. photoshop would crash a lot, and as there was no protected memory space for processes every app crash balked the entire system. Happy days.

OS9 was as stable as W98SE. Not as bad as W98/W95, but still crashy.

Win98SE was the high water mark of a fast, stable, small MS Windows environment. Here it is in under 5 megs of hd space : https://web.archive.org/web/20080306134751/http://www.eteak....

Re: Swift on Mac OS 9 (2020)

#37
post #15

I'm trying to restore mac OS 9.2 on my still working iBook G4. I am ordering old CDs to see if I can restart the system. It has an Mac OS X Tiger installation that is blocking.

The iBook G4 only officially supports Mac OS X and Classic (a Mac OS 9 virtual machine), don’t waste your time ordering old CDs that won’t work. If someone has managed to get Mac OS 9 running, they’ll probably post instructions or a download on a forum like Mac OS 9 Lives.

Re: Swift on Mac OS 9 (2020)

#38
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS9 was as stable as W98SE. Not as bad as W98/W95, but still crashy.

Win98SE was the high water mark of a fast, stable, small MS Windows environment. Here it is in under 5 megs of hd space : https://web.archive.org/web/20080306134751/http://www.eteak....

Heh. Small, but not stable. I suffered it at home. Sound/chipset driver install = BSOD. "High" load on IE with several (less than 10) Windows open = BSOD.

Re: Swift on Mac OS 9 (2020)

#39
post #15

I'm trying to restore mac OS 9.2 on my still working iBook G4. I am ordering old CDs to see if I can restart the system. It has an Mac OS X Tiger installation that is blocking.

The iBook G4 only officially supports Mac OS X and Classic (a Mac OS 9 virtual machine), don’t waste your time ordering old CDs that won’t work. If someone has managed to get Mac OS 9 running, they’ll probably post instructions or a download on a forum like Mac OS 9 Lives.

When I bought the iBook it came with Mac OS 9 installed.
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