As someone old enough to have lived through most of the personal computing era, I think your perspective regarding the walled gardens is apt. It is a defense mechanism, as is the fight over first sale doctrine, fair use, and the right to repair.
I do not fully agree. I love simplicity, but making computers disposable only adds to our problems in the long run because 100% of that system simply can't be reused. It's blasphemy to say you as an organization claims to care about "climate change" (something that's not obvious to many if it's actually is a problem or not) would produce products that only add to the landfill problem. It's straitup blasphemy. If Apple was really concerned their laptops wouldn't only be easily serviceable, but they would give the tools to do so. Yet that's not Apple. Because killing people (supposedly) is less important then money or the whole "climate change" propaganda is just that and they know it.
I've been using every version of Windows since v3.1.1, and was always used to simply download and install apps directly from an installer or a zip file. I was bewildered when I first saw an M$ AppStore. lol I would never use that, rather find it as a separate installer.
The files on the desktop are actually in a hidden folder called "Desktop Folder" in "Macintosh HD". It shows the files/folders in it on the desktop, along with the trash and mounted disks. So it actually works similar to Windows or the current macOS. Some versions would also show printers on the desktop, giving access to the print queue. It would also have a Desktop Folder for each mounted disk, and on the desktop it shows files from all of them. So it you drag a file from one disk to the Desktop, it would actually stay on that disk. And when you eject it, the files would disappear from the desktop. The current macOS actually can still be set so that the icons in a folder can be set so that they can be freely moved. It even has more options, such as changing the icons size for one folder, or adding a background image or color. There is also an option to hide the toolbar, and then it works the same as in classic Mac OS, it opens a new window for each folder, and saves its position/size. The main difference is that on classic you could never open two windows with the same folder. In some early versions they also tried to extend the spatial desktop metaphor further, for example the users/group control panel used to be represented as a Finder window with icons for users and folders for groups. You could even put users into the Trash, mixed with normal files. Also "suitcases" in the System folder ("System", and fonts) show as folders, even though they are actually resources. It does have a task manager (the top right) menu, and it can be set to automatically hide windows from background applications. But this was added later, the original Mac OS had only one active program at a time. On early macs you would have to change floppy disks often for loading different applications, so each floppy could have its own System Folder on it, so that there is a Finder to load when you quit the application. Also applications can have multiple windows, but one global menu bar on top of the screen. And you can only launch each application a single time, but it can open multiple files. Windows still today allows to open several instances of the same application. For example opening several Notepad files actually opens multiple instances of Notepad. In early Windows versions, it was usually one window per task. So a window has its own menu bar, and there was even "Multiple Document Interface", where there would be a frame window, with multiple windows that were contained inside of it.
Also, dating back to the Apple LISA (where the desktop metaphor was stretched to its limit by modern standards) is a "put away" option for desktop icons. See, on the LISA, you could only open and use files while they were on your desktop, just like a real desk, and the "put away" option would then return it to its folder for you once you were done. This function actually persisted in the Mac, all the way until they ditched Classic.
Is there a setting when opening nested folders to open it in the same window instead of creating new ones for every level? That's what I saw in this video, but need toms clarification.
Printers (and other devices) acted like a Unix system. They were mountable, just like devices in the /etc directory of a Unix system can be mounted. If you opened them up you'd see the print ques. Modern Unix systems, and thus the Mac OS still uses this mount system. It's just that most of your devices are hidden in the /etc directory. Some visual Unix desktops still actually allow you to mount device to the desktop to this date.
@@PhirePhlame Man, I like that metaphor- it's a taskbar, but for all the files you're currently working with. And it cleanly fits in with the desktop on macOS showing what's “mounted”.
I see other replies mentioned that the Desktop Folder was a hidden folder on the hard disk, but I’m not sure anyone mentioned the huge caveat: Every disk that was inserted had its own Desktop Folder, and when you dragged a file residing on that disk onto the desktop, it would just move to the Desktop Folder on THAT disk, and would disappear if the disk was ejected. Back in the day, it was drilled into newbies NEVER to put documents on the Desktop, because very often people would receive a file on a Zip/Jazz disk to do some work with, drag it to the desktop thinking they’ve copied it, and then would hand the disk back, or even erase the disk not realizing they’re deleting their file. This was a huge footgun and led to the Desktop being redesigned for Mac OS X. My father used to scold me for saving things to the desktop even after OS X was installed, because he had PTSD from it.
Windows on macOS don’t tend to spread them selves around. In Microsoft Windows windows want to take up the full screen or tile. Document windows appear nested inside application windows which limits how you can layout documents from several applications on screen. macOS does not suffer from this problem. One window per document not nested. Also the zoom button doesn’t make the window take up the full screen as it does on Microsoft OS. Instead on macOS the application calculates the optimal size for the window to be able to display its current contents and set the size accordingly. You hinted at the way things behave on macOS. Windows and icons always remember the way you positioned them. Once you move a folder window it will in future open in exactly the same state. It doesn’t matter so much if it’s messy because everything is where you left it. You also missed the beauty of the macOS desktop. It’s your workspace. Drag any documents or applications you wish to use for your current task so that they are easily accessible. Once you are done then select them and use the menu option “Put Away”. macOS will move them back to the folders they were originally stored in. I still miss some aspects of classic macOS.
You hit the nail on the head with "It's your workspace". I wasn't around for this ethos of desktops but I still feel there is a semblance of this even today in how Apple promotes windowing on macOS through their marketing material. The silo-fication of apps has absolutely changed how people use desktop interfaces but there's still so much value in the very tangible feel of "put everything anywhere you want" approach that Apple likes to feature in their product mockups. Even their newer window management features like Stage Manager flourish most on giant displays in contrast to the "space-efficient window tiling" attitude that most people in tech have today. I rarely use computers with screens larger than a 24" display, and I grew up on Windows XP and 7 so I'm used to the tileable approach of window management. However, I remember how freeing it felt using my university's 5K iMacs earlier this year. I wasn't worried if it could become cluttered, or that it didn't have the window tiling app that I use on my personal MacBook, because there was more space than I could ever waste by not having an app occupy it. It almost makes me want to get a giant 4K monitor just to explore that paradigm more since I never had the chance to.
YES! being a windows person since elementary school, my first experience with a mac was in college, where one of my math classes had a lab portion taught with macs running either mac os 8 or 9, and i was fascinated by the way the computer and OS worked, like for example the keyboard had a power button to power on the mac, or that you ejected floppy disks by dragging them to the trash. one day i hastily dragged some homework files to a floppy disk, and when i came back to the lab days later and sat at a different computer, i was so surprised to see the file icons were arranged in the exact same haphazard way i had dragged them to the disk! i was so curious to learn how the OS saved that info
The idea behind everything being spatial is the idea that I as the user decide where on the screen my files go, where my app windows live, etc. I put them somewhere, and they stay put much like a physical object would. I'm constantly frustrated by modern OSes that never seem to remember where I put stuff.
This is what I find most erksome about modern OS interfaces, even MacOS. I want to put something somewhere and be able to get it through feel, where I practically don’t have to look or think about what I am doing. The classic Mac interface had that, a deep sense of spatial awareness that you could organize the tools and documents in such a way that you had a really smooth flow in how you used the computer. The use of search bars and key presses needed in modern OS’s to navigate and find stuff is a kluge to compensate for the fact that the OS cares more about what it’s designers envision that what their users need. If you put a pen on your desk, and came back to find that now it has been placed somewhere else by the desk because you opened a drawer, would that piss you off? Yeah, I’m an old school Mac user, but I’ve used a lot of stuff, and classic Mac wasn’t my first GUI OS. But it remains my favorite. Just give me MacOS 9 with a modern kernel and some graphical cleanup and modernization, and I would be happy and productive.
Reffering to something you touched on in the part about silos - I honestly miss the the straight and simple quid-pro-quo of old proprietary software. I pay the developer, the developer gives me the program. Want a new version? Buy it again. No subscription bullshit that forces me to fund active development of the software when the old version is perfectly fine for my use-case for many years, no forced updates. Not having to make an account for everything (that could be arbitrarily terminated at any time). I don't actually think that it's consequence of the open-source movement, but rather the proliferation of internet (though the two have been closely linked). It makes software piracy extremely easy, so the old model quid-pro-quo no longer works when you can just get the same software for free from some website or torrent. At the same time, it makes subscription-based software possible.
Hum, I decided it was because once software was good enough, it was hard to persuade people to buy a new version, so to avoid going bust, you either bake in designed obsolescence, get the OS or hardware manufacturer to break compatibility, or switch to subscription... or all of the above.
@JimAllen-Persona If you can cough *find* an old "offline" registration key, you can still install at least up to CS4, perhaps even newer, I haven't tried.
@@doltBmB I literally installed a copy of CS4 about 3 weeks ago. There are special offline keys that don't need to check the (missing) activation servers. I haven't tried newer versions so couldn't say regarding CS5 and 6, but CS4, you can 100% install without a crack.
I left this same message on your Reddit post but I love content that asks whether we lost something that may have been intuitively better than today’s macOS. In my opinion, since the original Macintosh OS was introduced in 1984, just in terms of desktop UIs, I don’t think much has changed in nearly 40 years. This metaphor (however you want to call it) has had real staying power. Great video. Keep them coming on vintage Mac!
There's also the concept of the "proxy icon". This icon appears in a window title bar and it represents the file or folder referenced by that window, and you can use it as if it were an icon from the file manager. Example 1: you have a word document open. In a browser and click to attach, the dialog to choose file opens. You drag and drop the icon from the word title bar to the open dialog, it gets selected. Boom. Example 2: You have a folder open and you download a file. The choose folder dialog appears. You drag the folder icon from the title bar of the folder and it gets selected as destination folder. Click save, it's downloaded there. I was so disappointed when GTK3 and Gnome stopped implementing this. Nautilus had a proxy icon to the current folder on the bottom left status bar, but it was also removed. We had great user interfaces that were ruined by people who didn't understand them.
I played with classic Mac. I noticed three things that were primarily different from Windows 98 which is what I grew up on. 1. The Global Taskbar. I love it and hate it. Got to make sure you're focused on the right thing 2. Closing a window doesn't close the app, it's still running in the background. Gets annoying 3. Installing stuff was a breeze no wizards or figuring out directories, you just dragged a folder into a drive and that was it for the most part
The thought to give full control to the application goes deep and is the very reason it was crashing. It gave all system resources to the app, and the app had to give back control to the OS. If the app fails it can’t give back control and computer needs to be restarted. At least once per day. :D
The original designers would have liked to have been more robust, but were told that costs had to be kept to an absolute minimum to allow as many ordinary people as possible to own one. But then they were actually sold at a premium, betraying the vision to maximize profit margin.
7:53 IIRC, MutliFinder _became_ the default Finder implementation in System Software 7. I know I couldn't select the simple Finder in 7.5.3, the first version of macOS I really dug into. Also, those free-floating text in the Office installation CD? Those are either files or folders (usually folders) that have a custom icon of a _blank_ icon (macOS' Finder still allows this, but now folders can have actual images as their backgrounds).
I remember there being at least one tool which would take an image, slice it up into icons, and then lay them out in a folder, assigned to files with names consisting of whitespace so you could generate your pretty branding banner in the gold master for your distribution media.
The key thing about Mac OS Classic and Modern is what was called the resource fork on classic OS and on modern MacOS it is called a “package”. What this was was basically every application is like a container that holds everything needed about it. The icons, dialog boxes, sounds, libraries etc etc. This makes them self contained. And this is why the Mac doesn’t need an installer or a registry or a boatload of DLL’s and supporting files sitting loosely next to the executable. On the classic OS you used a tool called ResEdit to get to them. On modern macOS you get to them by right clicking and selecting show package contents. Regarding the menubar/toolbar, the only difference there is that Mac has always made the menu bar become the front most application where windows etc put a separate menubar in every application window. And you can only use that menu bar if that window /application is the front most window so it makes more sense to just have a single menu bar. The reason windows did not have this, or a hierarchical list view and many other differences were most likely because of legal battle reasons during the early stages of the GUI wars. There’s surprisingly not a whole lot of difference between the early Mac Systems and the modern Mac OS GUI / “Finder”. The main difference is the underlying core is UNIX.
Very cool video. For context, I was born in 82, and learned to read and write on a Mac 512k, then lived through the whole multimedia and early Internet era on a Performa, then an iBook. Then moved to Linux when I figured Apple lost the plot and I was a broke student anyway. It's kind of wild to me that people would immerse themselves in those OSs so long after the fact, and your analysis is very interesting to me, as your perspectives differs so much from someone whose de facto daily life it was. You didn't mention it so I don't know if you're aware of it, but the command and the option key have always been a very central mechanism in classic Macs, and have always been assigned very consistent modifying properties across programs. As such, an essential feature of the finder is that if you open a folder with the option key pressed, it will open the selected folder and close the parent folder at the same time. It quickly becomes an essential tool to navigate the finder efficiently. It's fast, intuitive, and suddenly that clutter becomes manageable and controlled even as the folder structure grows. I appreciated a lot your take on walled gardens, freedom and control. It's an angle of the discussion that you don't often see discussed that way. It's also one of the things that ended up driving me away from Apple's products as mentioned above, but it's one of the reasons I have the hardest time to articulate in conversations. Cheers!
Like option closes the last window, you can command click on the window's folder name to get a pop up menu of the parent directories too. Or you can press Command Up Arrow. Both of these can be combined with option. Command Down also opens the selected file and is good for navigating with just the keyboard. Arrow keys by themselves move the selection around.
One of my first GUI experiences was a Mac Classic in the early 1990s which I remember fondly. I also moved away from Apple due to their walled garden approach with the iPhone (and making their 2007-era Macbooks obsolete and non-upgradable after just a few years). That felt like a big step back in user freedom compared to the Palm Tungstens I was using at the time. But I still really like the feel of classic Mac OS, especially System 7 up to version 9.
my experience is very similar to yours, born in 78, first mac is Macintosh SE/30 (I think), always have Mac / Wintel throughout the years. The early years of OS X on late PPC / Early Intel era seem to be the most comfortable for me, in the later years.... there seem to be a push to adopt from iOS. Now, we have a weird situation where iPad is not Mac-enough to function properly, Mac sometimes acts like an iPad for no functional reason (What's the point of Launchpad?)
The secret sauce of MacOS has always been - at least since OS 9 - modifier keys. ex. OS 9-present has “spring loaded” folders: so where you were showing double click a folder, opens a new window, etc. you can actually drag a file over a folder (either hold til it opens or press spacebar) and continue drilling down into the directory until you’re ready to move it, and when you let go of your mouse all of those temporarily opened windows will immediately close. Also, with OS 9 you can drag a folder to the bottom of the screen and it’ll become a spring loaded “docked” folder. I actually miss that UI; although it’s fairly well represented in OS X.
@@theol1044 It’s a fairly similar UI metaphor, but functionally distinct. For example in OS 9 icon view you had the option to turn an entire folder into one click buttons, so you could take app aliases into a folder and turn it into a spring loaded app launcher. … Of course, that was long before Spotlight, which is how I launch apps these days. 🤷♂️
@@XMattingly Oh, I didn't know that trick yet :-) But didn't OS8/9 actually have a dedicated launcher (that came into being as some kind of Performa special IIRC) that wasn't installed (or active) by default, but could be added (or activated) as an option? I remember it being a floating window with clickable buttons. AFAIR I found it ugly and clunky, and I used the MS Office dropdown menu launcher (in the menu bar) at the time.
This is a problem of monolithic single task operating systems. Nether Windows 95 nor Mac OS were true multitasking systems. You could get the OS pretty stable, it was just about not stuffing with it and overloading it with system extensions, also having enough RAM per app that it didn't crash the system.
I remember the day the iMac and the G3 came out. I was a tech lead on a Mac OS 9 software product and we were all amazed at what Apple had done. The OS 9 Finder had some precision the current macOS Finder has lost. Also read Bruce Tognazzini’s books.
When I started using a Mac at work (about 1988), it had System 6.x installed. With System 6 you could only run one program at a time unless you installed the "Multi-Finder" system extension.
Loved this video! I was a Mac user around 2011-2015 and a bunch of these design paradigms were still there. I remember being confused when an older program would have a bunch of floating toolbars and widgets that seemed cluttered and dated to me. I also remember how folders were semi-spatial; you could rearrange contents of a folder to sort by date, alphabetical order, etc. but you could also move an item in 2D space and it would stay where you put it. Now I use GNOME and it is definitely my favorite paradigm, combining the best of macOS with the best of other interfaces IMO
The best way to show this is that if you want to copy your system to another floppy you just drag the "system" folder to a floppy icon and that's it. You have a bootable floppy with a Mac os system
I originally posted this to reddit but realized I should be benefiting the algo for you. I really find this interesting on two fronts: Windows user and someone who's considerably younger than me as my first computer of my own was a G3 450, at the very end of the OS 9 era and live in macOS both personally and professionally as a developer. Just a few thoughts: - DMGs aren't inherently a manifestation of disks as Apple had already killed disks with the iMac and was prepping users for the internet future in OS 9. DMGs are compressed but offer a few extras ZIP/RAR etc do not as they have a built in check sum, encryption options and partitioning. - I found it interesting you said you'd have certain level of disgust as a Windows user. You'd have to compare OS 9 to Windows 98 or ME. XP was a huge leap but but happened during the same time Apple was gearing up OS X, Windows 2k with it's preemptive multitasking and protected memory was oodles ahead of of OS 9 and became the backbone of XP. Apple had to drop OS 9 and failed with it's Copland OS. It acquired NeXT instead of BeOS and the rest is history. - While I think its just your wording, multifinder existed even in System 4 before Apple called it Mac OS. However it's really jenky way with cooperative multitasking. I like hearing an outside perspective as I'm a bit too close to the subject to sometimes step back. I somewhat disagree with the take on Open Source as the true answer. OS X was far less invested in a wall garden from the outset with X11, Unix compatibility and true *nix terminal, and switching away from Apple only standards like Apple Talk to baking in SMB, Apache into the OS as well as OpenGL and later OpenCL and forking KHTML to create Webkit. However the problem becomes that purely open source means relying on community which may or may not have the resources to meet the needs of the company. Apple's experiment with investing heavily into Open source yielded mixed results like getting burned by OpenGL. On the other hand, it heavily influence tech like creating Webkit which would create Blink which would create VP8 which would create Node. Open source wasn't in danger of winning as there's simply no answer to Apple integration like hand-off, continuity and air drop. There's a balance between closed and open and early OS X was as close to ideal as we'd ever see, as there's real benefits to a large corporation with many people in places Open Source lacks like QA, testers and support staff. Anyhow, long winded post. Enjoyed hearing your thoughts.
Even the basic ZIP format supports symmetric encryption and DEFLATE checks the contents with CRC-32 checksums. What DMG *does* support that very few compression formats do not, are Forks - something that can trip up Windows users as well, since NTFS supports Forks as Alternative Data Streams, and Windows *does* still use them for certain functions
It's cool how Apple is bringing back the spatial desktop idea with VisionOS. While you can actually run multiple applications at once, the "infinite" screen area of a mixed reality headset allows applications to return to having options and settings for an application in a separate window that the user can arrange as they like. VisionOS also saves where you place your applications in space, so when you open an application it will return to the same window layout you had the last time. Mac OS 9 may have been way ahead of its time. The self contained application window is a product of the limited view a monitor gives of your virtual space, but maybe not the most intuitive or user friendly way to interact with a computer.
I used Mac OS during the 90’s in high school and in college for graphic design. It felt very much like something that was trying to emulate traditional tools to help achieve your goals. As stated in this video, the desktop was literally for spreading out on, like a real desk. So much so that wooden desktop wallpapers were introduced just to add to this sense. Even the taskbar being at the top made perfect sense as one reads a book from top to bottom. Windows on the other hand felt more like an organised system with powerful right mouse button options. Windows seemed more efficient but a little less humane than Mac OS. Both operating systems made me happy in different ways.
Thanks for sharing this. I was primarily a Mac user from 1995 and onwards, and you made many good points about the differences. I would have used a lower resolution when demonstrating MacOS 9 on youtube. It would have made it appear more like it did back then, while also more clear for the viewers.
Actually it does have a "Desktop" folder in the directory, but you can't see it on the machine. If you share the the drive on the network, and connect from another Mac, you can see the "Desktop" folder in the directory.
I was born in the late 80’s and grew up with a variety of classic Macs in the house. (And an Amiga, but that was just what I played Lemmings on.) I remember when OSX came out, and some of the changes were quite jarring. The concept of DMGs absolutely baffled me. Why am I downloading this thing that pretends to be a disk but isn’t, that I then need to “copy” my program off of, and then eject and delete the dmg when it’s done? Gimme mah Stuffit archives, consarnit! Folder management took a lot of getting used to. I grew up opening up Macintosh HD one time, and opening up all the folders in sequence that I’d need to, say, move a file from one place to another. I remember it being kind of satisfying to close all the open folders when I was done with something. OSX was pretty. It ran Bugdom. Cool. But no matter how many system updates I sat through, there was never any other interface themes other than Aqua and Graphite. And this was supposed to be advanced?! Pssh, OS9 had way more color themes. Thank goodness for ShapeShifter!
GNOME 2.4 and OS/2 Workplace Shell were also spatial, amazing user experience. I loved all these interfaces, never understood all the criticism it received.
I loved this. An absolutely intelligent breakdown of the past and current OS/software landscapes, while also expressing an appreciation for a paradigm I never got to experience and yet miss as a tactile person myself. I mean, except for the jank "solution" to multi-tasking that is MultiFinder. I know it only works the way it does due to the limits of the kernel, and Copland was supposed to fix it, but it doesn't stop it from sounding like a frustration.
But isn’t most of this still true in modern macOS? Like the desktop not being limited to a folder is still true since it also shows connected drives for example. The list of installed Applications is still just a folder (that’s why you just need to drag and drop an .app file to applications to install it), although by default you use the launchpad to view your installed apps you can also right click launchpad to bring up the classic app list. The Finder is still visual when using the default view so you can place files anywhere in the window and add background images and text but if you don‘t like this you can change the view to list or columns. I think in settings you can also set Finder to open folders in new windows and now with stage manager the one app at a time focus is stronger than ever before.
The desktop IS a folder on the classic mac OS, at least going back to 7.0. But the folder is hidden. The reason for preferring DMGs has nothing to do with emulating the classic OS; it's down to installers being dangerous and misused, installing who knows what, who knows where. Apple prefers drag-and-drop installations of application bundles because they're less likely to screw up the OS.
Yes.. BUT it didn't save files off of an external drive. If you moved a file or folder off of an external to the desktop, it did not copy to the drive volume - to do that you'd have to open the drive image, navigate to the Documents or whatever folder you wanted and drag/drop the file there. If you unmounted the external, whatever you'd put on the desktop from it, disappeared. Classic Desktop was more a workspace than a folder. I did a ton of ripping vinyl on my old G3 (I had the Bordeaux perch card w/ RCA inputs..and a hot copy of Final Vinyl) under OS 8.6 then later 9.2.2 and found it critical to rebuild the desktop every few months because the locations of the icons would start to drift around the desktop.
@@foodandart5808 Each disk/volume has it's own desktop folder so you ejected the disk, any items on its desktop (or in the trash, which was also it's own hidden folder) would vanish. Rebuilding the desktop was a different that. That was a database file which kept track of icons, comments etc.
There is a lot of holes in this video. This is what happens with someone with zero experience in equipment that came before they were even born, decides to make a youtube video.
Opinionated? Oh yes, you have probably no idea how heated the debates were in the early days of the internet or earlier. Macintosh, Windows, Unix, Atari, Amiga, Linux... God knows i spent countless hours arguing why Mac was the best or dare i say only computer one could use.
I've used Mac OS from System 6.0.8, 7.1, 7.3.5, 7.5.5 and from Mac OS 8.0, 8.5, 9.0, 9.2.2, 10.0 beta public release through the current version of Mac OS X. I still remember all those OS versions
My first Os was DRDos. I moved to MS Dos 5.2 and loved it. Then I moved to an other city and didn't took my old PC with me. My roommate had an old Atari ST left, and this was my first contact with a gui. Later he sold me his PPC with MacOs 7.2 I loved it so much! So intuitive, so clean, and with hexedit I could fiddle around with the gui. Then I got a used eMac with MacOS X and I was slightly irritated. It seemed totally different to Classic MacOs. Several Years later I "converted" to pc because it gaves me the freedom I was missing. And I never looked back. Now I think about emulating classic MacOS 9 on a Linux system if it's possible.
I have the most nostalgia for MacOS 7 (specifically 7.5.5, which was a very stable version I used for years). I loved how apps had multiple Windows that could be arranged to maximize screen space, which is better than windows with tabs like many apps on modern MacOS. The desktop was always a little quirky - if you dragged a file from a floppy to the desktop, it would still be on the floppy and would disappear when you'd eject it! The history behind the "pink" and "blue" operating system teams at Apple and absorbing NeXT for the dual purpose of getting back Steve Jobs and acquiring a stable, modern operating system is quite fascinating. Good video, good walk down memory lane.
For someone who (likely) wasn't alive when Classic Mac OS was the current generation of OS for the Mac, you have managed to pick up on a lot of little details that, frankly, I wasn't expecting you to notice. Good job!
Hints on Mac OS 9: learn about the combos. For example: 1) option+ == opens a folder in same window without opening a new one. 2) option+ == drops down a cyclic menu where you can choose which level of directory you want in window.
I know that your knowledge may not be exact, but I like to see different perspectives, especially when they take me to the times I was seeing things differently.
I’m highly fond of classic systems and the software ecosystems they have. If you want to experience a classic system with a rich history and huge back catalog, and is arguably somewhat still usable, I would recommend taking a serious dive into 68k AmigaOS. Not PPC AmigaOS 4. Most Americans have no idea what they were missing while poking around with their DOS and classic MacOS computers. Seriously. Do a deep dive and discover another universe of computing.
Definitely! I wanted an Amiga 1200 so bad in the early 90's. But, I ended up getting a Mac Classic II. The Amiga was so ahead of the times in regards to graphics, hardware, and multitasking. Just look at what Video Toaster could do. You could never do what it could on a Mac.
I used Mac OS 9 as my main OS as late as 2008. I'm still quite familiar with it, I've never forgotten it and like keeping around Mac OS 9 computers. Classic Mac OS did a lot of great things, but then some things were horrible like resource forks and drivers.
When I was in middle school & high school (in the 90s), my schools had some Macs with OS versions 7 through 8.6 . I thought those were interesting, although at home I was always a DOS/Windows user.
If you don’t want a separate window after each click, hold down option. If you want to get to everything in one window switch to list view in the view menu. What you get there are disclosure triangles to drill down the hierarchy. Something that was and still is a pain in windows because you have to use the file explorer.
Mac OS follows numerous principles of design, like Pareto's 80/20. They are masters of that. I'm glad to watch your thoughts and parallelisms about classic Mac OS and wall gardens paradigm. In these times (I'm 38 yo now) I use the Macs of my father, our house was a little photography studio, and wonders the luxury of SCSI ports, or Magneto-optical drives were use like another disk drive in their computers, imagine years before the burnings of CDROM, those mo disks of 128mb, 256mb and more, are a wonderfull without burning software, without any kind of software, only a driver in setup, nothing more, it's like an infinite flow of hard drives, working like a hard drive.
You can place icons in folders spatially in MacOS X+ as well. Just choose "Icons" view and "None" in sorting and you good to go. Moreover, you can choose other views and sorts and get back to how you left it spatially afterwards if you revert these two settings.
That was really interesting to see. Never used Mac OS at that time. but did use SunView, X, GEM, and early MS Windows. A great point you made is that those were the early times of windowing type systems, and it was by no means standardized or obvious how how they should best work. Add to that the hardware limitations like floppies, and how different users were more hands on, those systems did a loss less abstraction of hardware than what a typical user sees today. Look forwards to seeing more of your videos!
In the early 2000's I'd often be babysat by my uncle and he had an iMac running whichever OS came with the Aqua theme. I thought it was the coolest things in the world because it had a few games on it but it also defined what I thought a computer should be for a long time. Even as I pilot into the world of Linux through Arch I check occasionally to see if someone has released a similar theme as a desktop environment.
The desktop IS a folder when a volume is accessed from a network, so it would suggest Apple simply chose to not let it be accessible via a folder when only accessed locally. I’ve used MacOS for 20+ years, the first version I got to know was 7.5.3, and I’ve used version as early as from System 6, all the way till High Sierra.
I have the fondest memories of running OS 7 and 9 (before it was "classic") on both a 7100 and a G3. It was focused, simple, you did one thing at a time, actually. That made me very economical with the use of resources nowadays (closing unused Chrome tabs, anyone?) so yes, it was a different time and a different work dynamic back in 1998.
We could return to easy installs on Windows now that PCs have enough RAM to let each app load up a full copy of the C/C++ runtime libraries, MFC, .NET, and whatever else they use. But that wasn't the case for many years.
Great video, I appreciate how it doesn't seem scripted and you're just walking us through the system. I might be totally off but to me the desktop metaphor has always felt forced, unwieldy, and difficult to implement. A file tree model with links seems to be the right level of abstraction to account for most of a computer's functions as seen by the end-user. It's always cool to see older approaches that take the metaphor more literally like this one or Microsoft Bob, in which the home screen looks like an office with a physical desktop
an actual tree view is horrible to use, but the vista breadcrumps nicely reifies the folder structure as a piece of UI I think, it's very sad that they have moved away from that because it really was genius
@@doltBmB Agreed! I think trees serve better as a way to conceptualize storage but are not helpful as a visual metaphor. When you say you moved away from it are you talking about how you don't see a full breadcrumb trail when using Explorer?
That's the kind of OS review I always looked for on UA-cam. Not just using old apps and games, but showing how the system was designed to be used. Another OS I always wanted to see in action was OS/2, that's why I'm trying it out on a VM.
Been using ArcaOS in Parallels with Intel Mac Pro 2013 for few years now. I remember Workplace Shell was very interesting comparing to old 16-Bit Windows. By that time I had not used older Mac OS to compare. New challenge, make Arca run on UTM so it can be used in Apple Silicon Macs in the future!
Gen Z here, I remember being aged 7/8 having a mac g5 and the first ipad, 16gb running IOS 5.1.1. The mac was osx, there was a definite good vibe those days compared to computing of today minus a few minor issues.
There are a lot of tricks you missed in this video. One of the classics was that Option-double-click on a folder would open the new window and close the previous behind it. macOS was and is designed to be used one-handed by novice users, and two-handed with the other hand on modifier keys for experienced users.
Another classic macOS tip (still relevant in the latest macOS versions) is the ability to hide on an app-by-app basis (as opposed to window minimization). Command-H will hide the current app, and Command-Option-H will hide every other app. You can also find these menu commands in the top-right application menu, or in the application-named menu in modern macOS.
ive only ever used mac os 9 in sheepshaver, on my 2009 MacBook, but it does have a lot of interesting things, but like most older operating systems, I don't know how to use it well, only just enough to do whatever simple task I'm trying.
Apple's support for the pointing device has always been supreme. On 68K, the mouse used a hardware CPU interrupt, resulting it very solid feel and accuracy; best support for drag and drop of any system; easiest OS to clone bootable sys. In the old day,s you could create bootable backup by dragging the System folder to another disk (it would ruin scripts transparently). Drag to Recycle run a silent uninstall script as does drag to /Applications to install. Probably on OSX they use 2D/3D hardware acceleration for the mouse and window dragging. But Win/Linux better for window tiling, alt-F for menus instead of Ctrl-F2 on mac, which requires also holding [fn] then use the cursor keys.
I remember being absolutely horrified and disgusted. Coming from a Windows background, I've spent years making fun of quirks like "putting the cd icon in the trash can to eject the cd" etc. Nowadays I'm a bit more mellow. The Mac design philosophy still doesn't work for me; spatiality just feels like a distraction and a way to spend more time fiddling with things than actually doing work. The way MacOS handles windows still doesn't jive with how my brain works, and it feels weird to me how even the most acclaimed file manager alternatives for Windows now, like the otherwise excelent Files, are doing away with the hierarchal tree view that I feel is absolutely essential. So yeah, I can respect the philosophy for being different and I'm glad people like it, but it just runs contrary to how my brain works and how I prefer interacting with a computer. I also feel like one of the reasons for the walled gardens and so on, as well as Google and others loathing folders and hierarchies, is because users are shit at organizing their work. We've all seen the horrors of some people's cluttered desktops. or keeping all documents just in the My Documents folder. People just don't spend any time at all thinking about hierarchies or structures. It's just a mess, and so they need seach functions as soon as they have more than like 50 or so documents. And so it kind of "makes sense" to make shallow hierarchies and search functions and just big massive folders full of every document the norm. In a way, it's user-centric design. As more of a power user, it doesn't suit me at all, but I'm not the norm.
One thing I miss about Mac OS is plugins. No messy DLLs or registry. You could just add or remove plugins at will, or hold down shift while booting to disable them. When you didn't want a plugin or an application, you just delete it. No uninstall tool needed.
the registry is actually a good idea, as the amount of programs and complexity of a system increases, the need to store configuration data for those programs also increases, so with windows 95 they moved to a singular binary blob which could efficiently load configurations for everything on the entire system all at once, the adoption was spotty and misused and nowadays we've gone back to individual config files, something that the increase in memory, cpu speed, and disk speed has allowed to still work
If OS 9 had a capable web browser, I would still daily drive that. In OS9 you don't have to remember names, just where things are like in your closet, your drawer, etc. OS X ruined it all, with OS 9 you just copy a system folder and boot from it. (in anything PPC) the nice one is 9.0.4 I still use with sheepshaver on a 2018 intel mini, it prints on 2024 ps printers directly. The only problem of OS 9 was that any program is allowed to crash the entire system, forcing you to reboot. We need an integrated emulation, like it was on Tiger PPC (shuricken) with the classic environnement. The only advantage of Tiger was to have auto icon previews of pictures, but the finder was already ruined, icons must not move, now it's not a finder, it's a loose-it.
Interesting, when I switched to a Mac in early 2011 I had been using Windows PCs for over a decade and I had no problem getting into 10.6 Snow Leopard at all. :D
The tendency for companies to solo users predates the open source initiative and community. It’s more a tendency for companies to naturally try to keep their customers exclusive than anything else. As for the tendency to make “shoebox apps”, I think part of that was due to the iPhone not having a shared filesystem between apps, so app developers didn’t put much care into how they stored user-created data on disk. Since most Mac applications are sandboxed by default, there’s little reason for developers to change their behavior, and so the proliferation of shoebox apps continues.
I always miss how simple OS9 was, no big distractions on the screen. In your MS word example you had the option to close all the tool bars and just have text fill the display, on OSX/Windows you tend to have a mess of distractions unless you full screen an app. It also gave the option to setup an app with the windows ordered how you want, MS word on windows is a mess of icons. I will always miss OS9, at the same time I know it was at end of life. We know from some dev stories now that OS9 was a technical mess, it needed real work & NEXT OS was an easy fix. You also had some fun options like being able to drag the OS9 folder to an external drive and it was bootable, you can hit problems but it also did just work.
As a Linux user of sixteen years I'm pretty comfortable using MacOS - in the userspace it's very similar: The terminal uses Zero shell for a start; the layout and behaviour of the interface is very reminiscent of xfce or (even?) modern Gnome Shell. It's a far cry from the MacOS that I fondly remember using in the newspaper industry ~ I'm talking Systems 6 and 7 here. All that said, returning to it after years of Linux I feel pretty well at home. I know that it's as much - maybe more - of a 'walled garden' as modern Windows builds, but to my eyes it's a better option. This brings me to the point that If I was forced to use a corporate, licenced OS these days I would choose MacOS over Windows every day of the week.
It's really weird to see the Mac OS 9 desktop at that aspect ratio. Even though I haven't used it in 15 years, my mental image of Mac OS 9 is at 800x600 - arguably the most comfortable resolution on an iMac DV.
@@serge_stauffer To be fair, Apple would also sell some properly high-resolution displays in the 90s. Maybe to someone who used to work on one of the fist-gen Cinema Displays, this wouldn't look quite as strange.
4:13 Based on my research, the desktop/GUI wasn't actually an innovation of PARC, but from Stanford, which was first publicly shown in the "mother of all demos" video from 1968, before PARC existed. And GUI engineers from PARC actually left Xerox to work at Apple on the Lisa and Macintosh, so IMO it wasn't exactly direct theft by Apple because those engineers had already done the work before themselves... and Xerox wasn't exactly trying to push the tech anyways.
Windows Explorer also used to open folders in a new window by default, when it was first released in Windows 95. They tried to sell it as an innovation, but people really didn't like it. I'm not sure the Mac implementation was better in any way, but I never used it so it might. Microsoft changed this when they introduced Active Desktop (if I remember correctly), which was basically a rework of the Windows Explorer.
I think you're right that Active Desktop introduced it in the consumer OSs, but I know the NT4 Explorer could be set to open new folders in the same window (possible it was introduced in a Service Pack, though).
Yeah I tried it at the time and hated it. It was hard to manage. I didn't want to worry about every window position and size. I learned very quickly to open "Explorer" (which was the same exe with a folder tree in the left) and navigated the folders there.
i grew up using macos from 1986 to 2001. i love macos9. from mac plus to powerbook g3 wallstreet. it is still so elegant. i wish someone took over making modern old mac. (i still use powerpc at work for embedded systems lol) same for classic macos, opensource it, make it evolve again
Not the Mac team did, the Lisa team did it. I used a Lisa in 1983 and it was this paradigm. Later I used SunOS with X11NeWS 1989 version, and it had some of these characteristics
I remember using Windows 3.1 in high school. Never could wrap my head around that UI or that file system. Mac OS 9 seems like the same way. Not until Windows 95 it started to "make sense" to my brain.
@@JohnGaltAustria right, so what are you saying? Mac OS 9 and Windows 3.1 are alike, how? And vs what? It took some time for me to wrap my head around a hierarchical file system, is that what you're talking about? On CLI, I had been using the Apple II and diskettes but I happened to get exposed to Unix (in 1985, I think) and remember that idea as being very mysterious. By 1988 I was using ProDOS and it had subdirectories, so I think around then the light bulb went on and I wished I could explain it to everyone. Also around then I was first exposed to a PC with a hard drive.
OSX is still pretty different since its actual UNIX (unlike Linux which runs off GNU) and still maintains a lot of the spatial design philosophy. Unlike windows which is built around opening a bunch of windows on your screen at once. I think modern Mac workflow works best as a collection of full screen or large screen apps you switch between using gestures. Stage manager, mission control, the three finger workspace swipe all create a very spatial, movement focused work flow which is very natural and similar to physical space management. Similar to how classic MacOS was built to replicate a desk.
Interesting to see a younger persons perspective on this but… Honestly … What you describe as "different" about Mac OS 9 was the norm. That's pretty much how Windows 3 worked (new window for everything) It's how OS/2 worked, it's how Amiga OS worked (and how AROS, it's spiritual successor still works) and it's how many versions of GEM Desktop worked. (excluding the ones for DOS which were hobbled by Apple lawsuits so that they couldn't open new windows for each directory, and had to re-use the existing window … For some reason, the Atari ST versions were not affected) It's also how BeOS worked, and how Haiku (it's spiritual successor) still works. It's even how the Acorn RISC OS worked. Not all of them were clever enough to remember where you left icons within the directory window. The ST GEM desktop would always forget that, but could remember if you wanted that directory listed out or displaying icons tiled. You will find that not all "files" on your OS 9 Mac have an icon, though you may think they do. You'd have to fire up a command line interface of some kind, or analyse the partition in Norton to see the files that don't have an icon, because Finder won't ever show them to you. (as others have mentioned, one of those hidden folders / directories is the Desktop Folder … But it was mostly used for storing "aliases" [what Windows calls shortcuts, except they're more like a hard link, or reparse point in many ways] to icons … So you could leave the Word application icon out on your desktop) On Amiga OS "Workbench" you could select "Show all files" to see files without icons, and those would never remember where you left them. However, the ones which did have icons would stay where you left them, provided you "snapshot" the window. (I have a feeling that automatic snapshot on drop would have been left out to avoid lawsuits, because otherwise, it would be easier for the user, and for software developers to just have done that … But it was nice if you had a parkinsons moment with the mouse before you snapshot, you could close the window and re-open it to find where the heck you dropped that random icon) The location was stored in an icon file with the same name, and a .info extension. On an Apple Mac, files had multiple "data forks", which used to be pretty unique, but these days Windows NTFS will use "alternative data streams" and Linux / Unix filesystems tend to support "extended attributes" which will achieve the same thing. In those days, you had to pack up icons from a Mac in a MacBinary or BinHex archive to move them onto an FTP server, DOS / CP/M floppy and back to another Mac without loosing the resource fork. The icons, and their locations, and what default file type the application supports, or what data type a document is encoded in are all stored in a "resource fork" on Mac OS 9 … And because most other systems didn't support resource forks at that time, OS X dropped them, just as Windows NT and e2FS were making equivalent standards outside the Apple world. The most ambitious use of such multiple data streams for every file was made by BeOS (now Haiku) where you can look up all sorts of file properties within alternative streams, and the file manager supported them natively, so that the default email client had no interface what-so-ever, and was just a daemon running in the background which wrote out every email you received into a separate file in you "inbox" folder. There was a data stream to say who it was from, one to say what it was "about" one to say who else had received it, one to say how long it was, one for each attachment it contained, and the usual ones to say that it was an email, and what level of MIME encoding it used, if it was plain text, rich text, html or any of the other more exotic mail formats that were experimented with. Sure, there was an email reader that could open those files, and an email composer that could create them and save them in the outbox folder where the daemon would mail them next time you dailed into your ISP. The programs on the Apple menu aren't applications though. They're desk accessories, and the desk accessories (.acx files) on the ST GEM Desktop also appeared there (well, obviously it was an Atari menu, rather than an Apple one) when they were on the root of the boot disk. The Amiga eventually had commodities, but, sadly, there was no standardised way to access them. They usually got hotkeys, and provided APIs that could be scripted through REXX. Icons appearing on the desktop when you insert storage media is also how GEM Desktop (at least on the Atari ST) Amiga OS, BeOS/Haiku, and OS/2 worked. That's was just how computer were, before Windows became "the norm" … And for many of them, the reason Windows doesn't work like that is almost certainly because Microsoft feared being sued by Apple if they worked too much like them. As cited with GEM, many alternative desktop systems were sued for having features in common with Mac OS. Some fought, some just dropped that feature, some won, some lost, (and had to drop that feature) many went completely bust trying to fight the lawsuits. For example, the reason Windows didn't have a bin (trash, wastepaper, recycled or otherwise) icon anywhere you could drop files you no longer want onto to delete them until Windows 95 is because Apple had rabidly sued anyone who attempted to have a bin of any kind on their desktop … Amiga OS was forced, by court to place the bin for each device on the root folder (drawer) of that device, GEM was forced to remove the bin in later editions and replace it with a Delete menu option, OS/2 was forced to have a shredder on a toolbar. Ironic, since Apple, later moved the Trash Can from the desktop to a waste paper basket on the dock in OS X. Apple sued people for copying things they had copied for Xerox Parc, and forced them to prove that they also copied Xerox, rather than copying Apple. It was insane! And, of course, Microsoft were playing this same game. I never really heard of Atari, Commadore, Acorn, or even big blue (IBM) getting involved in that sort of tactic, except as victims … And, of course, the victims don't seem to have survived. Although, I would argue that we are left with only the worst examples of systems at that time, and one wonders how good the less aggressive competition would have been by now had they not been wiped out so early on. In particular, Acorn was broken up because they were deemed to hold a monopoly, making their own hardware, OS and applications, which is clearly unfair competition… It's not like poor little Apple, or Microsoft could do all that … Oh wait! That's exactly what they do, and were doing even when Acorn were trying to compete with them. It's also what Commadore, and Atari were doing. Okay, at the time, Microsoft only really had MSX machines, and they only really sold in Japan and a bit in the US, and they tended to be licensed to other hardware manufacturers. But I mean, XBox and Surface today are massive. As is Acorns ARM processor, but imagine if they managed to remain a single company, making modern, ARM based desktop computers running a modern RISC OS!? How different would the world be? We'd all have a pinboard to put our wallpaper on, and expect to drag a file out of our application and into the folder window we wanted to save it to, and we'd expect the main application menu to appear from the middle mouse button! 😆
@@michalsvihla1403 My suspicion is you're not an engineer or A+ computer technician.. XNU /MACH . The core [kernel] of OSX was open for 20 years. Unlike the NT4 kernel of windows. It Would serve you well to learn the layers of how operating systems work... Fun fact.
@@Peterthethinker "was" is the key word here and I don't need to be either an engineer or A+ computer technician to comment on a company's core philosophy, which does not stand upon technical knowledge. Calling out their approach from 20-30 years ago is of zero relevance today when looking at what they've done in the last decade. From that it's painfully obvious that they would voluntarily not open source anything.
@@michalsvihla1403 the fact is apple did more for the open movement for 20 years then you can even imagine. you just dont see it as its not a thing you see as a consumer. CUPS was Saved by apple and its how Linux and Chromebooks. can use a printer... They donate time pretty heavily back upstream to the FreeBSD project, upon which OSX is based. They are also top-tier donors to LLVM. Iam sorry. but your conflating. openSrc * SW* with a repairable computer ..
I enjoyed your video very much! Personally, I keep a virtual machine of OS X Mountain Lion because I want to keep an open-source app called Genius OSX that helped me graduate from college. Anki is okay, but the uncluttered and simplicity of Genius is unmatched. I wish someone would create a modern version of it!
one bit of advice im sure you've heard, put the mic down, on something which absorbs shock (even a tissue box works) and use a pop filter (or put a sock over your mic)
As someone who started using Macs in the early 90s and used them almost exclusively and have used every version from 5 through 9 of the classic Mac OS, this was really wild to watch because for me all of this just the way it was and I never thought it was that special - windows just never made any sense to me because this is what I grew up with. Also, the X in Mac OS X is the Roman numeral 10 so it’s pronounced “Mac OS ten” not “Mac OS ex” :-) thanks for the video though, even if it made me feel old
Hard to believe after a few short years, this grew up into being linus tech tips.
As someone old enough to have lived through most of the personal computing era, I think your perspective regarding the walled gardens is apt. It is a defense mechanism, as is the fight over first sale doctrine, fair use, and the right to repair.
I don't know what I'm going to do when my 10 year old Thinkpad gives out. They simply don't make computers like they used to.
@@cineminttechtipsI have a t410 Thinkpad that's 13 years old now that still sees daily use
@@cineminttechtips thinkpads are great, although the use windows (unless you hackintoshed it!!!)
I do not fully agree. I love simplicity, but making computers disposable only adds to our problems in the long run because 100% of that system simply can't be reused. It's blasphemy to say you as an organization claims to care about "climate change" (something that's not obvious to many if it's actually is a problem or not) would produce products that only add to the landfill problem. It's straitup blasphemy. If Apple was really concerned their laptops wouldn't only be easily serviceable, but they would give the tools to do so. Yet that's not Apple. Because killing people (supposedly) is less important then money or the whole "climate change" propaganda is just that and they know it.
I've been using every version of Windows since v3.1.1, and was always used to simply download and install apps directly from an installer or a zip file. I was bewildered when I first saw an M$ AppStore. lol I would never use that, rather find it as a separate installer.
The files on the desktop are actually in a hidden folder called "Desktop Folder" in "Macintosh HD". It shows the files/folders in it on the desktop, along with the trash and mounted disks. So it actually works similar to Windows or the current macOS. Some versions would also show printers on the desktop, giving access to the print queue. It would also have a Desktop Folder for each mounted disk, and on the desktop it shows files from all of them. So it you drag a file from one disk to the Desktop, it would actually stay on that disk. And when you eject it, the files would disappear from the desktop.
The current macOS actually can still be set so that the icons in a folder can be set so that they can be freely moved. It even has more options, such as changing the icons size for one folder, or adding a background image or color. There is also an option to hide the toolbar, and then it works the same as in classic Mac OS, it opens a new window for each folder, and saves its position/size. The main difference is that on classic you could never open two windows with the same folder.
In some early versions they also tried to extend the spatial desktop metaphor further, for example the users/group control panel used to be represented as a Finder window with icons for users and folders for groups. You could even put users into the Trash, mixed with normal files. Also "suitcases" in the System folder ("System", and fonts) show as folders, even though they are actually resources.
It does have a task manager (the top right) menu, and it can be set to automatically hide windows from background applications. But this was added later, the original Mac OS had only one active program at a time. On early macs you would have to change floppy disks often for loading different applications, so each floppy could have its own System Folder on it, so that there is a Finder to load when you quit the application.
Also applications can have multiple windows, but one global menu bar on top of the screen. And you can only launch each application a single time, but it can open multiple files. Windows still today allows to open several instances of the same application. For example opening several Notepad files actually opens multiple instances of Notepad. In early Windows versions, it was usually one window per task. So a window has its own menu bar, and there was even "Multiple Document Interface", where there would be a frame window, with multiple windows that were contained inside of it.
Also, dating back to the Apple LISA (where the desktop metaphor was stretched to its limit by modern standards) is a "put away" option for desktop icons. See, on the LISA, you could only open and use files while they were on your desktop, just like a real desk, and the "put away" option would then return it to its folder for you once you were done. This function actually persisted in the Mac, all the way until they ditched Classic.
Is there a setting when opening nested folders to open it in the same window instead of creating new ones for every level? That's what I saw in this video, but need toms clarification.
Very Unix/Linux
Printers (and other devices) acted like a Unix system. They were mountable, just like devices in the /etc directory of a Unix system can be mounted.
If you opened them up you'd see the print ques. Modern Unix systems, and thus the Mac OS still uses this mount system. It's just that most of your devices are hidden in the /etc directory.
Some visual Unix desktops still actually allow you to mount device to the desktop to this date.
@@PhirePhlame Man, I like that metaphor- it's a taskbar, but for all the files you're currently working with. And it cleanly fits in with the desktop on macOS showing what's “mounted”.
I see other replies mentioned that the Desktop Folder was a hidden folder on the hard disk, but I’m not sure anyone mentioned the huge caveat:
Every disk that was inserted had its own Desktop Folder, and when you dragged a file residing on that disk onto the desktop, it would just move to the Desktop Folder on THAT disk, and would disappear if the disk was ejected.
Back in the day, it was drilled into newbies NEVER to put documents on the Desktop, because very often people would receive a file on a Zip/Jazz disk to do some work with, drag it to the desktop thinking they’ve copied it, and then would hand the disk back, or even erase the disk not realizing they’re deleting their file.
This was a huge footgun and led to the Desktop being redesigned for Mac OS X. My father used to scold me for saving things to the desktop even after OS X was installed, because he had PTSD from it.
Yeah. One of the interesting design quirks born of having a desktop before you have hard drives.
Windows on macOS don’t tend to spread them selves around. In Microsoft Windows windows want to take up the full screen or tile. Document windows appear nested inside application windows which limits how you can layout documents from several applications on screen.
macOS does not suffer from this problem. One window per document not nested. Also the zoom button doesn’t make the window take up the full screen as it does on Microsoft OS. Instead on macOS the application calculates the optimal size for the window to be able to display its current contents and set the size accordingly.
You hinted at the way things behave on macOS. Windows and icons always remember the way you positioned them. Once you move a folder window it will in future open in exactly the same state. It doesn’t matter so much if it’s messy because everything is where you left it.
You also missed the beauty of the macOS desktop. It’s your workspace. Drag any documents or applications you wish to use for your current task so that they are easily accessible. Once you are done then select them and use the menu option “Put Away”. macOS will move them back to the folders they were originally stored in.
I still miss some aspects of classic macOS.
You hit the nail on the head with "It's your workspace". I wasn't around for this ethos of desktops but I still feel there is a semblance of this even today in how Apple promotes windowing on macOS through their marketing material. The silo-fication of apps has absolutely changed how people use desktop interfaces but there's still so much value in the very tangible feel of "put everything anywhere you want" approach that Apple likes to feature in their product mockups. Even their newer window management features like Stage Manager flourish most on giant displays in contrast to the "space-efficient window tiling" attitude that most people in tech have today.
I rarely use computers with screens larger than a 24" display, and I grew up on Windows XP and 7 so I'm used to the tileable approach of window management. However, I remember how freeing it felt using my university's 5K iMacs earlier this year. I wasn't worried if it could become cluttered, or that it didn't have the window tiling app that I use on my personal MacBook, because there was more space than I could ever waste by not having an app occupy it. It almost makes me want to get a giant 4K monitor just to explore that paradigm more since I never had the chance to.
YES! being a windows person since elementary school, my first experience with a mac was in college, where one of my math classes had a lab portion taught with macs running either mac os 8 or 9, and i was fascinated by the way the computer and OS worked, like for example the keyboard had a power button to power on the mac, or that you ejected floppy disks by dragging them to the trash.
one day i hastily dragged some homework files to a floppy disk, and when i came back to the lab days later and sat at a different computer, i was so surprised to see the file icons were arranged in the exact same haphazard way i had dragged them to the disk! i was so curious to learn how the OS saved that info
The idea behind everything being spatial is the idea that I as the user decide where on the screen my files go, where my app windows live, etc. I put them somewhere, and they stay put much like a physical object would. I'm constantly frustrated by modern OSes that never seem to remember where I put stuff.
This is what I find most erksome about modern OS interfaces, even MacOS. I want to put something somewhere and be able to get it through feel, where I practically don’t have to look or think about what I am doing. The classic Mac interface had that, a deep sense of spatial awareness that you could organize the tools and documents in such a way that you had a really smooth flow in how you used the computer. The use of search bars and key presses needed in modern OS’s to navigate and find stuff is a kluge to compensate for the fact that the OS cares more about what it’s designers envision that what their users need. If you put a pen on your desk, and came back to find that now it has been placed somewhere else by the desk because you opened a drawer, would that piss you off? Yeah, I’m an old school Mac user, but I’ve used a lot of stuff, and classic Mac wasn’t my first GUI OS. But it remains my favorite. Just give me MacOS 9 with a modern kernel and some graphical cleanup and modernization, and I would be happy and productive.
You said it. My wife can never find files on her dammed Mac book. I could never get things organized in OSX like I could in OS9. Or OS8. Or OS7 :)
Reffering to something you touched on in the part about silos - I honestly miss the the straight and simple quid-pro-quo of old proprietary software. I pay the developer, the developer gives me the program. Want a new version? Buy it again. No subscription bullshit that forces me to fund active development of the software when the old version is perfectly fine for my use-case for many years, no forced updates. Not having to make an account for everything (that could be arbitrarily terminated at any time).
I don't actually think that it's consequence of the open-source movement, but rather the proliferation of internet (though the two have been closely linked). It makes software piracy extremely easy, so the old model quid-pro-quo no longer works when you can just get the same software for free from some website or torrent. At the same time, it makes subscription-based software possible.
Hum, I decided it was because once software was good enough, it was hard to persuade people to buy a new version, so to avoid going bust, you either bake in designed obsolescence, get the OS or hardware manufacturer to break compatibility, or switch to subscription... or all of the above.
@JimAllen-Persona If you can cough *find* an old "offline" registration key, you can still install at least up to CS4, perhaps even newer, I haven't tried.
@@phipli naw they terminated the activation servers, its crack or nothing now
@@doltBmB I literally installed a copy of CS4 about 3 weeks ago. There are special offline keys that don't need to check the (missing) activation servers. I haven't tried newer versions so couldn't say regarding CS5 and 6, but CS4, you can 100% install without a crack.
I left this same message on your Reddit post but I love content that asks whether we lost something that may have been intuitively better than today’s macOS.
In my opinion, since the original Macintosh OS was introduced in 1984, just in terms of desktop UIs, I don’t think much has changed in nearly 40 years. This metaphor (however you want to call it) has had real staying power.
Great video. Keep them coming on vintage Mac!
There's also the concept of the "proxy icon".
This icon appears in a window title bar and it represents the file or folder referenced by that window, and you can use it as if it were an icon from the file manager.
Example 1: you have a word document open. In a browser and click to attach, the dialog to choose file opens. You drag and drop the icon from the word title bar to the open dialog, it gets selected. Boom.
Example 2: You have a folder open and you download a file. The choose folder dialog appears. You drag the folder icon from the title bar of the folder and it gets selected as destination folder. Click save, it's downloaded there.
I was so disappointed when GTK3 and Gnome stopped implementing this. Nautilus had a proxy icon to the current folder on the bottom left status bar, but it was also removed.
We had great user interfaces that were ruined by people who didn't understand them.
I played with classic Mac.
I noticed three things that were primarily different from Windows 98 which is what I grew up on.
1. The Global Taskbar. I love it and hate it. Got to make sure you're focused on the right thing
2. Closing a window doesn't close the app, it's still running in the background. Gets annoying
3. Installing stuff was a breeze no wizards or figuring out directories, you just dragged a folder into a drive and that was it for the most part
The thought to give full control to the application goes deep and is the very reason it was crashing. It gave all system resources to the app, and the app had to give back control to the OS. If the app fails it can’t give back control and computer needs to be restarted. At least once per day. :D
The original designers would have liked to have been more robust, but were told that costs had to be kept to an absolute minimum to allow as many ordinary people as possible to own one.
But then they were actually sold at a premium, betraying the vision to maximize profit margin.
7:53 IIRC, MutliFinder _became_ the default Finder implementation in System Software 7. I know I couldn't select the simple Finder in 7.5.3, the first version of macOS I really dug into.
Also, those free-floating text in the Office installation CD? Those are either files or folders (usually folders) that have a custom icon of a _blank_ icon (macOS' Finder still allows this, but now folders can have actual images as their backgrounds).
I remember there being at least one tool which would take an image, slice it up into icons, and then lay them out in a folder, assigned to files with names consisting of whitespace so you could generate your pretty branding banner in the gold master for your distribution media.
The key thing about Mac OS Classic and Modern is what was called the resource fork on classic OS and on modern MacOS it is called a “package”.
What this was was basically every application is like a container that holds everything needed about it. The icons, dialog boxes, sounds, libraries etc etc. This makes them self contained.
And this is why the Mac doesn’t need an installer or a registry or a boatload of DLL’s and supporting files sitting loosely next to the executable.
On the classic OS you used a tool called ResEdit to get to them. On modern macOS you get to them by right clicking and selecting show package contents.
Regarding the menubar/toolbar, the only difference there is that Mac has always made the menu bar become the front most application where windows etc put a separate menubar in every application window. And you can only use that menu bar if that window /application is the front most window so it makes more sense to just have a single menu bar.
The reason windows did not have this, or a hierarchical list view and many other differences were most likely because of legal battle reasons during the early stages of the GUI wars.
There’s surprisingly not a whole lot of difference between the early Mac Systems and the modern Mac OS GUI / “Finder”. The main difference is the underlying core is UNIX.
Very cool video. For context, I was born in 82, and learned to read and write on a Mac 512k, then lived through the whole multimedia and early Internet era on a Performa, then an iBook. Then moved to Linux when I figured Apple lost the plot and I was a broke student anyway. It's kind of wild to me that people would immerse themselves in those OSs so long after the fact, and your analysis is very interesting to me, as your perspectives differs so much from someone whose de facto daily life it was.
You didn't mention it so I don't know if you're aware of it, but the command and the option key have always been a very central mechanism in classic Macs, and have always been assigned very consistent modifying properties across programs. As such, an essential feature of the finder is that if you open a folder with the option key pressed, it will open the selected folder and close the parent folder at the same time. It quickly becomes an essential tool to navigate the finder efficiently. It's fast, intuitive, and suddenly that clutter becomes manageable and controlled even as the folder structure grows.
I appreciated a lot your take on walled gardens, freedom and control. It's an angle of the discussion that you don't often see discussed that way. It's also one of the things that ended up driving me away from Apple's products as mentioned above, but it's one of the reasons I have the hardest time to articulate in conversations.
Cheers!
Like option closes the last window, you can command click on the window's folder name to get a pop up menu of the parent directories too. Or you can press Command Up Arrow. Both of these can be combined with option. Command Down also opens the selected file and is good for navigating with just the keyboard. Arrow keys by themselves move the selection around.
One of my first GUI experiences was a Mac Classic in the early 1990s which I remember fondly. I also moved away from Apple due to their walled garden approach with the iPhone (and making their 2007-era Macbooks obsolete and non-upgradable after just a few years). That felt like a big step back in user freedom compared to the Palm Tungstens I was using at the time. But I still really like the feel of classic Mac OS, especially System 7 up to version 9.
my experience is very similar to yours, born in 78, first mac is Macintosh SE/30 (I think), always have Mac / Wintel throughout the years. The early years of OS X on late PPC / Early Intel era seem to be the most comfortable for me, in the later years.... there seem to be a push to adopt from iOS. Now, we have a weird situation where iPad is not Mac-enough to function properly, Mac sometimes acts like an iPad for no functional reason (What's the point of Launchpad?)
The secret sauce of MacOS has always been - at least since OS 9 - modifier keys. ex. OS 9-present has “spring loaded” folders: so where you were showing double click a folder, opens a new window, etc. you can actually drag a file over a folder (either hold til it opens or press spacebar) and continue drilling down into the directory until you’re ready to move it, and when you let go of your mouse all of those temporarily opened windows will immediately close. Also, with OS 9 you can drag a folder to the bottom of the screen and it’ll become a spring loaded “docked” folder. I actually miss that UI; although it’s fairly well represented in OS X.
I miss folder tunneling, but I no longer have to explain to Mac noobs how to 'click-and-a-half' to do it.
Yes, I also miss the "docked" (tabbed) folders. But isn't minimizing them to the macOS dock (or the Windows taskbar) somehow close?
@@theol1044 It’s a fairly similar UI metaphor, but functionally distinct. For example in OS 9 icon view you had the option to turn an entire folder into one click buttons, so you could take app aliases into a folder and turn it into a spring loaded app launcher. … Of course, that was long before Spotlight, which is how I launch apps these days. 🤷♂️
@@XMattingly Oh, I didn't know that trick yet :-) But didn't OS8/9 actually have a dedicated launcher (that came into being as some kind of Performa special IIRC) that wasn't installed (or active) by default, but could be added (or activated) as an option? I remember it being a floating window with clickable buttons. AFAIR I found it ugly and clunky, and I used the MS Office dropdown menu launcher (in the menu bar) at the time.
@@XMattingly Yes, they built the “At Ease” launcher into the Finder options so you could have tiles/buttons to launch apps.
My dominant memory of using MacOS 9 was that it crashed usually at least once day, and if I had forgotten to save my work, I lost hours.
lol damn that's not cool.
Ah, the days before autosave….glad those are over
Yeah I remember lots of Bomb crashes 😅
Win95 crashed about twice per day with the same result…that was my motivation to move to win2k
This is a problem of monolithic single task operating systems. Nether Windows 95 nor Mac OS were true multitasking systems. You could get the OS pretty stable, it was just about not stuffing with it and overloading it with system extensions, also having enough RAM per app that it didn't crash the system.
My first Mac OS was 8.6 back in 2000. I still love classic Mac OS.
This is the first of your videos that I've seen. I really enjoyed!
Thank you very much!
I remember the day the iMac and the G3 came out. I was a tech lead on a Mac OS 9 software product and we were all amazed at what Apple had done. The OS 9 Finder had some precision the current macOS Finder has lost. Also read Bruce Tognazzini’s books.
When I started using a Mac at work (about 1988), it had System 6.x installed. With System 6 you could only run one program at a time unless you installed the "Multi-Finder" system extension.
His first experience was in 2020, wow I'm getting old... I've been using MacOS since 1986 🙂
Loved this video! I was a Mac user around 2011-2015 and a bunch of these design paradigms were still there. I remember being confused when an older program would have a bunch of floating toolbars and widgets that seemed cluttered and dated to me. I also remember how folders were semi-spatial; you could rearrange contents of a folder to sort by date, alphabetical order, etc. but you could also move an item in 2D space and it would stay where you put it.
Now I use GNOME and it is definitely my favorite paradigm, combining the best of macOS with the best of other interfaces IMO
The best way to show this is that if you want to copy your system to another floppy you just drag the "system" folder to a floppy icon and that's it. You have a bootable floppy with a Mac os system
I originally posted this to reddit but realized I should be benefiting the algo for you.
I really find this interesting on two fronts: Windows user and someone who's considerably younger than me as my first computer of my own was a G3 450, at the very end of the OS 9 era and live in macOS both personally and professionally as a developer.
Just a few thoughts:
- DMGs aren't inherently a manifestation of disks as Apple had already killed disks with the iMac and was prepping users for the internet future in OS 9. DMGs are compressed but offer a few extras ZIP/RAR etc do not as they have a built in check sum, encryption options and partitioning.
- I found it interesting you said you'd have certain level of disgust as a Windows user. You'd have to compare OS 9 to Windows 98 or ME. XP was a huge leap but but happened during the same time Apple was gearing up OS X, Windows 2k with it's preemptive multitasking and protected memory was oodles ahead of of OS 9 and became the backbone of XP. Apple had to drop OS 9 and failed with it's Copland OS. It acquired NeXT instead of BeOS and the rest is history.
- While I think its just your wording, multifinder existed even in System 4 before Apple called it Mac OS. However it's really jenky way with cooperative multitasking.
I like hearing an outside perspective as I'm a bit too close to the subject to sometimes step back. I somewhat disagree with the take on Open Source as the true answer. OS X was far less invested in a wall garden from the outset with X11, Unix compatibility and true *nix terminal, and switching away from Apple only standards like Apple Talk to baking in SMB, Apache into the OS as well as OpenGL and later OpenCL and forking KHTML to create Webkit. However the problem becomes that purely open source means relying on community which may or may not have the resources to meet the needs of the company. Apple's experiment with investing heavily into Open source yielded mixed results like getting burned by OpenGL. On the other hand, it heavily influence tech like creating Webkit which would create Blink which would create VP8 which would create Node. Open source wasn't in danger of winning as there's simply no answer to Apple integration like hand-off, continuity and air drop.
There's a balance between closed and open and early OS X was as close to ideal as we'd ever see, as there's real benefits to a large corporation with many people in places Open Source lacks like QA, testers and support staff.
Anyhow, long winded post. Enjoyed hearing your thoughts.
Even the basic ZIP format supports symmetric encryption and DEFLATE checks the contents with CRC-32 checksums. What DMG *does* support that very few compression formats do not, are Forks - something that can trip up Windows users as well, since NTFS supports Forks as Alternative Data Streams, and Windows *does* still use them for certain functions
very good video! interesting analysis regarding open source software and it’s impact on service/software atomization !
It's cool how Apple is bringing back the spatial desktop idea with VisionOS. While you can actually run multiple applications at once, the "infinite" screen area of a mixed reality headset allows applications to return to having options and settings for an application in a separate window that the user can arrange as they like. VisionOS also saves where you place your applications in space, so when you open an application it will return to the same window layout you had the last time.
Mac OS 9 may have been way ahead of its time. The self contained application window is a product of the limited view a monitor gives of your virtual space, but maybe not the most intuitive or user friendly way to interact with a computer.
I used Mac OS during the 90’s in high school and in college for graphic design. It felt very much like something that was trying to emulate traditional tools to help achieve your goals. As stated in this video, the desktop was literally for spreading out on, like a real desk. So much so that wooden desktop wallpapers were introduced just to add to this sense. Even the taskbar being at the top made perfect sense as one reads a book from top to bottom. Windows on the other hand felt more like an organised system with powerful right mouse button options. Windows seemed more efficient but a little less humane than Mac OS. Both operating systems made me happy in different ways.
Thanks for sharing this. I was primarily a Mac user from 1995 and onwards, and you made many good points about the differences. I would have used a lower resolution when demonstrating MacOS 9 on youtube. It would have made it appear more like it did back then, while also more clear for the viewers.
As someone who has used os9 OS X was an amazing step up. Next step which it was based off was a quantum leap forward.
Actually it does have a "Desktop" folder in the directory, but you can't see it on the machine. If you share the the drive on the network, and connect from another Mac, you can see the "Desktop" folder in the directory.
I was born in the late 80’s and grew up with a variety of classic Macs in the house. (And an Amiga, but that was just what I played Lemmings on.) I remember when OSX came out, and some of the changes were quite jarring.
The concept of DMGs absolutely baffled me. Why am I downloading this thing that pretends to be a disk but isn’t, that I then need to “copy” my program off of, and then eject and delete the dmg when it’s done? Gimme mah Stuffit archives, consarnit!
Folder management took a lot of getting used to. I grew up opening up Macintosh HD one time, and opening up all the folders in sequence that I’d need to, say, move a file from one place to another. I remember it being kind of satisfying to close all the open folders when I was done with something.
OSX was pretty. It ran Bugdom. Cool. But no matter how many system updates I sat through, there was never any other interface themes other than Aqua and Graphite. And this was supposed to be advanced?! Pssh, OS9 had way more color themes. Thank goodness for ShapeShifter!
because they're trying to shoehorn mac functionality into a unix system
GNOME 2.4 and OS/2 Workplace Shell were also spatial, amazing user experience.
I loved all these interfaces, never understood all the criticism it received.
Check out Amiga Workbench, also spatial, works in much the same way, released 1985.
Amiga fan spotted in an Apple thread... have a like, good sir
I worked in Amiga OS 3.1 for a few years. Switching to Mac OS was easier to me back in the day than to Windows.
I loved this. An absolutely intelligent breakdown of the past and current OS/software landscapes, while also expressing an appreciation for a paradigm I never got to experience and yet miss as a tactile person myself. I mean, except for the jank "solution" to multi-tasking that is MultiFinder. I know it only works the way it does due to the limits of the kernel, and Copland was supposed to fix it, but it doesn't stop it from sounding like a frustration.
Woah, this feels like a 2010s UA-cam video. Nostalgia!
Mission accomplished
But isn’t most of this still true in modern macOS? Like the desktop not being limited to a folder is still true since it also shows connected drives for example. The list of installed Applications is still just a folder (that’s why you just need to drag and drop an .app file to applications to install it), although by default you use the launchpad to view your installed apps you can also right click launchpad to bring up the classic app list. The Finder is still visual when using the default view so you can place files anywhere in the window and add background images and text but if you don‘t like this you can change the view to list or columns. I think in settings you can also set Finder to open folders in new windows and now with stage manager the one app at a time focus is stronger than ever before.
The desktop IS a folder on the classic mac OS, at least going back to 7.0. But the folder is hidden. The reason for preferring DMGs has nothing to do with emulating the classic OS; it's down to installers being dangerous and misused, installing who knows what, who knows where. Apple prefers drag-and-drop installations of application bundles because they're less likely to screw up the OS.
Yes.. BUT it didn't save files off of an external drive. If you moved a file or folder off of an external to the desktop, it did not copy to the drive volume - to do that you'd have to open the drive image, navigate to the Documents or whatever folder you wanted and drag/drop the file there. If you unmounted the external, whatever you'd put on the desktop from it, disappeared. Classic Desktop was more a workspace than a folder. I did a ton of ripping vinyl on my old G3 (I had the Bordeaux perch card w/ RCA inputs..and a hot copy of Final Vinyl) under OS 8.6 then later 9.2.2 and found it critical to rebuild the desktop every few months because the locations of the icons would start to drift around the desktop.
@@foodandart5808 Each disk/volume has it's own desktop folder so you ejected the disk, any items on its desktop (or in the trash, which was also it's own hidden folder) would vanish.
Rebuilding the desktop was a different that. That was a database file which kept track of icons, comments etc.
@@foodandart5808hold down the option key to copy to the system desktop
App bundles remind me of AppImages. It's neat.
There is a lot of holes in this video. This is what happens with someone with zero experience in equipment that came before they were even born, decides to make a youtube video.
Opinionated? Oh yes, you have probably no idea how heated the debates were in the early days of the internet or earlier. Macintosh, Windows, Unix, Atari, Amiga, Linux... God knows i spent countless hours arguing why Mac was the best or dare i say only computer one could use.
It was and still is.
I've used Mac OS from System 6.0.8, 7.1, 7.3.5, 7.5.5 and from Mac OS 8.0, 8.5, 9.0, 9.2.2, 10.0 beta public release through the current version of Mac OS X.
I still remember all those OS versions
My first Os was DRDos. I moved to MS Dos 5.2 and loved it. Then I moved to an other city and didn't took my old PC with me.
My roommate had an old Atari ST left, and this was my first contact with a gui. Later he sold me his PPC with MacOs 7.2 I loved it so much! So intuitive, so clean, and with hexedit I could fiddle around with the gui.
Then I got a used eMac with MacOS X and I was slightly irritated. It seemed totally different to Classic MacOs. Several Years later I "converted" to pc because it gaves me the freedom I was missing. And I never looked back. Now I think about emulating classic MacOS 9 on a Linux system if it's possible.
I have the most nostalgia for MacOS 7 (specifically 7.5.5, which was a very stable version I used for years). I loved how apps had multiple Windows that could be arranged to maximize screen space, which is better than windows with tabs like many apps on modern MacOS. The desktop was always a little quirky - if you dragged a file from a floppy to the desktop, it would still be on the floppy and would disappear when you'd eject it! The history behind the "pink" and "blue" operating system teams at Apple and absorbing NeXT for the dual purpose of getting back Steve Jobs and acquiring a stable, modern operating system is quite fascinating. Good video, good walk down memory lane.
System 7 forever!
For someone who (likely) wasn't alive when Classic Mac OS was the current generation of OS for the Mac, you have managed to pick up on a lot of little details that, frankly, I wasn't expecting you to notice. Good job!
I liked that I could just drag a file into a folder that would open it automatically on startup.
Hints on Mac OS 9: learn about the combos. For example: 1) option+ == opens a folder in same window without opening a new one. 2) option+ == drops down a cyclic menu where you can choose which level of directory you want in window.
Option double click closes the last window rather than opens the next in the same window. The menu from the window name is command click.
I know that your knowledge may not be exact, but I like to see different perspectives, especially when they take me to the times I was seeing things differently.
I’m highly fond of classic systems and the software ecosystems they have. If you want to experience a classic system with a rich history and huge back catalog, and is arguably somewhat still usable, I would recommend taking a serious dive into 68k AmigaOS. Not PPC AmigaOS 4. Most Americans have no idea what they were missing while poking around with their DOS and classic MacOS computers. Seriously. Do a deep dive and discover another universe of computing.
Definitely! I wanted an Amiga 1200 so bad in the early 90's. But, I ended up getting a Mac Classic II. The Amiga was so ahead of the times in regards to graphics, hardware, and multitasking. Just look at what Video Toaster could do. You could never do what it could on a Mac.
I used Mac OS 9 as my main OS as late as 2008. I'm still quite familiar with it, I've never forgotten it and like keeping around Mac OS 9 computers. Classic Mac OS did a lot of great things, but then some things were horrible like resource forks and drivers.
I don't recall the display resolution of a classic Macintosh being that huge.
Your probably getting it mixed up with an old television maybe, but most old computer monitors (especially in the 90's) were decent quality
Great video and something i would have never heard about otherwise.
I love classic Mac OS! It's so fun to play around with, like a toy or something these days. It's really fun
When I was in middle school & high school (in the 90s), my schools had some Macs with OS versions 7 through 8.6 . I thought those were interesting, although at home I was always a DOS/Windows user.
My first mac ran OS 8.1. I remember the old classic very well. Good memories...
Bought my first Mac in 1984.
ImageWriter as well.
Those were the days.
If you don’t want a separate window after each click, hold down option. If you want to get to everything in one window switch to list view in the view menu. What you get there are disclosure triangles to drill down the hierarchy. Something that was and still is a pain in windows because you have to use the file explorer.
Mac OS follows numerous principles of design, like Pareto's 80/20. They are masters of that. I'm glad to watch your thoughts and parallelisms about classic Mac OS and wall gardens paradigm.
In these times (I'm 38 yo now) I use the Macs of my father, our house was a little photography studio, and wonders the luxury of SCSI ports, or Magneto-optical drives were use like another disk drive in their computers, imagine years before the burnings of CDROM, those mo disks of 128mb, 256mb and more, are a wonderfull without burning software, without any kind of software, only a driver in setup, nothing more, it's like an infinite flow of hard drives, working like a hard drive.
You can place icons in folders spatially in MacOS X+ as well. Just choose "Icons" view and "None" in sorting and you good to go. Moreover, you can choose other views and sorts and get back to how you left it spatially afterwards if you revert these two settings.
That was really interesting to see. Never used Mac OS at that time. but did use SunView, X, GEM, and early MS Windows. A great point you made is that those were the early times of windowing type systems, and it was by no means standardized or obvious how how they should best work. Add to that the hardware limitations like floppies, and how different users were more hands on, those systems did a loss less abstraction of hardware than what a typical user sees today. Look forwards to seeing more of your videos!
In the early 2000's I'd often be babysat by my uncle and he had an iMac running whichever OS came with the Aqua theme. I thought it was the coolest things in the world because it had a few games on it but it also defined what I thought a computer should be for a long time. Even as I pilot into the world of Linux through Arch I check occasionally to see if someone has released a similar theme as a desktop environment.
"if your computer is cluttered then your mind doesn't have to be"
I can't agree but that explains their abysmally bad windows management even today
The desktop IS a folder when a volume is accessed from a network, so it would suggest Apple simply chose to not let it be accessible via a folder when only accessed locally. I’ve used MacOS for 20+ years, the first version I got to know was 7.5.3, and I’ve used version as early as from System 6, all the way till High Sierra.
Excellent presentation! Thank you!
I have the fondest memories of running OS 7 and 9 (before it was "classic") on both a 7100 and a G3. It was focused, simple, you did one thing at a time, actually. That made me very economical with the use of resources nowadays (closing unused Chrome tabs, anyone?) so yes, it was a different time and a different work dynamic back in 1998.
Mac OS was so intuitive for me in 2009.. In few day I got used to it!Using it since then.
We could return to easy installs on Windows now that PCs have enough RAM to let each app load up a full copy of the C/C++ runtime libraries, MFC, .NET, and whatever else they use. But that wasn't the case for many years.
Great video, I appreciate how it doesn't seem scripted and you're just walking us through the system. I might be totally off but to me the desktop metaphor has always felt forced, unwieldy, and difficult to implement. A file tree model with links seems to be the right level of abstraction to account for most of a computer's functions as seen by the end-user. It's always cool to see older approaches that take the metaphor more literally like this one or Microsoft Bob, in which the home screen looks like an office with a physical desktop
an actual tree view is horrible to use, but the vista breadcrumps nicely reifies the folder structure as a piece of UI I think, it's very sad that they have moved away from that because it really was genius
@@doltBmB Agreed! I think trees serve better as a way to conceptualize storage but are not helpful as a visual metaphor. When you say you moved away from it are you talking about how you don't see a full breadcrumb trail when using Explorer?
I love Mac Classic, when I was growing up - especially in the years leading up to 1998.
That's the kind of OS review I always looked for on UA-cam. Not just using old apps and games, but showing how the system was designed to be used. Another OS I always wanted to see in action was OS/2, that's why I'm trying it out on a VM.
Been using ArcaOS in Parallels with Intel Mac Pro 2013 for few years now. I remember Workplace Shell was very interesting comparing to old 16-Bit Windows. By that time I had not used older Mac OS to compare. New challenge, make Arca run on UTM so it can be used in Apple Silicon Macs in the future!
Gen Z here, I remember being aged 7/8 having a mac g5 and the first ipad, 16gb running IOS 5.1.1. The mac was osx, there was a definite good vibe those days compared to computing of today minus a few minor issues.
Mac OS 9 does actually have a "taskbar", it's in the upper right corner, there's a dropdown window with a list of all applications running.
There are a lot of tricks you missed in this video. One of the classics was that Option-double-click on a folder would open the new window and close the previous behind it. macOS was and is designed to be used one-handed by novice users, and two-handed with the other hand on modifier keys for experienced users.
Another classic macOS tip (still relevant in the latest macOS versions) is the ability to hide on an app-by-app basis (as opposed to window minimization). Command-H will hide the current app, and Command-Option-H will hide every other app. You can also find these menu commands in the top-right application menu, or in the application-named menu in modern macOS.
ive only ever used mac os 9 in sheepshaver, on my 2009 MacBook, but it does have a lot of interesting things, but like most older operating systems, I don't know how to use it well, only just enough to do whatever simple task I'm trying.
Apple's support for the pointing device has always been supreme. On 68K, the mouse used a hardware CPU interrupt, resulting it very solid feel and accuracy; best support for drag and drop of any system; easiest OS to clone bootable sys. In the old day,s you could create bootable backup by dragging the System folder to another disk (it would ruin scripts transparently). Drag to Recycle run a silent uninstall script as does drag to /Applications to install. Probably on OSX they use 2D/3D hardware acceleration for the mouse and window dragging. But Win/Linux better for window tiling, alt-F for menus instead of Ctrl-F2 on mac, which requires also holding [fn] then use the cursor keys.
The golden times of Apple: Aqua interface, PowerMacs. It was a universe within a universe ❤
I remember being absolutely horrified and disgusted. Coming from a Windows background, I've spent years making fun of quirks like "putting the cd icon in the trash can to eject the cd" etc. Nowadays I'm a bit more mellow. The Mac design philosophy still doesn't work for me; spatiality just feels like a distraction and a way to spend more time fiddling with things than actually doing work. The way MacOS handles windows still doesn't jive with how my brain works, and it feels weird to me how even the most acclaimed file manager alternatives for Windows now, like the otherwise excelent Files, are doing away with the hierarchal tree view that I feel is absolutely essential. So yeah, I can respect the philosophy for being different and I'm glad people like it, but it just runs contrary to how my brain works and how I prefer interacting with a computer.
I also feel like one of the reasons for the walled gardens and so on, as well as Google and others loathing folders and hierarchies, is because users are shit at organizing their work. We've all seen the horrors of some people's cluttered desktops. or keeping all documents just in the My Documents folder. People just don't spend any time at all thinking about hierarchies or structures. It's just a mess, and so they need seach functions as soon as they have more than like 50 or so documents. And so it kind of "makes sense" to make shallow hierarchies and search functions and just big massive folders full of every document the norm. In a way, it's user-centric design. As more of a power user, it doesn't suit me at all, but I'm not the norm.
One thing I miss about Mac OS is plugins. No messy DLLs or registry. You could just add or remove plugins at will, or hold down shift while booting to disable them. When you didn't want a plugin or an application, you just delete it. No uninstall tool needed.
the registry is actually a good idea, as the amount of programs and complexity of a system increases, the need to store configuration data for those programs also increases, so with windows 95 they moved to a singular binary blob which could efficiently load configurations for everything on the entire system all at once, the adoption was spotty and misused and nowadays we've gone back to individual config files, something that the increase in memory, cpu speed, and disk speed has allowed to still work
Wow. Thank you for this video. It brought back a lot of memories.
If OS 9 had a capable web browser, I would still daily drive that. In OS9 you don't have to remember names, just where things are like in your closet, your drawer, etc. OS X ruined it all, with OS 9 you just copy a system folder and boot from it. (in anything PPC) the nice one is 9.0.4 I still use with sheepshaver on a 2018 intel mini, it prints on 2024 ps printers directly. The only problem of OS 9 was that any program is allowed to crash the entire system, forcing you to reboot. We need an integrated emulation, like it was on Tiger PPC (shuricken) with the classic environnement. The only advantage of Tiger was to have auto icon previews of pictures, but the finder was already ruined, icons must not move, now it's not a finder, it's a loose-it.
Interesting, when I switched to a Mac in early 2011 I had been using Windows PCs for over a decade and I had no problem getting into 10.6 Snow Leopard at all. :D
The tendency for companies to solo users predates the open source initiative and community. It’s more a tendency for companies to naturally try to keep their customers exclusive than anything else.
As for the tendency to make “shoebox apps”, I think part of that was due to the iPhone not having a shared filesystem between apps, so app developers didn’t put much care into how they stored user-created data on disk. Since most Mac applications are sandboxed by default, there’s little reason for developers to change their behavior, and so the proliferation of shoebox apps continues.
For me pretty obvius that we totaly miss alot of good things which were in the past!!!
God return that back please!!!
I always miss how simple OS9 was, no big distractions on the screen. In your MS word example you had the option to close all the tool bars and just have text fill the display, on OSX/Windows you tend to have a mess of distractions unless you full screen an app. It also gave the option to setup an app with the windows ordered how you want, MS word on windows is a mess of icons.
I will always miss OS9, at the same time I know it was at end of life. We know from some dev stories now that OS9 was a technical mess, it needed real work & NEXT OS was an easy fix.
You also had some fun options like being able to drag the OS9 folder to an external drive and it was bootable, you can hit problems but it also did just work.
As a Linux user of sixteen years I'm pretty comfortable using MacOS - in the userspace it's very similar: The terminal uses Zero shell for a start; the layout and behaviour of the interface is very reminiscent of xfce or (even?) modern Gnome Shell. It's a far cry from the MacOS that I fondly remember using in the newspaper industry ~ I'm talking Systems 6 and 7 here.
All that said, returning to it after years of Linux I feel pretty well at home. I know that it's as much - maybe more - of a 'walled garden' as modern Windows builds, but to my eyes it's a better option. This brings me to the point that If I was forced to use a corporate, licenced OS these days I would choose MacOS over Windows every day of the week.
It's really weird to see the Mac OS 9 desktop at that aspect ratio. Even though I haven't used it in 15 years, my mental image of Mac OS 9 is at 800x600 - arguably the most comfortable resolution on an iMac DV.
That was also my first thought. The design was made for much lower screen resolutions.
@@serge_stauffer To be fair, Apple would also sell some properly high-resolution displays in the 90s. Maybe to someone who used to work on one of the fist-gen Cinema Displays, this wouldn't look quite as strange.
4:13 Based on my research, the desktop/GUI wasn't actually an innovation of PARC, but from Stanford, which was first publicly shown in the "mother of all demos" video from 1968, before PARC existed. And GUI engineers from PARC actually left Xerox to work at Apple on the Lisa and Macintosh, so IMO it wasn't exactly direct theft by Apple because those engineers had already done the work before themselves... and Xerox wasn't exactly trying to push the tech anyways.
Windows Explorer also used to open folders in a new window by default, when it was first released in Windows 95. They tried to sell it as an innovation, but people really didn't like it. I'm not sure the Mac implementation was better in any way, but I never used it so it might. Microsoft changed this when they introduced Active Desktop (if I remember correctly), which was basically a rework of the Windows Explorer.
I think you're right that Active Desktop introduced it in the consumer OSs, but I know the NT4 Explorer could be set to open new folders in the same window (possible it was introduced in a Service Pack, though).
@@billwall267 Yes, it was possible to reconfigure, even on Windows 95. I was just talking about the default setting.
Yeah I tried it at the time and hated it. It was hard to manage. I didn't want to worry about every window position and size. I learned very quickly to open "Explorer" (which was the same exe with a folder tree in the left) and navigated the folders there.
i grew up using macos from 1986 to 2001. i love macos9. from mac plus to powerbook g3 wallstreet. it is still so elegant. i wish someone took over making modern old mac. (i still use powerpc at work for embedded systems lol) same for classic macos, opensource it, make it evolve again
This was a very insightful video, thank you for sharing! :)
I remember when Windows 95 were starting it was like Heaven sky i am entering. But now When Windows 10 is starting is like oh that spining circle./.
Not the Mac team did, the Lisa team did it. I used a Lisa in 1983 and it was this paradigm. Later I used SunOS with X11NeWS 1989 version, and it had some of these characteristics
I remember using Windows 3.1 in high school. Never could wrap my head around that UI or that file system. Mac OS 9 seems like the same way. Not until Windows 95 it started to "make sense" to my brain.
But DOS did?
@@michaelmicek The discussion is about GUIs, genius.
@@JohnGaltAustria right, so what are you saying?
Mac OS 9 and Windows 3.1 are alike, how?
And vs what?
It took some time for me to wrap my head around a hierarchical file system, is that what you're talking about?
On CLI, I had been using the Apple II and diskettes but I happened to get exposed to Unix (in 1985, I think) and remember that idea as being very mysterious.
By 1988 I was using ProDOS and it had subdirectories, so I think around then the light bulb went on and I wished I could explain it to everyone.
Also around then I was first exposed to a PC with a hard drive.
OSX is still pretty different since its actual UNIX (unlike Linux which runs off GNU) and still maintains a lot of the spatial design philosophy. Unlike windows which is built around opening a bunch of windows on your screen at once. I think modern Mac workflow works best as a collection of full screen or large screen apps you switch between using gestures. Stage manager, mission control, the three finger workspace swipe all create a very spatial, movement focused work flow which is very natural and similar to physical space management. Similar to how classic MacOS was built to replicate a desk.
Excellent! Well done, and thank you!
Interesting to see a younger persons perspective on this but…
Honestly … What you describe as "different" about Mac OS 9 was the norm. That's pretty much how Windows 3 worked (new window for everything) It's how OS/2 worked, it's how Amiga OS worked (and how AROS, it's spiritual successor still works) and it's how many versions of GEM Desktop worked. (excluding the ones for DOS which were hobbled by Apple lawsuits so that they couldn't open new windows for each directory, and had to re-use the existing window … For some reason, the Atari ST versions were not affected) It's also how BeOS worked, and how Haiku (it's spiritual successor) still works. It's even how the Acorn RISC OS worked.
Not all of them were clever enough to remember where you left icons within the directory window. The ST GEM desktop would always forget that, but could remember if you wanted that directory listed out or displaying icons tiled. You will find that not all "files" on your OS 9 Mac have an icon, though you may think they do. You'd have to fire up a command line interface of some kind, or analyse the partition in Norton to see the files that don't have an icon, because Finder won't ever show them to you. (as others have mentioned, one of those hidden folders / directories is the Desktop Folder … But it was mostly used for storing "aliases" [what Windows calls shortcuts, except they're more like a hard link, or reparse point in many ways] to icons … So you could leave the Word application icon out on your desktop) On Amiga OS "Workbench" you could select "Show all files" to see files without icons, and those would never remember where you left them. However, the ones which did have icons would stay where you left them, provided you "snapshot" the window. (I have a feeling that automatic snapshot on drop would have been left out to avoid lawsuits, because otherwise, it would be easier for the user, and for software developers to just have done that … But it was nice if you had a parkinsons moment with the mouse before you snapshot, you could close the window and re-open it to find where the heck you dropped that random icon) The location was stored in an icon file with the same name, and a .info extension. On an Apple Mac, files had multiple "data forks", which used to be pretty unique, but these days Windows NTFS will use "alternative data streams" and Linux / Unix filesystems tend to support "extended attributes" which will achieve the same thing. In those days, you had to pack up icons from a Mac in a MacBinary or BinHex archive to move them onto an FTP server, DOS / CP/M floppy and back to another Mac without loosing the resource fork. The icons, and their locations, and what default file type the application supports, or what data type a document is encoded in are all stored in a "resource fork" on Mac OS 9 … And because most other systems didn't support resource forks at that time, OS X dropped them, just as Windows NT and e2FS were making equivalent standards outside the Apple world.
The most ambitious use of such multiple data streams for every file was made by BeOS (now Haiku) where you can look up all sorts of file properties within alternative streams, and the file manager supported them natively, so that the default email client had no interface what-so-ever, and was just a daemon running in the background which wrote out every email you received into a separate file in you "inbox" folder. There was a data stream to say who it was from, one to say what it was "about" one to say who else had received it, one to say how long it was, one for each attachment it contained, and the usual ones to say that it was an email, and what level of MIME encoding it used, if it was plain text, rich text, html or any of the other more exotic mail formats that were experimented with. Sure, there was an email reader that could open those files, and an email composer that could create them and save them in the outbox folder where the daemon would mail them next time you dailed into your ISP.
The programs on the Apple menu aren't applications though. They're desk accessories, and the desk accessories (.acx files) on the ST GEM Desktop also appeared there (well, obviously it was an Atari menu, rather than an Apple one) when they were on the root of the boot disk. The Amiga eventually had commodities, but, sadly, there was no standardised way to access them. They usually got hotkeys, and provided APIs that could be scripted through REXX.
Icons appearing on the desktop when you insert storage media is also how GEM Desktop (at least on the Atari ST) Amiga OS, BeOS/Haiku, and OS/2 worked. That's was just how computer were, before Windows became "the norm" … And for many of them, the reason Windows doesn't work like that is almost certainly because Microsoft feared being sued by Apple if they worked too much like them. As cited with GEM, many alternative desktop systems were sued for having features in common with Mac OS. Some fought, some just dropped that feature, some won, some lost, (and had to drop that feature) many went completely bust trying to fight the lawsuits. For example, the reason Windows didn't have a bin (trash, wastepaper, recycled or otherwise) icon anywhere you could drop files you no longer want onto to delete them until Windows 95 is because Apple had rabidly sued anyone who attempted to have a bin of any kind on their desktop … Amiga OS was forced, by court to place the bin for each device on the root folder (drawer) of that device, GEM was forced to remove the bin in later editions and replace it with a Delete menu option, OS/2 was forced to have a shredder on a toolbar. Ironic, since Apple, later moved the Trash Can from the desktop to a waste paper basket on the dock in OS X.
Apple sued people for copying things they had copied for Xerox Parc, and forced them to prove that they also copied Xerox, rather than copying Apple. It was insane! And, of course, Microsoft were playing this same game. I never really heard of Atari, Commadore, Acorn, or even big blue (IBM) getting involved in that sort of tactic, except as victims … And, of course, the victims don't seem to have survived. Although, I would argue that we are left with only the worst examples of systems at that time, and one wonders how good the less aggressive competition would have been by now had they not been wiped out so early on. In particular, Acorn was broken up because they were deemed to hold a monopoly, making their own hardware, OS and applications, which is clearly unfair competition… It's not like poor little Apple, or Microsoft could do all that … Oh wait! That's exactly what they do, and were doing even when Acorn were trying to compete with them. It's also what Commadore, and Atari were doing. Okay, at the time, Microsoft only really had MSX machines, and they only really sold in Japan and a bit in the US, and they tended to be licensed to other hardware manufacturers. But I mean, XBox and Surface today are massive. As is Acorns ARM processor, but imagine if they managed to remain a single company, making modern, ARM based desktop computers running a modern RISC OS!? How different would the world be? We'd all have a pinboard to put our wallpaper on, and expect to drag a file out of our application and into the folder window we wanted to save it to, and we'd expect the main application menu to appear from the middle mouse button! 😆
I hope that some day Apple will open source their Mac OS System 1 trough Mac OS 9 ….
Haha, Apple and open source in one sentence. Good one
@@michalsvihla1403
My suspicion is you're not an engineer or A+ computer technician..
XNU /MACH . The core [kernel] of OSX was open for 20 years.
Unlike the NT4 kernel of windows.
It Would serve you well to learn the layers of how operating systems work...
Fun fact.
@@Peterthethinker "was" is the key word here and I don't need to be either an engineer or A+ computer technician to comment on a company's core philosophy, which does not stand upon technical knowledge. Calling out their approach from 20-30 years ago is of zero relevance today when looking at what they've done in the last decade. From that it's painfully obvious that they would voluntarily not open source anything.
@@michalsvihla1403
the fact is apple did more for the open movement for 20 years then you can even imagine.
you just dont see it as its not a thing you see as a consumer. CUPS was Saved by apple and its how Linux and Chromebooks. can use a printer...
They donate time pretty heavily back upstream to the FreeBSD project, upon which OSX is based. They are also top-tier donors to LLVM.
Iam sorry. but your conflating. openSrc * SW* with a repairable computer ..
Very interesting a topic and well explained! A window to the past, pardon the pun. 🙌
I enjoyed your video very much! Personally, I keep a virtual machine of OS X Mountain Lion because I want to keep an open-source app called Genius OSX that helped me graduate from college. Anki is okay, but the uncluttered and simplicity of Genius is unmatched. I wish someone would create a modern version of it!
I love the design of MacOS 9 very much!
one bit of advice im sure you've heard, put the mic down, on something which absorbs shock (even a tissue box works) and use a pop filter (or put a sock over your mic)
Great idea 🫡
As someone who started using Macs in the early 90s and used them almost exclusively and have used every version from 5 through 9 of the classic Mac OS, this was really wild to watch because for me all of this just the way it was and I never thought it was that special - windows just never made any sense to me because this is what I grew up with. Also, the X in Mac OS X is the Roman numeral 10 so it’s pronounced “Mac OS ten” not “Mac OS ex” :-) thanks for the video though, even if it made me feel old