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Mac(OS)talgia

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Re: Mac(OS)talgia

#61

Post by bitwize »

cameldrv wrote: post #15

I get the nostalgia, but boy are computers so much better than back then. MacOS 7-8 (not sure about 9, never used it) would crash constantly. There was no protected memory, so as soon as one app started misbehaving, you'd have to reboot the computer and it would take forever and you'd lose your work. My recollection was that this would typically happen 3-4 times a day. Apple's project to make a new MacOS that didn't…

One of the reasons why I love the Angry Videogame Nerd is that when he came out, the state of third-generation retrogaming nostalgia involved a lot of wearing of rose-colored glasses. Remember Castlevania? Remember Mega Man? Double Dragon? Remember having to blow on the cartridges before they'd work (which never did really work)? Etc. The AVGN stood as a counterpoint to all that, reminding us that many of the games from that era -- even games we loved or wanted -- kind of sucked, and that we can appreciate modern games for the extra bit of care that went in to them to make them not suck so bad. (This was 2004, though, and what goes around comes around...)

The same is kind of true of retrocomputing. We look back to these old platforms as if due to coming from a "simpler time", they never had any latency and never experienced bugs. And sure, if you fire it up for five minutes on some online WebAssembly emulator you find on Hackernews, it seems much snappier and more pleasant to use than Windows 11. But back then, we were running them on CPUs literally hundreds of times slower than even a potato-class computer from today. And due to memory protection being frickin' absent from almost all consumer-grade operating systems, they crashed. A lot. Even the Amiga was crash- and Guru-Meditation-prone depending on what you were running on it. It was such an enormous relief for me, trying out Linux or even Windows NT for the first time, to watch the OS simply yeet out a misfiring app; disconnect any access it had to the network, file system, or window system; and proceed merrily on its way as if nothing happened. Not following the exact sequence of steps it required to set up the message pump properly so that your program can respond to messages as required in Windows 3.1, for instance, can cause strange glitches within Windows itself, requiring a restart of Windows; or even hard-lock the system requiring a cold boot.

Our computers are so powerful these days, and our software so sophisticated, that they've eliminated entire classes of problems from the old days, only to open the door to entirely new classes of problems (like adware that would have brought a Pentium II to its knees, and sparked a user complaint campaign that would have resulted in major egg on the vendor's face if not bankruptcy from the ensuing lawsuits, being routine, and even required, on commercial operating systems of today).

Offtopic, but here's how to feel old: More time has passed between the debut of the AVGN and the present, than has passed between the debut of the NES in the West and the debut of the AVGN.

Re: Mac(OS)talgia

#62

Post by dtgriscom »

cameldrv wrote: post #15

I get the nostalgia, but boy are computers so much better than back then. MacOS 7-8 (not sure about 9, never used it) would crash constantly. There was no protected memory, so as soon as one app started misbehaving, you'd have to reboot the computer and it would take forever and you'd lose your work. My recollection was that this would typically happen 3-4 times a day. Apple's project to make a new MacOS that didn't…

Does anyone else remember the early third party tool that would help you find extension conflicts by enabling half of them, asking you if the problem was still there, and then subdividing again and again? (Can't remember what it was called, but boy! was it helpful.)

Re: Mac(OS)talgia

#63

Post by kazinator »

cameldrv wrote: post #15

I get the nostalgia, but boy are computers so much better than back then. MacOS 7-8 (not sure about 9, never used it) would crash constantly. There was no protected memory, so as soon as one app started misbehaving, you'd have to reboot the computer and it would take forever and you'd lose your work. My recollection was that this would typically happen 3-4 times a day. Apple's project to make a new MacOS that didn't…

Remember "Machine Always Crashes, If Not, The OS Hangs"?

:)

Re: Mac(OS)talgia

#64

Post by _0xdd »

Honestly, I sometimes feel like I got work done more efficiently on my 1024x768 displays in that era than I do with my 4K+ monitors now. Modern UIs are bewildering at times. I miss the days where Photoshop and Office had toolbars separate from the open document windows. Things just seemed so much more discoverable and made more efficient use of space.

Re: Mac(OS)talgia

#65

Post by ribfeasty »

cameldrv wrote: post #15

I get the nostalgia, but boy are computers so much better than back then. MacOS 7-8 (not sure about 9, never used it) would crash constantly. There was no protected memory, so as soon as one app started misbehaving, you'd have to reboot the computer and it would take forever and you'd lose your work. My recollection was that this would typically happen 3-4 times a day. Apple's project to make a new MacOS that didn't…

I still recall the workaround to avoid restarting with some of these, once to the bewildered confusion of the ageing IT teacher looking over my shoulder in the library:

At the ">" ROM debugger prompt, type the following lines, pressing Return after each:

SM 0 A9F4 G 0

Re: Mac(OS)talgia

#66

Post by ribfeasty »

dtgriscom wrote: post #62
cameldrv wrote: post #15

I get the nostalgia, but boy are computers so much better than back then. MacOS 7-8 (not sure about 9, never used it) would crash constantly. There was no protected memory, so as soon as one app started misbehaving, you'd have to reboot the computer and it would take forever and you'd lose your work. My recollection was that this would typically happen 3-4 times a day. Apple's project to make a new MacOS that didn't…

Does anyone else remember the early third party tool that would help you find extension conflicts by enabling half of them, asking you if the problem was still there, and then subdividing again and again? (Can't remember what it was called, but boy! was it helpful.)

Conflict Catcher?

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/conflict-catcher-9

Re: Mac(OS)talgia

#67

Post by bangonkeyboard »

gopalv wrote: post #58
acherion wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While what you said is true (MacOS was really unstable in these tumultuous years), this link specifically celebrates the user interface of the later versions of non-OSX MacOS. This doesn't really have a relation to the stability of the OS.

> this link specifically celebrates the user interface of the later versions of non-OSX MacOS. This doesn't really have a relation to the stability of the OS. "Very pretty but can't do much" was a general take on the Mac OS cube of the day. The lack of a fan or any decent cooling, the "lack of a floppy disk" (for those of us who didn't use Zip drives), it was pretty to look at but hard to work with. We had one to run…

> The lack of a fan or any decent cooling, the "lack of a floppy disk" (for those of us who didn't use Zip drives), it was pretty to look at but hard to work with.

The G4 Cube had an (empty) standard mount and power connector for an optional fan.

Re: Mac(OS)talgia

#68

Post by kazinator »

feketegy wrote: post #16
cameldrv wrote: post #15

I get the nostalgia, but boy are computers so much better than back then. MacOS 7-8 (not sure about 9, never used it) would crash constantly. There was no protected memory, so as soon as one app started misbehaving, you'd have to reboot the computer and it would take forever and you'd lose your work. My recollection was that this would typically happen 3-4 times a day. Apple's project to make a new MacOS that didn't…

OS X Lion was the most stable operating system I've ever used. Tbh, it's all downhill from there, every new release gets a little worse not to mention all the hardware issues too.

I have VirtualBox VM of Lion. I use that for making 32 bit x86 builds of TXR for older Macs. (I ssh out to the Compile Farm for M1 on newer MacOS.)

Re: Mac(OS)talgia

#69

Post by cosmic_cheese »

lmz wrote: post #54
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The XFCE global menubar plugin being deprecated likely happened because there’s no standardized way for applications on Linux to surface their menus to the environment for display (or to power a Unity-style HUD or whatever), which means that hackery via plugins for GTK and Qt are required to make a global menubar work. Keeping that hackery functional probably is a constant battle. There’s also how GTK apps have been…

> I know a lot of people hate global menubars but I’ve always loved them and it kills me that they’re not a practical option on the Linux desktop, despite ultimate customizability being one of the most frequently-cited reasons to use Linux as a desktop OS. Isn't that the point? It's so customizable that app writers opt out of menubars. And the system menubar has no power over the apps.

I meant customizability for the end user, which in my opinion should rarely if ever be compromised by app devs.

As for the global menubar, it doesn’t need to wield any power over third party apps… it’s just there to display a list of menus provided by the front most app, and there’s not really a good reason for apps to not provide that even if their devs don’t want a menubar within the app’s window.

Re: Mac(OS)talgia

#70

Post by cosmic_cheese »

bsimpson wrote: post #49
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its performance over wifi is also shockingly close to that of third party KB+mouse sharing software running hardwired which is crazy. Trying to use Synergy, etc over wifi is normally a laggy mess.

You can use Steam Link to render a VR environment on one device and project it into another's goggles over wifi. Or you can use Stadia and its compatriots to play 3D-rendered video games over WAN. The amount of low-latency bandwidth modern computers have available is mindboggling.

Yep, I’ve used Sunshine and Moonlight to do exactly that. It’s super impressive, which makes it all the more confusing why Synergy and friends and send cursor movements and keystrokes (which I’d expect to be a stream of ints and chars) over WiFi without lagging.
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