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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
01:58 PM
11/27/09
11/28/09
Dude.
11/27/09
11/27/09
[folklore.org]
If you take more a holistic view of the operating system (rather than focussing on specific things like memory management or Kernel performance, both of which were far from advanced on the Mac) then there were many ways in which Mac didn't "totally suck".
Comparatively to other systems, until the late 90's/early 00's the Mac held its own. Of course you could use UNIX or Linux, but they were hardly user friendly. DOS based versions of Windows weren't that much more reliable either. You had far better chance of getting a USB device working correctly with a Mac in the early days of USB. Windows 2000 and XP using the NT Kernel were undisputedly more reliable than Mac OS 9, but XP and OS X launched in the same year.
Mac OS introduced many concepts and ideas that GUIs still use today (overlapping windows, drop down menus, multiple views of the same filesystem (list, icon etc.) drag and drop file management, control panels, desk accessories or widgets etc.). It also made localised software really easy and was sophisticated enough to know type file was without needing an extension (not practical now for interoperability, but better for users).
"Niche" things like handling font management, consistent colour management were handled better on the Mac than comparative systems.
It might make a funny, throw away comment, but the reason you got such a long reply is that this "it sucked" attitude seems to occur a lot in tech circles ("Vista sucked") because people compare old technology to what we have now. Instead the old technology should be placed in context of what was around it at the time along with what it lead to…
For example (crude):
C# was inspired by Java, which was inspired by elements Objective-C, which was influence by Smalltalk from Xerox Parc.
Now with Visual Studio 2010 and C# .NET you can do some amazing things… so this means small talk sucks… right?
So when you champion Ubuntu or Windows or another system, remember many of the things you take for granted were given a helping hand by both the Mac, NeXTSTEP, Xerox and countless other companies, some of which are now defunct.
You just might not realise it.
11/27/09
Pre-OS X, Apple had the same issues that Microsoft had today-- it was not possible to advance the state of the art within the Mac OS and maintain backward compatibility. It was a cooperative (not preemptive) multitasker where an errant app brought the house down, the OS provided poor memory management, and its system folder held an absolute zoo of ugly and questionable extensions-- kludges on kludges that were the primary way of extending the Mac OS' functionality.
The Mac OS of the 80s and 90s was only notable for its aesthetics and user-facing (NOT administrator-facing) technologies. Under the hood it was absolute garbage, with no possible future.
My $0.02, of course.
11/28/09
The last few revisions of classic mac os had a well-deserved reputation of being technically deficient, but philosophically it was in the right place, and I think that that has been paramount in distinguishing MacOSX from other modern OSes.
11/29/09
Also, I loved that I could use *NIX apps like Gnutar in NeXT and have 10 shell instances of FTP or Gzip running, while still using the rich GUI to quickly navigate a huge filesystem. Squeezing that kind of productivity/efficiency out of NT4 was well-nigh impossible - excepting custom Perl and Python scripts. And trying to use 3rd-party apps on IRIX was pretty hit-or-miss (and miss could be really expensive).
NeXT really was ahead of it's time, and it made perfect sense to me that Apple would fold it into its' next-gen OS.
07/21/09
07/21/09