This shows a Macintosh Plus running System 7.0.1. The computer could actually run versions up to 7.5.5 – an OS that came out in 1996. That’s quite amazing, given the Plus was released in 1986.
Try running Windows 8 or OS X Mavericks on a 10 year old computer.
That's insane to me. While people were using Win95 in 1996, full color, 3D games (Duke Nukem 3D), etc Macs were still in the dark ages with 7.5 and 8.
This was around the time I was in college. I went to a big ugly state school and a close friend went to a fancy private school. In my school, we only had PCs available for general student use. At his school, it was Mac-only with everyone got their own Mac in their dorms. It felt like we were back in the 80s with the tiny screens and the antiquated OS. A newer version of the same OS I used in elementary school when my parents bought a Mac 512k.
The labs at that school did have the newer color macs, which were nice, but were a minority there.
Incredible how long apple put off the move to a new platform. I guess 1999 wasn't too far off, but for a long while, owning a mac seemed like a step backward.
Contrary to what you seem to be suggesting, in 1996 Macs ran full color 3D games, could use large screens, and they were known for its graphics – remember that MYST was made on Macs. System 7.5 was a great OS, it just didn’t have the modern features that Win95 had (protected memory, preemptive multitasking.) Also, let’s not forget that before the release of Windows95, the Mac’s OS was way more advanced. We’re talking about a rough patch of 3 years.
Because XP was feature competitive and there wasn't much market pressure to do so, unlike OS7,8 from that era.
This is quickly becoming a OS war, but I think its uncontroversial to say that the few years before OSX showed us an Apple that couldn't compete and was selling products that were substandard and overpriced. 95-99 was pretty rough.
I would say 1995 to 1997 were the dark days. Not because MacOS wasn’t working well (even though its aging architecture did mean it needed to be replaced someday.) Apple’s problem was one of focus. They had too many product lines, too many managers, and too many mediocre sales locations.
Steve Jobs’ return to the company changed all that. He killed most projects and fired a lot of people (after Gil Amelio had already done his fair share of firing.) Apple released great products again far before Mac OS X came out. The iMac was introduced in May 1998.
I don't believe that Windows 95 have protected memory or preemptive multitasking. That came in with the NT versions of Windows. I switched to Windows in 97 when NT 4 came out. The Mac OS was definitely lagging behind NT around that time period.
“Microsoft made preemptive multitasking a core feature of their flagship operating system in the early 1990s when developing Windows NT 3.1 and then Windows 95. It was later adopted on the Apple Macintosh by Mac OS 9.x” [1]
You’re right about Win95 (and Win98 and ME) not having true memory protection, but when comparing MacOS and Windows back then MacOS’ lack of memory protection was always mentioned.
Tiny screens weren't a requirement. 14", 16", and 21" color displays were available since 1992, with resolutions of 640x480, 832x624, and 1152x870. A 1987 Mac II supported up to 6 displays, forming a single desktop. Not too shabby, eh?
However, the OS was behind the times, lacking memory protection and preemptive multitasking. It is incredible how much wasted effort went into Pink, Taligent, and Copland...
> It is incredible how much wasted effort went into Pink, Taligent, and Copland...
Indeed. I remember reading Robert X. Cringely's book "Accidental Empires" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires) back at that time, and in one chapter he looked over the Pink/Taligent/Copland debacle and predicted that no company would ever write a general-purpose operating system from scratch again, because doing so had just become too complicated.
That seemed pretty far-fetched to me at the time, but it turned out he was more or less right. OS X is NeXTSTEP is Mach/BSD; Windows is NT; Android is Linux/Java. Every major OS project these days starts by picking up some earlier project and using it as a base. And those who tried to defy the prediction (cough Be cough) found out that it was true the hard way.
In 1994, IIRC, I used a Mac IIfx with a 21" Radius CRT monitor with 24-bit color. It probably also had a 34010 graphics processor (we didn't call them GPU's back then). The machine was perfectly capable of supporting multiple monitors, seamlessly extending the desktop. Preemptive multitasking excepted, it was easily on the same league as Sun 3 or HP/Apollo 400 workstations.
Around 97, I think, I installed MkLinux on a PowerMac that sat unused in a closet at the ISP I worked for. Then I left. One year after that, I returned as a consultant and found all retired PowerMacs running MkLinux on developer and sysadmin desks. It felt good.
I think I remember seeing an article where Steve Jobs lamented that Apple sat stalled while Microsoft and the PC industry continued to evolve. This was from an interview shortly after his return to Apple.
Sounds like you're talking about old hardware though. I grew up in a Mac household and used Macs in school. We had a 128k in the 80s, but moved to the IIsi, IIci, Performa 520, PowerBooks, and PowerMacs, using various LCs in school. The PowerBooks were always black-and-white in the 68k days due to the state of LCDs at the time, but everything else I used from the 1990 IIsi on was in full color.
My (expensive) IIci of 1992 or so ran Prince of Persia (and other games like Spectre VR) in full color (256 color) at high resolution (640x480, high at the time), which the PC was nowhere near having yet. Not to mention full digitized sound was present in even the very first Mac, which PC's did not even have reliably working (soundblaster support, IRQ/DMA conflicts prevented much from actually working all of the time) until Windows 98 or so.
Well, Mavericks, fine. But I'm able to run Windows 8 on my old as hell Toshiba laptop, and it's blazing fast. I have completely regained my respect for Microsoft's engineers after Windows 8. They've proven, time and time again, that with the right management, they're able to produce stunning work.
According to Microsoft, you need a CPU with NX, which weren’t around until 2005, and you’d need a at least Pentium 4 (Prescott). Other system requirements are 1Ghz clock rate and 2GB RAM.
Windows 8 runs fine on a ThinkPad X41 Tablet from 2005. That's not 10 years, but it's pretty close. It has a Pentium M and 512 MiB of RAM. The only real issue is that you need to use the generic Microsoft video driver, which isn't quite acceptable for the video playback performance we're used to today (though it does support Aero). For all the other basics, it works great.
Try running Windows 8 or OS X Mavericks on a 10 year old computer.