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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

#51

Post by deaddodo »

anthk wrote: post #26
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…

W95 and W98 werent' much better until W98SE. Linux distros were rough but mega-stable.

Win98 was head and shoulders above System 9, from a stability perspective. It had protected memory, actual preemptive multitasking, a somewhat functional driver system built on top of an actual HAL, functional networking, etc, etc.

To be clear, Win98 was a garbage fire of an OS (when it came to stability); which makes it so much worse that Mac OS 8-9 were so bad.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#52

Post by todd8 »

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?

I'm running the latest MacOS right now on a modest m4 Mini and it doesn't seem slow to me at all. I use Windows for gaming and Linux for several of my machines as well and I don't "feel" like MacOS is slow.

In any case, Chrome opens quickly on my Mac Mini, under a second when I launch it from clicking its icon in my task bar or from spotlight (which is my normal way of starting apps). When Chrome is idle with no windows, opening chrome seems even faster, almost instant.

This made me curious so I tried opening some Apple apps, and they appear to open about the same speed as Chrome.

Gui applications like Chrome or Keynote can be opened from a terminal command line using the open command so I tried timing this:

     $ time open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app
which indicated that open was finished in under 0.05 seconds total. So this wasn't useful because it appears to be timing only part of the time involved with getting the first window up.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#53

Post by jxdxbx »

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…

I like System 6: the most complete version of the “real” classic Mac OS before System 7 started to be more “modern.” Dead simple, not a lot of new abstractions and metaphors layered on.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#54

Post by cmrdporcupine »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #46
swiftcoder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There were plenty of preemptive multitasking systems for the original 68000, and regardless page fault recovery was fixed from the 010 onwards.

And certainly was very not a problem on PowerPC which TFA is about.

Also not sure how you can say the 68000 "barely has interrupts" I don't even know what you're on about.

MacOS was broken because Jobs forced it to be that way after he was kicked off the Lisa team. Which had a preemptive multitasking operating system on the 68000.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#55

Post by bri3d »

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…

Mac OS 9 was Apple Windows ME; too many side ports of new features into the rickety legacy core OS (Win32 / Toolbox Mac OS) and not enough attention paid to detail since the Next Big Thing was already cooking (XP / OS X).

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#56

Post by WillAdams »

anthk wrote: post #31
cyrc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was because of QuarkXPress and Photoshop. In the same way WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were dominant for business computers. Wish someone would try to create native MacOS classic on x86 hardware. There are so many Unix or Linux ABI compatible kernels like the recent Moss written in rust.

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…

I will have to see if this is yet able to run Macromedia Freehand/MX --- if it is, I no longer need to have a Windows machine for that....

Now, if I can just get a nice portable with:

- largish OLED

- current gen Wacom EMR digitizer support

- decent battery life

running Linux, I can get off the Windows update treadmill....

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#57

Post by hoistbypetard »

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…

You might enjoy decker:

https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#58

Post by StilesCrisis »

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.

System 6 had menu blinks, zoom animations (with rect XORs no less), and button blinks when you used keyboard completion. Mac was the original "wasteful animation" OS.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#59

Post by Bluecobra »

bluedino wrote: post #47
apatheticonion wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I loved the MBP’s from that era. That was my first (easy) upgrade as well in addition to more memory. Those 5400 RPM hard drives were horrible. Also another slick upgrade you could do back then is to swap out the super drive with a caddy to have a second SSD/HDD.

It still works fine today, though I had install Linux on it to keep it up to date.

Re: System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4

#60

Post by Wowfunhappy »

jxdxbx wrote: post #53
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…

I like System 6: the most complete version of the “real” classic Mac OS before System 7 started to be more “modern.” Dead simple, not a lot of new abstractions and metaphors layered on.

I kind of wish there was a version of System 6 without MultiFinder. Classic Mac OS clearly wasn’t built with multi-tasking in mind.
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