One thing that I still miss from the system 7 area is an OS where the system folder is simple and accessible, with readable full text folders. Installing a driver was a simple as moving a single, self contained, extension file to the extensions folder. Uninstalling was moving it out. You could observe the full state of the system and manipulate it.
I miss it as well. Mac OS 7 was awesome in it's simplicity. I also thought maintaining the machine was pretty simple in case there was some driver issue. Just do a kind-of safe boot (by pressing shift on start-up IIRC) which would disable all extensions and control panels. And then one could try to disable all or some extensions during the next start-up and see if that would solve the issue. All in all it worked rather well and that was pretty much all there was to managing the system.
Though nowadays I would miss having a decent terminal. Perhaps A/UX [0] was decent, but I never tried that.
Yes, and I really miss the classic Mac OS finder with its spatial metaphor. Icons stayed where you left them, every window remembered its position, shape, size, view settings, etc. You could recognize, at a glance, what folder a window belonged to based on these strong visual cues, without needing to read any of the text on the screen.
For anyone reading who never used a spatial desktop before, it's kind of difficult to describe how good it was. There is this incredible feeling of solidity, reliability, etc. Things don't move around behind your back; everything is right where you left it. I miss it so much!
Surely, such file browser can't be that hard to develop as a user space application, right? I mean there are explorer alternatives on windows, a plethora of GUI file browsers on linux, and I have no idea but I can only assume there's at least one finder alternative on mac. I wonder why this hasn't been done yet.
For a while nautilus had this, I believe it was referred to as "spacial mode". It wasn't popular and eventually it was dropped. Which was a shame because as a former Mac user I was really excited by the idea. I think though that I have a much different relationship with my files and folders across a dozen computers these days than I did back when I only had one Mac desktop... if nothing else there are a lot more of them and in a way I guess I feel less "ownership" of my storage. And so I am less interested in keeping things nearly organized. And modern operating systems have much better search features which means that careful file organization is less important too.
Why wouldn't you when developers have the opinion that their way is the right way to do things and you're retarded if you don't let their software organize your life for you? No comrade, you can't install software directly from the vendor! You must use almighty package-manager and hope The People have deigned that software worthy of inclusion in the repo. If you're lucky it might only be a few versions out of date! You don't actually want icons on your desktop, just use the application menu we built for you. Our AI assistant will choose an appropriate time to automatically install OS updates and reboot your machine, citizen. If it does so in the middle of your work or when you really need to use it, that's your fault for not training it well enough!
The reason the old Mac Finder worked was its ruthless consistency. The new macOS finder occasionally opens windows with a toolbar or with the wrong view or in the wrong location or the wrong size. As soon as that happens the illusion is broken.
The current Finder has both a spacial mode and a browser mode. Unfortunately, the two modes step on each other's toes, making both modes worse. It's been a problem since OS X 10.0, and it persists today.
E.g.:
Navigating around in browser mode clobbers the existing folder view state (window size and position, view mode, etc.). So your folders always seem to lose their view state.
And there's no way to set a preferred browser window size. Instead, it always uses the spacial mode window size and if there is none it uses the hard coded default window size, which is way too small. And, again, as you browse around it clobbers the existing window sizes of other folders.
Create a new folder on the desktop, then double click. You'll get that tiny default browser window. Now navigate up to your home folder. You just clobbered your preferred home folder window size.
The end result is that when you open a Finder window, you never know what you're going to get.
A distinct difference in behavior is that OS X+ Finder has the ability to view the same folder in multiple windows, which is a necessity if you're going to keep the miller column view.
Classic Mac OS Finder did not allow this. Every time you opened a new folder, a new window would open. If you navigated to a folder already open, the previous window would jump to the front. That's how spatial Finder worked so well. It's difficult to combine both these patterns. It's one of the reasons people felt Mac OS "just worked" without necessarily being able to elaborate as to why.
Seems inefficient though, these days I really only navigate with Spotlight. Just hit the key command, type what I’m looking for, and hit enter. I don’t like navigating through any finder-like UI to access my files.
One thing Adi Robertson at The Verge said about Magic Leap is that she put things down... and then forgot where she put them! The limited FOV means you have to be basically looking right at something to see it.
Right? We've come a long way in the technology and the OS underpinnings, but in terms of having these kinds of simple abstractions that are easy to reason about and manipulate we have regressed significantly.
Compare the System 7 OS installation procedure to any modern OS. In System 7, you format the disk, then you copy the System folder to it. That's it. Compare application installation. In System 7, you copy the application folder to the disk. That's it.
What the hell is wrong with all the people developing OSs these days? Do they just fetishize complexity? Do they just have too much contempt and condescension for users? It makes me loathe computing as an industry.
> Right? We've come a long way in the technology and the OS underpinnings, but in terms of having these kinds of simple abstractions that are easy to reason about and manipulate we have regressed significantly.
> Compare the System 7 OS installation procedure to any modern OS. In System 7, you format the disk, then you copy the System folder to it. That's it. Compare application installation. In System 7, you copy the application folder to the disk. That's it.
> What the hell is wrong with all the people developing OSs these days? Do they just fetishize complexity? Do they just have too much contempt and condescension for users? It makes me loathe computing as an industry.
Bullshit. There is no reason at all that these things cannot be done today, we simply choose not to make it so simple. Portable applications are reasonably common on Windows, MacOS still uses Application Bundles, even Linux has AppImage, and those work pretty much just like applications did on System 7, yet so many developers insist on using broken installers, or needlessly complicated package management systems. There is no reason that bootloaders can't just look for a directory to boot the system from, even present the user a graphical menu to choose between the ones it found. FFS, UEFI can run a browser or NES emulator.
It's probably part "complexity fetish" (ie you are not a real programmer or computer whiz unless you live and die in a teletype emulator). The other problem is that a couple of generations of developers are now out in the world who have never experienced these systems.
Part of that is probably laziness, it’s hard work to keep things simple, it requires to enforce a lot of discipline, to redesign things frequently, etc.
I think also increasingly there is the view that users shouldn’t even be aware of these things. If you grew up on iOS, you have never even seen a filesystem, let alone an OS directory structure.
Yes I agree. It's hard work. You'd think a trillion dollar personal computing company like Apple would put in that work.
As for hiding things from users, what we need are good metaphors (ideally layered atop one another). You want users to be able to peel back one layer if they can't do everything they need. Things like spreadsheets and hypercard started getting there, but personal computing went the entirely opposite direction.
>Yes I agree. It's hard work. You'd think a trillion dollar personal computing company like Apple would put in that work.
As a whole I think software dev culture has tilted a little too far in the direction of developer convenience. It’s our job to make the lives of our users easier, but it’s also very easy to fall into the trap of settling for “good enough”, which leads to the production of software that in reality is just barely hanging on the edge of “good enough”. To hit the moon you need to shoot for the stars so to speak, and as of late we’ve barely even been shooting for the mountaintops.
And in many ways, docker style containers are an ugly way around not having a clean and modernized format for applications, which in the spirit of MacOS' extensions should really be a single self contained file, with a declaration of its dependencies and privileges required. Instead of that we have to package a whole OS image when building a container to go around the millions of ugly inter-dependencies between the components of the OS and the app.
Recently I've come to believe that you don't need "applications" at all, but rather components that can be put together every which way. OpenDoc was sort of like that and something like a smalltalk system is also sort of like that.
Either way, these *nix style operating systems are not great for personal computer users. They can either interact with their machines as pure consumers (app level) or learn a full blown programming language and the ins and outs of the OS. There's nothing in between. It's like having zoology and quantum physics, but without biology, chemistry, etc in the middle.
Yeah. But there is a case for keeping it simple even for professional / server stuff. I mean the success of python is the best illustration. It's a dog by any metric but it allows to keep things simple, which has a lot of value in itself. Developer and IT people have enough complexity dealing with their domain not having to add the complexity of their tools to that.
Shared libraries are the real difficulty. If your SSL library patches a security vulnerability, you generally want any program that uses that SSL library to be immune.
Not a problem, something as fundamental as SSL should be part of the OS's provided library set that you can depend on being there so you don't have to include it in your self contained application.
There's no reason to have all this complicated crap so that you don't have 2 copies of 200k libsomebullshit.so.
You could argue the same about many other libraries, like all of the basic data structures and algorithm libraries, string libraries, time and date handling, nowadays machine learning, etc.
The installation environment for Windows has always been overly complicated, error-prone and fragile, and a danger to system stability. There have been numerous cases of app uninstallers getting DLL reference counting wrong and destroying a Windows instance because they removed a critical component or deleted an "unused" registry entry. One workstation I'm running now has some software that cannot be uninstalled; the installers just say "sorry, something bad happened" and that's it -- it's a practical impossibility to manually remove the packages, and in one case it involves clobbering tens of thousands of registry entries.
I wrote apps and drivers for MacOS 6/7 and early Windows; there was really no comparison in sophistication between the two systems. MacOS's approach was simple, elegant and worked well, while Windows' was baroque, poorly documented, and generally a very bad experience in terms of debugging and having confidence it would work in the field (I'm not talking about writing the apps or drivers themselves, just installing them).
There's absolutely no good reason for the current state of affairs on Windows other than an initial bad design that Microsoft chose to carry forward as architecture. (Read the INF file format documentation, it's a horrorshow).
On the bottom it says "SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)" which lists 3 different MacOS 7 versions for me. YMMV, but probably you'll be able to find those as well.
That doesn't really jibe with the fact that it was based on Carbon (which of course didn't exist in NeXTSTEP) until Snow Leopard, so I don't think it's true.
It is true. The functionality of the macOS Finder is based on the NeXTSTEP file manager. You are talking about the API with which Finder was programmed for. Carbon was introduced for programmers to transition to Mac OS X.
It adopted features from the OPENSTEP file manager (column view, inspector vs Get Info) but I doubt shared much if any code with it. It was written in Carbon and IIRC built with CodeWarrior (at least at first)
This takes me back. 6.0.8 was the last version of the Macintosh System and Finder that I really loved.
System 6 did support color as well as larger screens, and I fondly remember phonebook sized white gloss books called Inside Macintosh. This _was_ Stack Overflow at the time. You had to crack a manual or know somebody if you got stuck.
Before even Xcode's progenitor Metrowerks CodeWarrior came along, Symantec Think C was my favorite coding environment. Microsoft Basic was a thing, as was Hypercard.
System 7 was ushered in with Inside Mac volume VI, a boat anchor of a paperback (never seen another this heavy) that threw everything akilter.
I look at the Macintosh SE on the shelf (no 30) and look forward to firing it up again. Hope its caps and hard drive haven't died. System 7 was basically unusable on the 68000's- too dog slow, and virtual memory was just a bad tradeoff. There's a kind of "snappy" about the old single threaded Mac that newer computers just can't pull off.
Does anyone else feel that these interfaces now look a lot less dated than they did five years ago (as we move away from skeuomorphic designs toward more flat, functional designs)?
Might be nostalgia speaking, but I recall as a youngter crawling every folder to figure out what the heck each thing did. Without the internet or search engine, I resorted to reading text files, manuals, etc.
Classic Mac OS was where I had a lot of my initial experience with conputing, so I'm excited to see that the fine folks at the internet archive have turned their attention to it.
