Considering how many highly skilled developers have died suddenly, no obituary, only person who seems to know anything about it is another developer, I sometimes hope that they're alive but the space aliens saw them as too valuable to leave on Earth and took them elsewhere.
This is an interesting tale, because Drunkenbatman ducked out of public view after he gave a speech at the C4 conference which we would now call “woke”. He called everyone in the room racists because there weren’t many bl*ck Apple customers or developers, and in 2007, you were allowed to disagree with such ideas.
And without knowing that in advance I’d have assumed that link would have been to a commit or PR.
A link to a project is useful, but a succinct description of a project can be far more helpful. Something like, “tl;dr: Infinite Mac (the software for running classic Mac and NextStep in your browser) can now run…”
Yes, POWER is an acronym for Power Optimization With Enhanced RISC.
There are some wild instructions like cntlzd and lwarx that are more CISC-esque, and everybody’s favorite instruction (by name), eieio
Obscure data point of the day; McDonalds is a small but long-standing real estate company in a provincial city in New Zealand. Their website address? eieio.co.nz
Unless you're making it possible to access memory on every instruction that takes an argument, or adding more addressing modes that are redundant with ALU operations, or making registers that can only be used for one purpose, etc., it's not really turning into CISC. The acronyms are misnomers, or maybe you just need to think of what's being "reduced" as the number of micro-ops per high-level instruction. Regardless, you don't turn RISC into CISC just by adding more instructions.
PowerPC is a trimmed down subset of the POWER architecture.
The latter has a higher number of instructions, and a POWER CPU can execute the generic PowerPC code but not vice versa (unless compiled for the common set of instructions).
I can't imagine what it would feel like to be a 20 year old tech enthusiast today confronted with OS X 10.4 (or .5 or .6)
In my bitterness, it makes me think of someone in the Dark Ages, standing before a Classical sculpture: "how was it that humanity was once capable of such works?"
But tastes change. In the Dark Ages, what they actually thought was probably "what heathen decadence is this?", and today maybe they think "photo-realistic icons: cringe!"
10.4 looks and behaves basically the same as ... whatever is the latest macOS version. (I stopped caring about macOS versions few years ago) even with Liquid Glass it still behaves similarly.
The app installation is still the same "ikea dmg app dragging", and occasional zip or pkg. The Finder window already has bookmarks in the left bar. The dock behaves identically. (They went through their weird 3D dock phase but that was... Leopard? I think?)
There is no Mac App Store but barely anyone uses this nowadays anyway... Spotlight... was new in Tiger.
It is much more recognisable than Windows XP vs 11. XP behaves very differently to 11!
The behavior hasn't changed radically, but it has changed. In most cases the differences diminish the OS. Eg: scrollbars hide themselves, multi-select options don't work everywhere, dragging window icons requires more steps, etc...
Re: looks, they are admittedly subjective. To my eyes, the difference between the Mac today, and the old Mac, is night and day.
Every Mac OS, starting with 10.7, has visual elements that strike me as sloppy or ugly. The link below has many screenshots from OS X 10.6; I find every element attractive, right down to the last pixel.
Sure but the question was "would user of modern macOS recognise Tiger" and he mostly would. Also user of Tiger could go to latest macOS without problems...
I mostly agree with criticisms of modern macOS, especially how it moves randomly closer to iOS, but one thing I disagree is the new Settings. It's still ugly as sin, but it's overall easier to use because everything is uniform (not each panel being its own special snowflake), and MUCH easy to search for. I used to hate it at first, but I got used to it.
Now I remember, a lot of the Mac apps back then had this weird "side panel" thing where side panel went "out" of the window. I don't know the precise name of the pattern, but that would be probably the most confusing thing.
Oh also the + button didn't do full screen as today, but... it did... something. I never understood the point of the + button.
> Oh also the + button didn't do full screen as today, but... it did... something. I never understood the point of the + button.
When I first came from Windows I was confused about this as well, but once I got the hang of it, it became the most logical thing to me.
The green + button zoomed the window to the minimum window size that showed the full content. (For example, one page in a word processor or one slide in presentation software.)
> n my bitterness, it makes me think of someone in the Dark Ages, standing before a Classical sculpture: "how was it that humanity was once capable of such works?"
What do you mean by "Dark Ages"? I do not think there was a loss of ability, but a difference in what an empire spends vs what independent kingdoms spent on. There are many beautiful artifacts and buildings from the early middle ages. A lot will not have survived, but there is some that has - things like the Sutton Hoo ship burial to Anglo Saxon churches (just drawing on things I have seen myself).
Started out as a developer in the 10.4/10.5 days. Mostly coz I was messing around with trying to get stuff to run in a semi-darkmode :) and theming things. Messing about in the system folder wasn't as complicated back then
To me, Mac OS X looks so much better than todays Mac OS. It looks clear and orderly and I feel like "Great in this environment I can get some work done!".
Current Mac OS feels like "Help, I fell into a sack of candies, how do I get out of here?" to me.
I feel like I'm becoming a fan of old gray interfaces (win 95, macos 9). They feel like tools to me, like a calculator is just a tool, and it's comforting.
Honestly, no; the parts of the UI that I see and work with are limited to the menu bar (just flat text, no embellishments), three dots and sometimes the Spotlight bar but I don't actively look at it unless it's slow. Same thing with Windows. I never work with the OS and rarely with native apps, it's all browser based and/or crossplatform applications that use third party design systems.
Sad part is there's really no reason they couldn't offer this look & feel in modern MacOS, except for the obvious reason (poorly designed software that lacks modularity). I'm tired of pretending that software companies are remotely good at software.
My favourite one is 10.3 Panther with the mix of aqua and brushed metal. 10.4 Tiger is similar but it has a glossy top menu bar that didn’t age well in my opinion. 10.5 Leopard has the fancy cheesy 3D dock, transparent top menu bar, and the more modern gradients. It looked great at the time but gradients aren’t as cool as brushed metal and aqua.
I had the same reaction looking at the screenshots. Sure it could use a new coat a paint (maybe not _everything_ needs to be gray) but the foundation is fantastically usable.
Every Linux WM had an aqua theme. Apple delivered an OS that the “year of the Linux desktop” folk had been (and still are) trying to deliver for years.
A mainstream Unix with all the usability for your grandmother supported by all big 3rd party apps as well. Home run.
> Apple delivered an OS that the “year of the Linux desktop” folk had been (and still are) trying to deliver for years.
Indeed.
I figured this out on the day in 2003 when I first tried out OS X. I've been using Linux since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. I'd used Mac OS 7 and 8 in college and hated it,[1] but OS X was a revelation.
I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period.
[1] People who never used pre-Unix MacOS have no idea how unreliable it was. Windows 95 and 98 weren't great, but there was at least some hope of killing an errant application and continuing on. System 7? No hope whatsoever. It didn't help that Mosaic (and Netscape) wasn't very reliable regardless of platform, but the OS's own failings made things that much worse.
100% agree on the unreliability of older Mac OS. In the late 90s my university computer room offered a mix of Mac and Windows machines, and I only ever took a Mac if that was all that was free, because there was a good chance it would at some point show you a sad Mac face alongside a cutesy and uninformative crash message, while losing the essay you’d half-written (or, hopefully, only the unsaved changes).
Liquid Glass feels like a reprisal of all the visual garishness of Aqua with none of the usability lessons. Aqua was good because it could be learned quickly, it made a lot of sense to copy back then.
Apple's current design language is sterile, but at least it's easy to read. The modern design trends are just a series of downgrades in usability, arguably continuing since System 7. Somehow, it looks like "overlapping low-contrast window content" has become the haute couture of UX, much to the dismay of grandmas everywhere.
Personally I found System 7.6/Mac OS 8’s Platinum to be a step up in usability compared to System 7 and before. The light mid-gray it used in most of its UI was pleasant and easier on the eyes than the stark white that made up the majority of the original Mac UI, but it was still plenty legible.
The System 7.0 UI appearance - before Platinum - was a mess. It was little more than a partially colorized version of the monochrome System 6 user interface; in fact, it mostly fell back to the System 6 appearance on machines with monochrome displays, like the (brand-new in 1991!) PowerBook series.
In a certain sense, Platinum was an attempt to reinterpret what Mac OS could have looked like if it had always been designed for a color display. It didn't just add color, like System 7.0 had; it added depth and texture to the interface which wasn't practical to display before. It also added a ton of new controls to the toolkit which previously didn't have standardized implementations or appearances. (For instance, System 7.0 didn't have a standard progress bar control - every application which used one had to provide their own implementation.)
It’s fair to say that design has moved on in the last 34 years. Totally subjective whether you think it’s all been for the better. But macOS is self-evidently more usable now than it was then; a lot more people are using it. I imagine fairly few of them would be happy if Apple decided to abandon this Liquid Glass idea and return to System 7 design instead.
Along the same line of logic we could argue that Windows became more usable since XP because more computers have it installed. Computer demand is an extenuating factor that doesn't really reflect the quality of UX design.
Okay, now argue your point. How does the install-base of a computer system possibly reflect the quality of it's UX on a timescale as large as 30 years?
There were plenty of Kaleidoscope schemes and Appearance Manager themes for those with Macs who liked Aqua but either couldn’t or didn’t want to upgrade to OS X yet. There were some interesting “remixes” of Aqua too, including one that gave it BeOS-like tab titlebars!
There was even one Aqua scheme that through some feat of wizardry managed to give menus soft, 32-bit transparency drop shadows just like OS X had. I have no idea how that worked, classic Mac OS itself was only capable of 1-bit transparency as far as I'm aware.
The classic Mac OS (Toolbox) menu routine took over exclusive use of the machine when it was tracking the mouse in the menu - all multitasking stopped running.
So an extension could draw whatever fancy effect it wanted when the menu was down without worrying about a background application drawing over it (drawing over the transparency) as long you made sure to restore what was beneath when the menu was let go.
There were extensions that got around this, though. iTunes for the classic Mac OS (and I'm pretty sure SoundJam before it) could continue to play music with a menu open, for example.
Yeah you could do things like set timer interrupts, and starting in somewhere like MacOS 8.6 there was an actual multitasking (and multi-CPU) nanokernel running beneath everything that allowed you to schedule tasks in a more modern way.
But those tended to have some pretty gnarly limitations (like I think in interrupts you can't allocate memory) so AFAIK they were only used for stuff like real-time audio, I dunno if anyone ever used those to do screen drawing, so in practice I can't think of anything that would interfere with menu drawing.
No, Quickdraw in 7.5 and higher (maybe before) supported 8 bit alpha channels. Classic MacOS didn't have a compositor, so redrawing windows was constant and expensive and I guess this was why they didn't do soft drop shadows.
“ Every Linux WM had an aqua theme. Apple delivered an OS that the “year of the Linux desktop” folk had been (and still are) trying to deliver for years.”
It perfectly captures more than two decades of work in a couple sentences.
> The operating system is another concept that is curious. Operating systems are dauntingly complex and totally unnecessary. It’s a brilliant thing that Bill Gates has done in selling the world on the notion of operating systems. It’s probably the greatest con game the world has ever seen... An operating system does absolutely nothing for you. As long as you had something—a subroutine called disk driver, a subroutine called some kind of communication support, in the modern world, it doesn’t do anything else.
- Chuck Moore, interview in "Masterminds of Programming", 2009
I love this quote, but the Mac OS showed a benefit Moore completely missed: an OS can gave a uniform appearance to every bit of software on a machine, giving the impression of hardware and software meant for each other. I think there's a psychological effect that benefits work efficiency and pleasure in using the machine. It's also undoubtedly been a great selling point for Apple in particular. Agreed Aqua was a high-water mark with this.
Of course, the downside is that the OS rules the day, so your choice of software quickly falls into a very small selection based on what OS you'd like. FOSS (or at least open source) tried to run around that, but for anything not purely command line it's very difficult to just pass around source and adapt it to wherever and whatever you'd like.
Lastly, for the past decade or more we've seen the browser take the place of the OS in this. There are quite a few downsides to that approach, especially the loss of the impression of a unified product build for the end user. But the house of cards / tower of babel continues to grow...if you'll excuse me I'll go back to my 7400-series logic now...
It's such a stupid quote. In fact, it's almost in the realm of "not even wrong".
The operating system (as in: a kernel) provides applications with an abstraction of the computer that allows applications to co-exist.
The "operating system" (as in: a desktop environment) provides users with a unified approach to design, interaction and cooperation.
We don't write applications to run on bare metal any more (or rather, very, very few people do), because that's neither desirable or cost-effective.
That "subroutine called a disk driver" is just ridiculous. Any modern computing device has more than one process that needs to write to the disk; the machinery that allows them all to do that without stepping on each other's toes is called an operating system (kernel).
I disagree. Even though we've added layers of abstraction even since then, the quote still reminds me to think "what are we really doing here?" Apart from arguing if it is crazy or genius, I will say it has broadened my mind and for that I'm very thankful.
> The "operating system" (as in: a desktop environment) provides users with a unified approach to design, interaction and cooperation.
I do stand corrected with that: desktop environment, not OS.
> Any modern computing device has more than one process that needs to write to the disk; the machinery that allows them all to do that without stepping on each other's toes...
I agree, but I'll also point out that in the end I, as the end user, only want one specific thing written to disk at a time - the word document, excel sheet, game state, etc. The vast majority of disk writes are supporting the abstractions that support the abstractions that support the abstractions that support me saving my word document. I understand why that is the case, but I still think it's amusing.
> in the end I, as the end user, only want one specific thing written to disk at a time
so you're in some sort of text editor, and you think that's all you want written to disk at a time.
but meanwhile, you've got a messaging app running somewhere, and messages are coming in, and you'd like to have a local copy of those for performance reasons, so they're being written to disk.
you've got an RSS reader running, which just found out about a new posting somewhere; it's going to write it to disk so it can tell you about it at any time.
your media control panel - you just adjusted that because the piece of music you're listening to is a bit loud, and you expect it to remember the current setting the next time you restart, which means ... write to disk. and the music player itself - that's going to write to disk so that it knows where you were in the playlist next time.
and so on and so forth.
the idea of a computer being a device on which you run one program at a time vanished before MS-DOS even existed.
And I never understood that as it wasn't remotely good looking with what I would call "unnecessary scan lines" in the windows background and those pills like button only made me think of being in an hospital.
But maybe I am the only one who didn't dig this look. The later brushed metal from panther and tiger was much more interesting but it would have looked better without the aqua styled sliders.
Aqua is still a revelation. We've taken a huge step back in being able to just identify window controls. My hope is that some of that comes back with Liquid Glass, but honestly, Aqua still looks great.
What all the copy cats missed (Windows Vista, Linux themes) is how consistent and usable everything was. It looked great, but better than that, it worked great.
I loved the "stripy" windows. Things lining up perfectly on the horizontal stripes were somehow so visually pleasing.
I tried to replicate this look in my Java Swing UI using a commercial Aqua-like look&feel, but got hit by issues with controls rendering their own background, resulting in stripes being misaligned.
I was so disappointed when Apple phased it out later.
> So this is the architecture, except there’s one more thing. The one more thing is, we have been secretly for the last 18 months designing a completely new user interface. And that new user interface builds on Apple’s legacy and carries it into the next century. And we call that new user interface Aqua, because it’s liquid. One of the design goals was when you saw it, you wanted to lick it.
That sounds like Rhapsody/Mac OS X Server (which would have been Platinum). And it is, indeed, quite snappy. I have it on a Wallstreet G3 and it runs very well.
The aqua interface first shipped in Mac OS X Developer Preview 3. So they could be referring to DP2 which had a platinum like interface but was released after Apple had moved on from the rhapsody concept.
Oh looky looky some of my fondly-remembered UIs: Platinum circa Macintosh OS 8. MacOS X lickables refined circa 10.3, 10.4.
I also fondly recall OpenLook on SunOS/Slowlaris and NeXTStep/OpenStep UIs and peak Microsoft Windows right on 2000 before the playskool never-ever-mix-orange-and-green Winblows XP. IRIX and plenty of Motif-esque joy on SGI.
UI elements were almost always distinct, understandable, consistent. If I was to actuate a standard UI control, I always knew exactly what I expected to happen before, and it happened exactly as I expected after.
Making them customized, themable, replaceable, more cool, well, that's what we have today, kind of in exchange I suppose..
Dad had an Apple Lisa when I was young. Apple kindly gave it to him as he was developing an accountancy suite for Apple.
I took this incredible machine for granted, and only used it for games and MacPaint at the time. Among Dad's collection of 3.5" disks was one labelled "Dark Castle." For reasons I don't recall, it wouldn't work on the Lisa, but I guessed it was a game, and it killed me that I couldn't play it. I was beguiled by this mysterious disk.
Those early OS X years were a real golden age for the Mac - the hardware was quite competitive with x86, and the OS was as good as it's ever been. Eventually the wheels started coming off both.
We're in a second golden age of hardware, so I can dream that maybe one day soon Mac OS will be amazing again.
(Despite the new hardware golden age, the emulation performance here is pretty close to unusable on an M1 with Safari, unfortunately.)
I've been Thinking Different™ly from 68k->PPC->Intel->Silicon. The two greatest performance increases have been the two most recent CPU updates, in both raw and per-watt metrics.
The entry-level, basic-bitch M4 mini is incredible... the entire computer uses less than just a comparable-performing x86's GPU.
Competitive in price it was not, and osx wasn't as good as you think it was. Kernel panics were a daily thing, and segmentation faults of quicktime while watching videos.
Reproducing file formats like wmv or divx was a quest in finding and installing the correct codec.
Also overheating, because to make it pretty they didn't add vents for the air to flow.
I'm talking about pre-x86. I don't recall any kernel panics or segfaults when I used a G4 Power Mac back in the day; it was certainly more stable than the Windows 98 PC I was coming from.
The Core2Duo were the first Intel Macs worth a hoot. IIRC, you could get this CPU in the white MacBook, along with an education discount and iPod rebate.
I rocked dual Xenons until early 2023's M2Pro mini (the energy savings are substantial, with minimal GPU performance degredation).
> It’s not particularly snappy, but as someone who lived through that period, I can tell you that it wasn’t much better on real hardware
As a Hackintosh user around ~2008, I can only second that. It adds even more to the realism that it's just as sluggish as it was on my computer back then. Luckily I didn't have to wait ~24 hours for installation to finish.
Oh what lengths I went through, just to be able to build some crappy Apps for my iPod Touch back then.
I went through several sections of the article and I am still none the wiser about what this project is. Is it a software emulator? If so, on which platforms does it run? How do I download it? Or is it a hardware device? The article jumps right into the middle of things and bombards the reader with jargon without explaining anything for the HN user like me, who just stumbled upon the link on the home page and is trying to understand the project.
It's a website that has compiled existing open source emulators that are capable of running old versions of MacOS and NeXTStep, to WebAssembly so they run inside a modern browser.
They have paired that with disk images of these OSes and a lot of tweaking, so that when you go to the website, you select the version of the OS you want to play with, and _it just runs_ in the browser.
Instant old Mac/NeXT experience, no separate download or software to install.
I think this is one of the things that makes systemd popular. A consequence of it being such a baseline of cross-cutting functionality is it necessarily goes against the classic unix philosophy.
> [PearPC] did this successfully for a few years, until interest waned after the Intel switch
Well, until the original maintainer was hit by a train and killed. It lost most of its momentum after that.
I was an avid user and community member at the time. It still brings a tear to my eye thinking about it.
https://www.wired.com/2004/07/pearpc-coauthor/
Considering how many highly skilled developers have died suddenly, no obituary, only person who seems to know anything about it is another developer, I sometimes hope that they're alive but the space aliens saw them as too valuable to leave on Earth and took them elsewhere.
Well it's that or suicide
And someone ripped off his work and sold it under the name cherryos
Your comment takes me back to a time when there was a blogger named "DrunkenBatman". Seems like ages ago now.
I miss DrunkenBatman...
I used to regularly check for years after he stopped posting, just in case...
The last it was active was in 2019, then it disappeared forever.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191007180901/http://www.drunke...
This is an interesting tale, because Drunkenbatman ducked out of public view after he gave a speech at the C4 conference which we would now call “woke”. He called everyone in the room racists because there weren’t many bl*ck Apple customers or developers, and in 2007, you were allowed to disagree with such ideas.
https://redsweater.com/blog/383/drunkenbatman-is-not-a-racis...
Sorry for your loss.
Loss indeed, he was barely 23.[0]
[0] https://www.macwelt.de/article/931666/pear-pc-entwickler-toe...
This article is behind a paywall.
http://archive.today/idiYg
Only goes on one more sentence. :-/
> Infinite Mac is a collection of classic Macintosh and NeXT system releases and software, all easily accessible from the comfort of a web browser.
https://infinitemac.org/
Thank you! The blog post really should hyperlink or define "Infinite Mac" so it stands on its own.
The first link in the post links to the infinite MAC website which explains itself.
There's no need to yell when saying Mac
Save it for something that matters. See also: FED and GIT.
I blame autocorrect there. Sorry.
And without knowing that in advance I’d have assumed that link would have been to a commit or PR.
A link to a project is useful, but a succinct description of a project can be far more helpful. Something like, “tl;dr: Infinite Mac (the software for running classic Mac and NextStep in your browser) can now run…”
Ah I'm glad you linked to this page - it's brilliant!
Big oversight by the blog writer. Without your comment I'd never have found this amazing site.
One of the most intriguing items in the article is a link to a PPC CPU emulator in less than 700 lines of code:
https://github.com/kwhr0/macemu/blob/master/SheepShaver/src/...
You see that kind of succinctness in 6502 emulators, not usually relatively modern architectures.
It's a RISC, so that's not too surprising. MIPS emulators are also roughly that size.
On the other hand, depending on the generation, PowerPC can have a whopping number of instructions.
Yes, POWER is an acronym for Power Optimization With Enhanced RISC. There are some wild instructions like cntlzd and lwarx that are more CISC-esque, and everybody’s favorite instruction (by name), eieio
Obscure data point of the day; McDonalds is a small but long-standing real estate company in a provincial city in New Zealand. Their website address? eieio.co.nz
There was an ISA I saw a while back that featured an "enhanced multiply and accumulate signed" instruction, which of course got the mnemonic "EMACS"
PowerPC has ‘Enforce In-Order Execution of I/O’ (eieio).
Could it be that they just wanted to call it POWER. And then "Enhanced" RISC made the acronym possible?
At what point have you enhanced your RISC architecture to the point where it becomes CISC?
Unless you're making it possible to access memory on every instruction that takes an argument, or adding more addressing modes that are redundant with ALU operations, or making registers that can only be used for one purpose, etc., it's not really turning into CISC. The acronyms are misnomers, or maybe you just need to think of what's being "reduced" as the number of micro-ops per high-level instruction. Regardless, you don't turn RISC into CISC just by adding more instructions.
It's true, but it's the encoding that makes this wordy or simple to emulate.
PowerPC is a trimmed down subset of the POWER architecture.
The latter has a higher number of instructions, and a POWER CPU can execute the generic PowerPC code but not vice versa (unless compiled for the common set of instructions).
I can't imagine what it would feel like to be a 20 year old tech enthusiast today confronted with OS X 10.4 (or .5 or .6)
In my bitterness, it makes me think of someone in the Dark Ages, standing before a Classical sculpture: "how was it that humanity was once capable of such works?"
But tastes change. In the Dark Ages, what they actually thought was probably "what heathen decadence is this?", and today maybe they think "photo-realistic icons: cringe!"
10.4 looks and behaves basically the same as ... whatever is the latest macOS version. (I stopped caring about macOS versions few years ago) even with Liquid Glass it still behaves similarly.
The app installation is still the same "ikea dmg app dragging", and occasional zip or pkg. The Finder window already has bookmarks in the left bar. The dock behaves identically. (They went through their weird 3D dock phase but that was... Leopard? I think?)
There is no Mac App Store but barely anyone uses this nowadays anyway... Spotlight... was new in Tiger.
It is much more recognisable than Windows XP vs 11. XP behaves very differently to 11!
The behavior hasn't changed radically, but it has changed. In most cases the differences diminish the OS. Eg: scrollbars hide themselves, multi-select options don't work everywhere, dragging window icons requires more steps, etc...
Re: looks, they are admittedly subjective. To my eyes, the difference between the Mac today, and the old Mac, is night and day.
Every Mac OS, starting with 10.7, has visual elements that strike me as sloppy or ugly. The link below has many screenshots from OS X 10.6; I find every element attractive, right down to the last pixel.
https://morrick.me/archives/9220
Sure but the question was "would user of modern macOS recognise Tiger" and he mostly would. Also user of Tiger could go to latest macOS without problems...
I mostly agree with criticisms of modern macOS, especially how it moves randomly closer to iOS, but one thing I disagree is the new Settings. It's still ugly as sin, but it's overall easier to use because everything is uniform (not each panel being its own special snowflake), and MUCH easy to search for. I used to hate it at first, but I got used to it.
But yeah macOS is obviously second fiddle now.
Now I remember, a lot of the Mac apps back then had this weird "side panel" thing where side panel went "out" of the window. I don't know the precise name of the pattern, but that would be probably the most confusing thing.
Oh also the + button didn't do full screen as today, but... it did... something. I never understood the point of the + button.
Re the side panel, you're probably thinking of "Drawers".
Here's a screenshot https://www.oreilly.com/api/v2/epubs/0596003706/files/tagore...
Yes, that exactly! They used to be common in 10.4 days.
> Oh also the + button didn't do full screen as today, but... it did... something. I never understood the point of the + button.
When I first came from Windows I was confused about this as well, but once I got the hang of it, it became the most logical thing to me.
The green + button zoomed the window to the minimum window size that showed the full content. (For example, one page in a word processor or one slide in presentation software.)
That functionality was adopted from Classic Mac OS, and I loved it. Too bad this isn't properly supported any more.
Hold down Option and the <> in the green circle for full screen will turn into a + for maximize.
You can also double click the title bar in most applications for the same effect.
It's called "maximize". You can get the + back by pressing Option while clicking the green circle.
Double clicking the title bar in many applications will also maximize the window.
It didn't maximize! It sometimes shrank the window! And in case of iTunes it changed the window entirely!
If the window is already maximized, the button should "restore" it to the previous smaller size. Unless you're describing something different?
I'm 20, and I vaguely remember using 10.5 or 10.6 when I was a young child, so nostalgia I guess?
I had nostalgia for the original Macintosh GUI, whose look was similar to 'flat design'.
> n my bitterness, it makes me think of someone in the Dark Ages, standing before a Classical sculpture: "how was it that humanity was once capable of such works?"
What do you mean by "Dark Ages"? I do not think there was a loss of ability, but a difference in what an empire spends vs what independent kingdoms spent on. There are many beautiful artifacts and buildings from the early middle ages. A lot will not have survived, but there is some that has - things like the Sutton Hoo ship burial to Anglo Saxon churches (just drawing on things I have seen myself).
Opinion among historians has shifted on whether the Dark Ages were so dark, but "Dark Ages" evokes what I wanted re: GUIs.
Started out as a developer in the 10.4/10.5 days. Mostly coz I was messing around with trying to get stuff to run in a semi-darkmode :) and theming things. Messing about in the system folder wasn't as complicated back then
The screenshots... wow!
To me, Mac OS X looks so much better than todays Mac OS. It looks clear and orderly and I feel like "Great in this environment I can get some work done!".
Current Mac OS feels like "Help, I fell into a sack of candies, how do I get out of here?" to me.
Does anybody else feel like that?
I feel like I'm becoming a fan of old gray interfaces (win 95, macos 9). They feel like tools to me, like a calculator is just a tool, and it's comforting.
The true pinnacle of grey button interfaces to me is Minesweeper.
> Does anybody else feel like that?
Honestly, no; the parts of the UI that I see and work with are limited to the menu bar (just flat text, no embellishments), three dots and sometimes the Spotlight bar but I don't actively look at it unless it's slow. Same thing with Windows. I never work with the OS and rarely with native apps, it's all browser based and/or crossplatform applications that use third party design systems.
Sad part is there's really no reason they couldn't offer this look & feel in modern MacOS, except for the obvious reason (poorly designed software that lacks modularity). I'm tired of pretending that software companies are remotely good at software.
My favourite one is 10.3 Panther with the mix of aqua and brushed metal. 10.4 Tiger is similar but it has a glossy top menu bar that didn’t age well in my opinion. 10.5 Leopard has the fancy cheesy 3D dock, transparent top menu bar, and the more modern gradients. It looked great at the time but gradients aren’t as cool as brushed metal and aqua.
Everything after is a bit boring.
Panther was peak OS X. Spotlight, in Tiger, was amazing, but Tiger’s performance was significantly worse.
If only someone could back-port Quick Look into Panther! I didn't realize how much I use that feature as I spammed the spacebar in these emulators.
I'm pretty sure Quicksilver was around in the Panther era. It was great to have Spotlight built in, but Quicksilver was incredible.
The striping on the windows was a little much and I was pretty happy when they removed that.
yes, i wish we could choose themes from the past to use in modern macs
I had the same reaction looking at the screenshots. Sure it could use a new coat a paint (maybe not _everything_ needs to be gray) but the foundation is fantastically usable.
Yep. My friend texted me during the keynote with “I don’t want liquid glass. I want brushed metal.”
Surprising that he had success with a project (pearpc) that had its last commit 10+ years ago: https://github.com/sebastianbiallas/pearpc
His fork is at https://github.com/mihaip/pearpc
I suppose it retains x86-64 support despite adding a webassembly target.
Edit: he also blogged about adding NextStep to Infinite Mac: https://blog.persistent.info/2024/03/infinite-mac-nextstep.h...
I love things like this. Aqua was such a revelation at the time.
Every Linux WM had an aqua theme. Apple delivered an OS that the “year of the Linux desktop” folk had been (and still are) trying to deliver for years.
A mainstream Unix with all the usability for your grandmother supported by all big 3rd party apps as well. Home run.
> Apple delivered an OS that the “year of the Linux desktop” folk had been (and still are) trying to deliver for years.
Indeed.
I figured this out on the day in 2003 when I first tried out OS X. I've been using Linux since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. I'd used Mac OS 7 and 8 in college and hated it,[1] but OS X was a revelation.
I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period.
(I wrote the above on Slashdot in 2012 <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2940345&cid=40457103>. I see no need for changes.)
[1] People who never used pre-Unix MacOS have no idea how unreliable it was. Windows 95 and 98 weren't great, but there was at least some hope of killing an errant application and continuing on. System 7? No hope whatsoever. It didn't help that Mosaic (and Netscape) wasn't very reliable regardless of platform, but the OS's own failings made things that much worse.
100% agree on the unreliability of older Mac OS. In the late 90s my university computer room offered a mix of Mac and Windows machines, and I only ever took a Mac if that was all that was free, because there was a good chance it would at some point show you a sad Mac face alongside a cutesy and uninformative crash message, while losing the essay you’d half-written (or, hopefully, only the unsaved changes).
Liquid Glass feels like a reprisal of all the visual garishness of Aqua with none of the usability lessons. Aqua was good because it could be learned quickly, it made a lot of sense to copy back then.
Apple's current design language is sterile, but at least it's easy to read. The modern design trends are just a series of downgrades in usability, arguably continuing since System 7. Somehow, it looks like "overlapping low-contrast window content" has become the haute couture of UX, much to the dismay of grandmas everywhere.
Personally I found System 7.6/Mac OS 8’s Platinum to be a step up in usability compared to System 7 and before. The light mid-gray it used in most of its UI was pleasant and easier on the eyes than the stark white that made up the majority of the original Mac UI, but it was still plenty legible.
The System 7.0 UI appearance - before Platinum - was a mess. It was little more than a partially colorized version of the monochrome System 6 user interface; in fact, it mostly fell back to the System 6 appearance on machines with monochrome displays, like the (brand-new in 1991!) PowerBook series.
In a certain sense, Platinum was an attempt to reinterpret what Mac OS could have looked like if it had always been designed for a color display. It didn't just add color, like System 7.0 had; it added depth and texture to the interface which wasn't practical to display before. It also added a ton of new controls to the toolkit which previously didn't have standardized implementations or appearances. (For instance, System 7.0 didn't have a standard progress bar control - every application which used one had to provide their own implementation.)
> arguably continuing since System 7
A downward trend since 1991?
It’s fair to say that design has moved on in the last 34 years. Totally subjective whether you think it’s all been for the better. But macOS is self-evidently more usable now than it was then; a lot more people are using it. I imagine fairly few of them would be happy if Apple decided to abandon this Liquid Glass idea and return to System 7 design instead.
Along the same line of logic we could argue that Windows became more usable since XP because more computers have it installed. Computer demand is an extenuating factor that doesn't really reflect the quality of UX design.
Most people definitely find Windows 11 easier to use than XP, yes. That’s what the comically large click targets and icons are for.
Okay, now argue your point. How does the install-base of a computer system possibly reflect the quality of it's UX on a timescale as large as 30 years?
There were plenty of Kaleidoscope schemes and Appearance Manager themes for those with Macs who liked Aqua but either couldn’t or didn’t want to upgrade to OS X yet. There were some interesting “remixes” of Aqua too, including one that gave it BeOS-like tab titlebars!
There was even one Aqua scheme that through some feat of wizardry managed to give menus soft, 32-bit transparency drop shadows just like OS X had. I have no idea how that worked, classic Mac OS itself was only capable of 1-bit transparency as far as I'm aware.
The classic Mac OS (Toolbox) menu routine took over exclusive use of the machine when it was tracking the mouse in the menu - all multitasking stopped running.
So an extension could draw whatever fancy effect it wanted when the menu was down without worrying about a background application drawing over it (drawing over the transparency) as long you made sure to restore what was beneath when the menu was let go.
There were extensions that got around this, though. iTunes for the classic Mac OS (and I'm pretty sure SoundJam before it) could continue to play music with a menu open, for example.
Yeah you could do things like set timer interrupts, and starting in somewhere like MacOS 8.6 there was an actual multitasking (and multi-CPU) nanokernel running beneath everything that allowed you to schedule tasks in a more modern way.
But those tended to have some pretty gnarly limitations (like I think in interrupts you can't allocate memory) so AFAIK they were only used for stuff like real-time audio, I dunno if anyone ever used those to do screen drawing, so in practice I can't think of anything that would interfere with menu drawing.
No, Quickdraw in 7.5 and higher (maybe before) supported 8 bit alpha channels. Classic MacOS didn't have a compositor, so redrawing windows was constant and expensive and I guess this was why they didn't do soft drop shadows.
This is my new favorite comment.
“ Every Linux WM had an aqua theme. Apple delivered an OS that the “year of the Linux desktop” folk had been (and still are) trying to deliver for years.”
It perfectly captures more than two decades of work in a couple sentences.
IMO this is the part that hits harder:
> A mainstream Unix with all the usability for your grandmother supported by all big 3rd party apps as well.
> The operating system is another concept that is curious. Operating systems are dauntingly complex and totally unnecessary. It’s a brilliant thing that Bill Gates has done in selling the world on the notion of operating systems. It’s probably the greatest con game the world has ever seen... An operating system does absolutely nothing for you. As long as you had something—a subroutine called disk driver, a subroutine called some kind of communication support, in the modern world, it doesn’t do anything else.
- Chuck Moore, interview in "Masterminds of Programming", 2009
I love this quote, but the Mac OS showed a benefit Moore completely missed: an OS can gave a uniform appearance to every bit of software on a machine, giving the impression of hardware and software meant for each other. I think there's a psychological effect that benefits work efficiency and pleasure in using the machine. It's also undoubtedly been a great selling point for Apple in particular. Agreed Aqua was a high-water mark with this.
Of course, the downside is that the OS rules the day, so your choice of software quickly falls into a very small selection based on what OS you'd like. FOSS (or at least open source) tried to run around that, but for anything not purely command line it's very difficult to just pass around source and adapt it to wherever and whatever you'd like.
Lastly, for the past decade or more we've seen the browser take the place of the OS in this. There are quite a few downsides to that approach, especially the loss of the impression of a unified product build for the end user. But the house of cards / tower of babel continues to grow...if you'll excuse me I'll go back to my 7400-series logic now...
It's such a stupid quote. In fact, it's almost in the realm of "not even wrong".
The operating system (as in: a kernel) provides applications with an abstraction of the computer that allows applications to co-exist.
The "operating system" (as in: a desktop environment) provides users with a unified approach to design, interaction and cooperation.
We don't write applications to run on bare metal any more (or rather, very, very few people do), because that's neither desirable or cost-effective.
That "subroutine called a disk driver" is just ridiculous. Any modern computing device has more than one process that needs to write to the disk; the machinery that allows them all to do that without stepping on each other's toes is called an operating system (kernel).
> It's such a stupid quote
I disagree. Even though we've added layers of abstraction even since then, the quote still reminds me to think "what are we really doing here?" Apart from arguing if it is crazy or genius, I will say it has broadened my mind and for that I'm very thankful.
> The "operating system" (as in: a desktop environment) provides users with a unified approach to design, interaction and cooperation.
I do stand corrected with that: desktop environment, not OS.
> Any modern computing device has more than one process that needs to write to the disk; the machinery that allows them all to do that without stepping on each other's toes...
I agree, but I'll also point out that in the end I, as the end user, only want one specific thing written to disk at a time - the word document, excel sheet, game state, etc. The vast majority of disk writes are supporting the abstractions that support the abstractions that support the abstractions that support me saving my word document. I understand why that is the case, but I still think it's amusing.
> in the end I, as the end user, only want one specific thing written to disk at a time
so you're in some sort of text editor, and you think that's all you want written to disk at a time.
but meanwhile, you've got a messaging app running somewhere, and messages are coming in, and you'd like to have a local copy of those for performance reasons, so they're being written to disk.
you've got an RSS reader running, which just found out about a new posting somewhere; it's going to write it to disk so it can tell you about it at any time.
your media control panel - you just adjusted that because the piece of music you're listening to is a bit loud, and you expect it to remember the current setting the next time you restart, which means ... write to disk. and the music player itself - that's going to write to disk so that it knows where you were in the playlist next time.
and so on and so forth.
the idea of a computer being a device on which you run one program at a time vanished before MS-DOS even existed.
And I never understood that as it wasn't remotely good looking with what I would call "unnecessary scan lines" in the windows background and those pills like button only made me think of being in an hospital.
But maybe I am the only one who didn't dig this look. The later brushed metal from panther and tiger was much more interesting but it would have looked better without the aqua styled sliders.
Exactly
Aqua is still a revelation. We've taken a huge step back in being able to just identify window controls. My hope is that some of that comes back with Liquid Glass, but honestly, Aqua still looks great.
What all the copy cats missed (Windows Vista, Linux themes) is how consistent and usable everything was. It looked great, but better than that, it worked great.
Mac OS design at the time was so good that I switched from Windows to Mac and never went back. Been over 20 years now.
Now I find myself frustrated with Mac OS quite often, but the competition is so bad that I'm just kind of stuck.
I loved the "stripy" windows. Things lining up perfectly on the horizontal stripes were somehow so visually pleasing.
I tried to replicate this look in my Java Swing UI using a commercial Aqua-like look&feel, but got hit by issues with controls rendering their own background, resulting in stripes being misaligned.
I was so disappointed when Apple phased it out later.
> So this is the architecture, except there’s one more thing. The one more thing is, we have been secretly for the last 18 months designing a completely new user interface. And that new user interface builds on Apple’s legacy and carries it into the next century. And we call that new user interface Aqua, because it’s liquid. One of the design goals was when you saw it, you wanted to lick it.
Steve Jobs
> Aqua was such a revelation at the time.
Liquid Glass seems to hearken back to that era...
I am so glad that we seem to be starting to crawl out of the minimalist local minimum.
The one thing that I remember about Aqua, was what it did to performance.
Before OSX was released, we were seeded prerelease copies, but with the original System 7 UI.
It was really fast.
When the first Aqua release came out, the performance dropped like a stone.
That sounds like Rhapsody/Mac OS X Server (which would have been Platinum). And it is, indeed, quite snappy. I have it on a Wallstreet G3 and it runs very well.
The aqua interface first shipped in Mac OS X Developer Preview 3. So they could be referring to DP2 which had a platinum like interface but was released after Apple had moved on from the rhapsody concept.
That sounds about right.
It was a while ago, so my memory is fuzzy.
The slowdown was probably the switch from Display PostScript to Quartz.
A quarter century of Moore's Law smashes that from "small problem" to "utterly nonexistent problem."
Oh looky looky some of my fondly-remembered UIs: Platinum circa Macintosh OS 8. MacOS X lickables refined circa 10.3, 10.4.
I also fondly recall OpenLook on SunOS/Slowlaris and NeXTStep/OpenStep UIs and peak Microsoft Windows right on 2000 before the playskool never-ever-mix-orange-and-green Winblows XP. IRIX and plenty of Motif-esque joy on SGI.
UI elements were almost always distinct, understandable, consistent. If I was to actuate a standard UI control, I always knew exactly what I expected to happen before, and it happened exactly as I expected after.
Making them customized, themable, replaceable, more cool, well, that's what we have today, kind of in exchange I suppose..
Dark Castle!
Dad had an Apple Lisa when I was young. Apple kindly gave it to him as he was developing an accountancy suite for Apple.
I took this incredible machine for granted, and only used it for games and MacPaint at the time. Among Dad's collection of 3.5" disks was one labelled "Dark Castle." For reasons I don't recall, it wouldn't work on the Lisa, but I guessed it was a game, and it killed me that I couldn't play it. I was beguiled by this mysterious disk.
Well fast forward to 2025... I just launched the Infinite Mac System 7 emulator https://infinitemac.org/1991/System%207.0
My heart skipped a beat. Inside the "Games" folder - there it is! Dark Castle.
Three decades later, I'm finally able to play this game!
The graphics are charming. Elements of a Sierra classic, Kings Quest, and some Prince of Persia too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Castle
That's my evening sorted!
Those early OS X years were a real golden age for the Mac - the hardware was quite competitive with x86, and the OS was as good as it's ever been. Eventually the wheels started coming off both.
We're in a second golden age of hardware, so I can dream that maybe one day soon Mac OS will be amazing again.
(Despite the new hardware golden age, the emulation performance here is pretty close to unusable on an M1 with Safari, unfortunately.)
I've been Thinking Different™ly from 68k->PPC->Intel->Silicon. The two greatest performance increases have been the two most recent CPU updates, in both raw and per-watt metrics.
The entry-level, basic-bitch M4 mini is incredible... the entire computer uses less than just a comparable-performing x86's GPU.
>Mac OS will be amazing again.
I don't think it's even heading in that direction.
I had one of the early x86 models.
Competitive in price it was not, and osx wasn't as good as you think it was. Kernel panics were a daily thing, and segmentation faults of quicktime while watching videos.
Reproducing file formats like wmv or divx was a quest in finding and installing the correct codec.
Also overheating, because to make it pretty they didn't add vents for the air to flow.
I'm talking about pre-x86. I don't recall any kernel panics or segfaults when I used a G4 Power Mac back in the day; it was certainly more stable than the Windows 98 PC I was coming from.
Windows 2000 and then XP were already a thing at the time and much more stable than win 98.
The early x86 Macs (Core Solo, Core Duo CPU, etc) were pretty bad. I have one of the x86 Mac Minis from 2006 around somewhere.
The Core2Duo were the first Intel Macs worth a hoot. IIRC, you could get this CPU in the white MacBook, along with an education discount and iPod rebate.
I rocked dual Xenons until early 2023's M2Pro mini (the energy savings are substantial, with minimal GPU performance degredation).
It's the age old problem: hardware giveth performance, software taketh away.
> It’s not particularly snappy, but as someone who lived through that period, I can tell you that it wasn’t much better on real hardware
As a Hackintosh user around ~2008, I can only second that. It adds even more to the realism that it's just as sluggish as it was on my computer back then. Luckily I didn't have to wait ~24 hours for installation to finish.
Oh what lengths I went through, just to be able to build some crappy Apps for my iPod Touch back then.
I went through several sections of the article and I am still none the wiser about what this project is. Is it a software emulator? If so, on which platforms does it run? How do I download it? Or is it a hardware device? The article jumps right into the middle of things and bombards the reader with jargon without explaining anything for the HN user like me, who just stumbled upon the link on the home page and is trying to understand the project.
It's a website that has compiled existing open source emulators that are capable of running old versions of MacOS and NeXTStep, to WebAssembly so they run inside a modern browser.
They have paired that with disk images of these OSes and a lot of tweaking, so that when you go to the website, you select the version of the OS you want to play with, and _it just runs_ in the browser.
Instant old Mac/NeXT experience, no separate download or software to install.
Thank you! It is clear now.
I think this is one of the things that makes systemd popular. A consequence of it being such a baseline of cross-cutting functionality is it necessarily goes against the classic unix philosophy.
Wrong thread.
launchd, which inspired systemd, was an artifact of Mac OS X in this era. But yes, the post is probably just in the wrong thread.
I think upstart inspired systemd :) And cgroups support in the linux kernel. Does osx have a comparable thing to cgroups?
systemd is allowed to have multiple inspirations. launchd 1.0 was a noted inspiration for systemd.
Yeah, whoops