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System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

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Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#41

Post by inferiorhuman »

Y-bar wrote: post #32
inferiorhuman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacOS 9 was awful , a product of a rather unpleasant era for Apple really. I wanna say through 9.2.1 maybe even through to 9.2.2 the OS had a nasty habit of corrupting your disk. Hardware-wise Apple used CMD64x based IDE controllers so when OS9 wasn't screwing with your data the hardware itself would. There absolutely were animations e.g. when closing a Finder window, but they were much lighter weight. As far as I'm…

Mac OS 9 was certainly not rock solid as far as crashes were concerned, but very much better than System 7, that was clear to me. Maybe it is my rose-tinted glasses colouring my memory but I also remember that there were very few small bug, you know the just annoying kind, than I have today with macOS 15, there may be fewer hard crashes, but the number of paper cuts have increased by many orders of magnitude.

Well, I got my B&W G3 because MacOS 9 lunched the filesystem as it was prone to doing. SCSI drive so it wasn't that other disk corruption fun (which I went through in PC land). As far as I'm concerned MacOS 9 was mostly a bunch of paper cuts glued together. Lots of stuff that would've demoed in OSX if Apple had the time and patience.

So yeah Apple had tacked on vestigial multi-user support, an automatic system update mechanism, USB support, etc., etc. but underneath it was still the same old single user, cooperative multitasked, no memory protection OS as its predecessors. Unlike OSX, MacOS 9 (like 7 and 8 before it) still relied on the Toolbox which was a mishmash of m68k and ppc code.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#42

Post by apatheticonion »

geerlingguy wrote: post #15
k310 wrote: post #11

> It is also my opinion Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS, and Mac OS, ever, but not everything that is possible in earlier Mac OS versions is possible in Mac OS 9.2.2. I had fun with hypercard on MacOS 9. At work, even. The boss was into rapid prototyping, and I cooked up some damn productive stacks in a hurry. It runs on the Cube and under OS 9 emulation on the new stuff. Hypercard scripters did cool things that most…

Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.

I don't understand why it takes 5 seconds for Chrome to open on my MBP while it's near instant on my Linux and Windows PC.

Why is eveything so slow on new MacOS?

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#43

Post by anthk »

cyrc wrote: post #33
anthk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ardi Executor. There's a recent fork at GitHub. You can run m68k binaries seamlessly. You don't need propietary MacOS parts, just the software. But if you are some software preserver, having a libre option to run legacy media it's always good for historical reasons. I am a daily libre software user but I emulate ancient machines with propietary stuff just for curiosity. As it not a personal computing device I find it…

It would be great if somebody tried to create an opensource version of Rhapsody DR2 that ran on X86 baremetal. Would not even need to be binary compatible. Source compatible API would be enough. Rhapsody DR2 is more like Classic Mac than any current MacOS.

Source compatible API it's GNUStep since the 90's.

At least the NeXTStep part; not the Mac GUI (Carbon?) one.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#44

Post by fzzzy »

ayaros wrote: post #13

I have an iMac G4 1.25 GHz. Originally, it was a 1GHz, but I swapped out the motherboard for a later model. For a while I've been wondering if I would had been better off with an earlier motherboard capable of booting OS 9 natively. Compared with using OS X's classic mode, this would omit the overhead of running a whole other OS and leave me with more resources to run OS 9 apps and games. I don't get a whole lot of u…

9 has been possible on that board for years now. No internal speaker but the headphone jack works.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#45

Post by julik »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #17
geerlingguy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.

MacOS 9 was awful , a product of a rather unpleasant era for Apple really. I wanna say through 9.2.1 maybe even through to 9.2.2 the OS had a nasty habit of corrupting your disk. Hardware-wise Apple used CMD64x based IDE controllers so when OS9 wasn't screwing with your data the hardware itself would. There absolutely were animations e.g. when closing a Finder window, but they were much lighter weight. As far as I'm…

I'd rather say the zenith was 8.1 which was not very widely used. 8.5 did add some nice gimmicks like the app switcher palette but for some reason it felt way slower than 8.1.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#46

Post by ErroneousBosh »

swiftcoder wrote: post #35
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the UI thread was everything. How would you have done it?

Preemption is a very nice OS feature it turns out (particularly once multi-core rolled around). Still, I recall os 8 and 9 being generally snappier than windows 98 (and a lot snappier than early builds of OSX)

How does preemption work on a processor that barely has interrupts and has no way to recover state after a page fault, in an OS that has to fit into a couple dozen kilobytes of ROM?

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#47

Post by bluedino »

apatheticonion wrote: post #42
geerlingguy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.

I don't understand why it takes 5 seconds for Chrome to open on my MBP while it's near instant on my Linux and Windows PC. Why is eveything so slow on new MacOS?

Somewhere around 2011 when I switched my MBP to an SSD (back when you could upgrade the drives, and memory, yourself), Chrome opened in 1-2 bounces of the dock icon instead of 12-14 second.

People used to make YouTube videos of their Mac opening 15 different programs in 4/5 seconds

Now, my Apple Silicon MacBook Air is very, very fast but at times it takes like 8-9 seconds to open a browser again.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#48

Post by julik »

Y-bar wrote: post #34
keyle wrote: post #19

That's impressive but early macOS were pretty awful UX; I think the UI thread was everything. I remember clicking and waiting.

I remember that yes, expensive operations could take a while, but the interface was much faster than my M1 Max Studio for the sole reson you actually do not have to wait for animations. And not just for the reasons that animations were sparse, they also never blocked input, so for example if you could see where a new element would appear you could click there DURING the animation and start eg typing and no input woul…

The animations were there, but they were frame-based with the number of frames carefully calculated to show UI state changes that were relevant. For example, when you would open a folder, there would be an animation showing a window rect animating from the folder icon into the window shape, but it would be very subtle - I remember it being 1 or 2 intermediate frames at most. It was enough to show how you get from "there" to "here" but not dizziingly egregious the way it became in Aqua.

Truth be told, I do have a suspicion that some folks (possibly - some folks close to Avie or other former NeXT seniors post-acquisition) have noticed that with dynamic loading, hard drive speed, and ubiquitous dynamic dispatch of ObjC OSX would just be extremely, extremely slow. So they probably conjured a scheme to show fancy animations to people and wooing everyone with visual effects to conceal that a bit. Looney town theory, I know, but I do wonder. Rhapsody was also perceptually very slow, and probably not for animations.

There were also quite a few tricks used all the way from the dithering/blitting optimizations on the early Macs. For example, if you can blit a dotted rect for a window being dragged instead of buffering the entire window, everything underneath, the shadow mask - and then doing the shadow compositing and the window compositing on every redraw - you can save a ton of cycles.

You could very well have do-wait-do-wait loops when custom text compositing or layout was involved and not thoroughly optimized - like in early versions of InDesign, for instance - but it was the exception rather than the rule.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#49

Post by JKCalhoun »

geerlingguy wrote: post #15
k310 wrote: post #11

> It is also my opinion Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS, and Mac OS, ever, but not everything that is possible in earlier Mac OS versions is possible in Mac OS 9.2.2. I had fun with hypercard on MacOS 9. At work, even. The boss was into rapid prototyping, and I cooked up some damn productive stacks in a hurry. It runs on the Cube and under OS 9 emulation on the new stuff. Hypercard scripters did cool things that most…

Not only that, everything felt _snappy_. No wasteful animations to add 0.28 ms to every interaction.

Oh, gotta be super snappy on a Mac mini G4!

Yeah, when a coworker and I showed my wife the first OS X preview, she was alarmed at how long it took to shut down (I mean System 7 shut down like you just kicked the cord out). "You'll have to find something else to like about it," was my coworker's response.

And to be sure, there was/is a lot to like about OS X.

But, probably because of the lack of a kernel, etc., System 7 sits somewhere in that nether/middle region on our personal computer journey. It's rich library of functions (the Toolbox) set it apart from machines before it that might have instead had a handful of ASSM routines you could "CALL" in BASIC to switch display modes, clear the screen, etc. But, as Amiga owners often reminded the Mac community in the day, no "true" preemptive multitasking…

I should say too, regarding programming, these days your ability to write safe, threaded code is probably the highest virtue to strive for, hardest to perfect — at least for me (so hard to wrap my head around). It seems to separate the hacks (in the negative sense) from the programming gods. I think wistfully of those simpler times when managing memory well, handling error returned from the system API gracefully were the only hurdles.

"You can’t simply add a lock here, because this function can be called while the lock is already held. Taking the same lock again would cause a deadlock…"

"The way you've implemented semaphores can still allow a potential race condition. No, I have no idea how we can test that scenario, with the unit tests it may still only happen once in a million runs—or only on certain hardware…"

(Since I have retired I confess my memory of those hair-pulling days are getting fuzzier—thankfully.)

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#50

Post by trollbridge »

k310 wrote: post #11

> It is also my opinion Mac OS 9.2.2 is the greatest OS, and Mac OS, ever, but not everything that is possible in earlier Mac OS versions is possible in Mac OS 9.2.2. I had fun with hypercard on MacOS 9. At work, even. The boss was into rapid prototyping, and I cooked up some damn productive stacks in a hurry. It runs on the Cube and under OS 9 emulation on the new stuff. Hypercard scripters did cool things that most…

FYI, Trello (or one of the many clones of it) can be used for similar purposes.
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