I have uses the newer OS’s of Mac but never the classic series that were numbered.
For those who have used apple computing back in the day, what was it like using it? Was it a lot more snappier and better user interface intuitiveness?
I say this because it always seemed to me that the macintosh operating systems seemed to be more… “smooth sailing” than Bill’s 50/50 BSOD contraptions (Windows ME anyone?)
Obviously things have changed a lot more with newer macos being more fisher priced down in looks but I’d really like to know what you guys thought about OS 8 or 9!
Thank you!
Oh I liked it a lot. In the early 90s, I had enough UI extensions running that OS7 looked exactly like BeOS. Gaming life was a lot of Bungie and AmbrosiaSW games and shareware games. So many shareware games. I established my first gamer tag at that time when playing A-10 Attack and A-10 Cuba. You want to talk about Nintendo-hard… Bungie’s Myth - The Fallen Lords was super-hard in single player, and the cross-platform multiplayer was amazeballs. I miss that game so much. Did all my Warcraft RTS playing, and waited a few agonizing months for the mac version of Starcraft to come out. Coincidentally, it was around then that I started doing file sharing through Carracho and Hotline
First started using Macs with OS7 and I find the whole Mac vs. Windows arguments silly. Windows 386, 3.1, and 3.11 were garbage, yes, but all that changed with Windows 95 and it instantly went head and shoulders above MacOS.
OSX didn’t come about until 2001. So Windows had the edge for 6 years. To give you some idea, the initial G3 iMacs that came out in 1998 were still running OS8.
The big problem with using a Mac back then is that Steve Jobs had his own ideas about the way things should work and the lack of compatability with other industry standards was a problem.
Example: Getting my Palm Pilot to sync with my iMac was a NIGHTMARE. I worked with Palm support for several weeks and we finally got it working, if the dock was connected to the iMac directly. The USB ports on the keyboard didn’t carry enough voltage to operate properly.
Windows machine? No problem… until Windows 98, when Microsoft decided to prioritize Windows CE devices and intentionally broke Palm functionality. That was fun! Took a while to get the driver updates to fix that one!
Jobs was his own worst enemy for a while on the compatibility issue.
New OS launches- all your old programs don’t work on it.
Want to use a floppy to transfer files between a Dos/Win and a Mac? Nope, not compatible. When USB drives started coming out they dropped all support for floppy drives, even in machines with them installed.
Constant driver issues with all sorts of things. Many never got resolved. To be fair the market share for Mac’s was so tiny, offering support for them didn’t make business sense.
Want to play a game? Good luck. The majority of games didn’t work on Mac. Same reason as the drivers.
As for stability issues, for a while I ran a computer lab for a college 50:50 win/Mac machines. They both crashed about equally as often.
When a program crashed in OS 7/8/9, it would often take down your whole system due to lack of memory protection. Also setting max RAM for each application one by one was tedious and annoying. While I wasn’t a huge fan of the skeuomorphic bubbly OS X interface, I was ecstatic to leave all that memory management nonsense behind.
I’ve used Macs all of my adult life, my first Mac came with System 7, and then up to Mac OS 8 and beyond. I’ve used every iteration of Mac OS since.
System 7, Mac OS 8, and Mac OS 9 were in a word: FUNctional! By that I mean the ol’ Apple tagline “it just works” wasn’t just marketing. It really did just work. Never crashed, no viruses, just easy, smooth, simple functionality.
And it was FUN to use. Since things did what they were supposed to do, and the system was build from the ground up to be intuitive for anyone - from children to the elderly, there weren’t any struggles to get stuff to do what you wanted, and especially the later versions, the OS interface was highly customizable. You could modify the window skins, scroll bars, icons, schemas, everything. Want to make your Mac look like a tropical fish aquarium, with all the windows swimming sound and making glub glub sounds when you opened files? Easy. Want it to be no-nonsense black & white fast as hell pro system? No problem.
Sometimes people got carried away and overdid it with the customizations, and they’d brick their computers (I was an Apple certified tech for a while and had to repair many a file system) - and that was even a fun challenge.
Ultimately, pre-OSX MacOS was a great product of its time. It was different from Windows - and that’s what threw off many Windows users - they’d try to approach MacOS as if it were a WinPC, and things weren’t where they expected them to be, but if you learned MacOS (which was easy) you’d find it did everything you needed it to do.
I don’t follow your comment that the current MacOS “being more fisher priced down in looks,” I think it looks very sleek & professional, but whatever. To each their own.
Speaking of fun, I wish somebody would port Gravité to macOS! Not at all helpful, but just kinda fun. Like a fidget toy.
I recently decided to learn modern macOS after avoiding it my whole life.
The UI isn’t horrible, but I found that I needed to buy about 20 different apps to regain basic OS functionality. Naturally some of these apps will charge me if I want to use them on the next version of macOS as well - honestly their whole app ecosystem feels like a scam.
I bought more apps than I would recommend to anyone just for the sake of testing and learning them. That being said, assuming someone doesn’t know their way around zsh/bash, can’t figure out homebrew, or doesn’t know how to use GitHub, they are probably going to have a bad time (although weirdly my tech illiterate friends like vanilla… am I crazy, or is window snapping extremely efficient?).
What type of OS functionality did you have to buy apps for? I bought a MacBook in 2019, first time using macOS on my own device in my life, and I haven’t ran into anything I’ve needed that I couldn’t get for free from brew, direct git clone then build, or installing from the installer on the vendor’s website instead of the App Store version.
In fact the only app I’m currently subscribed to is Infuse, and that’s because I wanted to turn off my Dell R710 for good and moved Plex to my NAS, but also have a shit ton of both encoded and remux 4K content, and I can almost hear my NAS laughing at me if I’m not direct playing. And that’s more for the Apple TV than the laptop anyway.
To your point about needing to be comfortable with zsh, git, building from source, all that cli stuff in general, I don’t think that’s an accurate assessment. One of the things I like most about macOS is that having that knowledge isn’t a requirement to use and enjoy it, but it’s there if you want it. There’s a reason you get both power users and non-technical people in love with macOS. The crossover appeal is much more weighted to the power user side for Linux. I don’t know anyone who “loves” Windows, they’ve either used it exclusively their entire life because it’s what they were exposed to in school, at the library, at work, or wherever they used a computer, or they have to use it to play games, although that’s thankfully getting better now.
And yeah the snapping is atrocious, when compared to Win11 or pre-11 with power toys. Idk why, I guess I’d just chalk it up to a fundamental difference in how Apple and MS saw their window managers being used during design. At this point it’s kind of crazy Apple hasn’t put work into improving it though.
Sound and battery management come to mind. Things like swish, Alfred, and better touch tool also makes things much nicer.
I wouldn’t say that anything is necessary at all, but my goal was to see how usable I could make macOS (as I had been told it was too easy and non-customizable by people who haven’t used it). Non-mac people generally hate apple for their ridiculous money grabbing techniques (myself included), but they also probably don’t realize how good the M series chips are. Even after realizing I like them though, I will still never buy a first hand apple device… their pricing is absurd.
I’m sure there are free alternatives to most software at this point. However, some of the paid versions are definitely better. Also, if you’re new to macOS it’s easy to assume the app store is “the” place to get apps, without realizing you can buy them directly from sites - I did this myself once.
Overall I probably enjoy using Mac more than windows as it feels closer to Linux to me. But it definitely still has issues (constant iCloud popups are my main complaint). Also the RAM situation is a joke, I can absolutely crash my M1 air by processing too hard. Also it’s definitely NOT good for any sort of gaming, as the video output is choppy (can barely handle factorio).
Allegedly window snapping is coming in the next version of macOS.
Edit: love being downvoted by fanboys (mac fanboys? Linux fanboys? Who knows at this point 😂)
When people say Mac never gets viruses i like to remind them that no one making a virus is trying to target the computer that doesn’t sell as well. They want to reach as many people as possible not as little as possible which would be in Macs case comparatively to windows.
Windows ME was released a year before OS X, so that’s not really the era to compare. Also, Windows 2000 was pretty solid. Before Windows 95 there’s simply no comparison, the Mac was much better.
Classic Mac OS might as well be part of the 90s kid starter pack (Kid Pix usually is). Macs were ubiquitous in American schools.
It was pretty intuitive, especially if you grew up on it. It was also still fairly easy to trigger crashes and break things, but maybe not for more normal people.
