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!
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.
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 😂)
Speaking of fun, I wish somebody would port Gravité to macOS! Not at all helpful, but just kinda fun. Like a fidget toy.
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.
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.
Oh wow, yeah I remember always having to open that info for each program and change how much RAM was allocated to it. Running slow? Quit it, increase RAM and try again. So glad all that nonsense is gone now.
I remember Ircle having instructions to open the terminal and run emacs to enable some service (identd probably). It was so traumatizing I’ve only ever used vi since.
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.
Windows 2000 was peak Windows, IMHO. It was the last clean and simple design.
Windows ME was shit, it didn’t even ship with completed error messages
They were fantastic to use. I remember using ResEdit back in the day to change my menu names in the Finder, knowing what every system extension did so I could delete non essential ones to speed up the system.
Unlike these days, you spent more time getting work done, rather than fighting the application or OS.
I loathe how new OS’s and programs change the UI / UX these days and make it worse every time. Looking at you Adobe / Microsoft!
I had to support the damn things for a university. Crash prone bastards they were. The windows 3.11 and 95 boxes in the same environment were so much more stable than the pre osx macs of the time.
The earlier ones - classics and the like were pretty stable.
I learned ProTools and Digital Performer on OS9. It crashed so often we saved very often. God I hated those machines. OS X completely changed the game and absolutely destroyed Windows in stability. I moved from Windows when 10.4 came out and search was amazing. Haven’t liked Windows since. Linux, you’re cool. Anything *nix is really where it’s at.
I find this hard to believe. I feel 3.11 and 95 crashed pretty often. They generally recovered on a restart though so was it more that the macs crashed in a way that needed support more often?
I suspect they just didn’t like being on a network. Often, killing off the startup extensions (or whatever they were called) would improve their stability. It was 28 years ago…
I just remember it seemed like more often than not I would come to a windows machine in the lab and it would be in a bad state and I would restart it and it was fine and much less often I would encounter a mac in a bad state but a reboot would not bring it back and I would have to bring it to the attention of the support person on shift.
Could be.
I think what I didn’t like was they often simply froze. There was no error message, so you had to just try different things to see if you could get it stable.
were the windows error messages that useful. I mean im thinking of the blue screen garbage.
If it implicated a driver or file, at least you had a clue to the cause and could search for it online.
i lived this same experience. it just seemed like the windows stuff was more resilient not to mention modular. early apple/mac OS felt very monolithic
I used a Mac SE/30 running OS 7 quite a bit in the early 90’s. I remember it being incredibly reliable; in fact, I can’t even remember what a crash looked like on a Mac, whereas I can still picture the BSOD from Windows 3.1.
I don’t remember noticing much difference in snappiness or intuitiveness between Mac and Windows back then though. Both were pretty easy to learn, even for people with limited computer experience. Anything with a hard drive felt snappy at the time, because the previous generation of computers all ran on floppy disks which were slow as molasses.
I loved it dearly. There were lots of cool customizations that were possible because the OS wasn’t locked down pre-internet. There was a system extension to have Oscar the Grouch pop up in the Trash and sing when deleting files. There were GUI customizations that radically changed the interface. iTunes Visualizer was amazing to watch while playing music on LSD.
Someone figured out how to trick the AOL client to think you were in their Support section (which wasn’t billed against your allotment of monthly hours) and released AOL4Free so you could run forever without extra billing. Eudora was a fine email client that I only remember because other people talk about how much they liked it. I was too young to work and so received very few emails at the time, but I know I hated whatever came after it; I think maybe Outlook Express? We had to troubleshoot system extensions that had incompatibilities and used a tool that aided in a binary search of disabling some systematically across reboots. You could customize apps with a tool called ResEdit (a resource fork editor for attributes like icons and buttons).
The most important part (to me) at the time: The text looked beautiful. I could never understand how anyone using the janky Windows fonts didn’t look at MacOS and immediately think to themselves, wtf my computer must be garbage. Being a publishing-first platform really made our typefaces shine by comparison.
I used to joke that the last Mac I used was the first one they made that had colour - I’ve used every Mac from the seminal one up to and including the Color Classic (MacOS 1 up to 7) - but my last job gave me a MacBook. I was curious about it since I’ve seen many a coworker love them, but I soon found myself hating the damn thing so much that I ended up installing the work tools on my own Linux-laden ThinkPad.
Used to be, they were fast and no nonsense, simply effective and efficient work horses. No doubt they still are, but it was fighting med in everything I wanted it to do. What do you mean “there’s no way to mount a USB stick on MACOS”?!
Hardware wise they’re still brilliant wrt. power and battery life, but getting a 2nd (or, gasp, even 3rd) monitor to work with it? Yikes what a shit show that was. Truly a walled garden, I stand by my usual words of “they’re excellent machines if you want to use them exactly as Apple intended.”
…sorry for going off track. So, back in the day. There was MacWrite, MacPaint, Aldus PageMaker (which, then, was way more useful for actual publishing work than after the Adobe take-over), and a ton of games! Granted, you only had 512*whatever in pure black and white, but it was crisp and the games had excellent sound. Pinball Construction Set had 4-voice digital sound and flawless physics (hmm, except I don’t actually remember if it had a Tilt feature). Oh yeah, add in AppleTalk which blew Novell and Windows for Workgroups plain out of the water. The ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) connector predates PS/2 and curiously allowed a Mac to have any number of keyboards and two mice connected, something we made good use of when gaming.
There was the ImageWriter which could do plain copy paper rather than Leparello paper and had exquisite resolution compared to the clunky 8-pin DOS offerings. Really, the Mac SE and the ImageWriter II are, in my mind, the pinnacle of industrial design - at least of the 80s era.
Thanks for reading all that. You should go have a look at folklore.org if you’re interested in stories from the inside.
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
Sorry if off-topic. You can try it here: https://macos9.app (or 8 if you replace the 9 with 8)
I had an ugly old Macintosh and it sucked because nothing I wanted worked on it and none of the things that did work were of any use.
Opposite opinion. It was great for Kid Pix and and After Dark screensaver. Also I was like a little kid and was also easily amused.
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.
I didn’t use it myself, but the parents of a friend of mine did. They had two macs of different generations.
On the newer one we played command & conquer (although not being able to right click to cancel placing a construction was annoying).
We didn’t use the older one a lot, except that the Screensaver was also a game of some sorts, kind of a cross between Asteroids and some 2d space exploration game.
I used them for word processing stuff in school and it was fine. I was mostly working on Amiga at home at the time, moreso than DOS/Windows.
So early to mid nineties the macs were way easier to do graphs off of spreadsheets as office and excel did not really come into their own and lotus was a bear. It the main thing I used them for outside of the neat networked tank game.
