Apple's full of shit
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I'd say that even Windows 3.1 was better than any release of the classical Mac OS.
I wonder how long until Blakey notices this.
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He's just saying that Mac Classic didn't have virtual memory, which is a "duh".
He's also missing the point of that screenshot. Turning on virtual memory on a PPC Mac Classic system like 8.5+ actually tells the OS to use an entirely separate memory manager than it uses otherwise. It's perfectly normal to see a Mac of that era with "virtual memory" turned on but with the bare minimum (in this case, 1 MB extra) of swap-space.
Mac Classic didn't have virtual memory or preemptive multitasking because it was developed based on a CPU that didn't really have hardware support for either of those, and it would have been extremely slow to implement them in software. (See also: Windows, the versions that didn't require a 386, which had the exact same technical problems.)
The reason Windows got those features in 3.x and Mac, say, 6.x didn't is because Apple was barely breaking even back then while Microsoft was using bulldozers to move around its huge piles of money. Also: Microsoft had the leverage to basically tell Intel exactly what features to cram in the next CPU, while Apple had less sway over 680x0 design than, say, Sega did. That didn't change until the PPC came out, and Mac didn't run on the PPC until 1994, and from then until OS X Apple was too broke to rewrite the fundamentals of the OS anyway. (If you read Raymond Chen's blog entries about that era, you can get a sense of how fucking difficult it was for Microsoft to do. Apple was barely keeping afloat.)
Anyway, if you're Techy McLinuxHead, then yeah: "obviously" to you, an OS with no virtual memory and no preemptive multitasking is a worse OS.
If you measured how satisfied/productive users of Windows 3.x were compared to users of Mac System 6.x, there'd be no doubt that Mac was the superior OS.
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Four PDP-8s in a cluster.
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Anyway, if you're Techy McLinuxHead, then yeah: "obviously" to you, an OS with no virtual memory and no preemptive multitasking is a worse OS.
I can remember a number of people switching to Linux back in the Windows 3.1 era exactly because it had a flat memory model with reasonable virtual memory. Dealing with DOS era segmented addressing was genuinely nasty, and DOS extenders were definitely kooky.
Linux was also one of the first systems to really get into using shared libraries extensively as part of how everything worked. At that point, commercial Unixes mostly didn't and also didn't take advantage of the code-sharing that it enabled. Windows had DLLs pretty early too; some of the problems that the platform's had may actually be legacies of being one of the first movers in that area and getting a few things slightly wrong. (The original Linux shared library system was awful. It was entirely replaced with ELF long ago. But it still beat using static libraries for everything!)
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there's nothing I can do on OS X I can't do on Linux
Running MS Office natively is nothing?
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Recently I've actually been reading this book of Raymond Chen. If I understand it correctly, even Windows 1.0 had solved the memory management problem already (with some weird but clever tricks), that Mac OS 9 was still struggling with.
But that's details. And the whole story about the financial situation and processor choice of Apple is irrelevant. A product doesn't become any better just because the company is in a difficult situation or made wrong decisions in the past.
Maybe System 6 was still competitive compared to Windows 3.x, but my parents' multi-thousand dollar Mac with System 7.5 just couldn't hold a candle to Windows 95 at all. And I bet that Apple would quickly have went completely bankrupt if it hadn't been for NextStep as a foundation to catch-up again in terms of core OS functionality.
By the way, I have also read the Unix-Haters Handbook, so I am certainly not an uncritical Linux/*nix-fanboy.
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Maybe System 6 was still competitive compared to Windows 3.x, but my parents' multi-thousand dollar Mac with System 7.5 just couldn't hold a candle to Windows 95 at all.
Bullshit.
Maybe it couldn't for Geeky McLinuxhead, but for the average user, System 7.5 was WAY ahead Windows 95 in every metric except number of available applications.
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number of available applications
\Which is pretty much the metric that end-users really care about most of all. I remember MS's efforts in that area to make Windows a platform that others could put their applications on top (especially in areas like business productivity and gaming). Those were very smart investments of developer time, giving a multi-decade payback…
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Bullshit.
Maybe it couldn't for Geeky McLinuxhead, but for the average user, System 7.5 was WAY ahead Windows 95 in every metric except number of available applications.
I'm talking about things like that it took 15 minutes to print a low-res color picture, or that it took 45 minutes to scan a 600 dpi photo, time during which the whole computer was unusable because of the lack of preemptive multitasking. That was indeed WAY ahead of Windows 95 in mulitple metrics - but in the wrong direction.And these are quite average tasks, I'd say. Nothing particularly geeky.
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I'm talking about things like that it took 15 minutes to print a low-res color picture, or that it took 45 minutes to scan a 600 dpi photo, time during which the whole computer was unusable because of the lack of preemptive multitasking.
In System 7.5, both of those things were able to be multi-tasked. You've got it mixed up with System 6.x, which is the last time printing or scanning couldn't be backgrounded. (And even then I'm pretty sure printing could be, but not 100% sure.)
That was indeed WAY ahead of Windows 95 in mulitple metrics - but in the wrong direction.
Right, but you're still missing my point. You're talking about getting a stopwatching and benchmarking shit. You're not talking about the relative quality of the USER EXPERIENCE. You know the MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER.
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In System 7.5, both of those things were able to be multi-tasked. You've got it mixed up with System 6.x, which is the last time printing or scanning couldn't be backgrounded. (And even then I'm pretty sure printing could be, but not 100% sure.)
I know. Technically you could switch to another program during scanning. But that meant waiting for about a minute after every mouse click or key press for the scanning software in the background to cooperatively give up some processor time. So in practice, it was unusable.Same thing with downloading files from the internet, by the way. Theoretically possible to do in the background on classic Mac OS, in practice a more or less useless functionality.
Right, but you're still missing my point. You're talking about getting a stopwatching and benchmarking shit. You're not talking about the relative quality of the USER EXPERIENCE. You know the MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER.
Oh, in that regard I think that the crucial thing is to be able to open and edit Word and Excel documents without formatting issues. And to be honest, as far as I know the classic Mac OS could do that just fine.
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I know. Technically you could switch to another program during scanning. But that meant waiting for about a minute after every mouse click or key press for the scanning software in the background to cooperatively give up some processor time. So in practice, it was unusable.
No.
Same thing with downloading files from the internet, by the way. Theoretically possible to do in the background on classic Mac OS, in practice a more or less useless functionality.
100% fucking wrong. I frequently played Starcraft while downloading files.
Oh, in that regard I think that the crucial thing is to be able to open and edit Word and Excel documents without formatting issues. And to be honest, as far as I know the classic Mac OS could do that just fine.
You still do not get it.
Whatever, I'm done.
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But... but... Go.
Go isn't designed for systems that have a 10MB limit on the size of one's temporary disk space (unlike some diskless Ultrix workstations I've used).
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Running MS Office natively is nothing?
I remember needing it, like, 6 months ago for the last time. I fire up LibreOffice, maybe, once in 2 months. What I work with usually doesn't involve office packages. When it does and I'm online, I use Google Docs.
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Running MS Office natively is nothing?
Office for Mac is a joke. I have a friend using the latest Excel on Mac and he says it's unusable: crashes a lot and is incomparable to Office for Windows in terms of features. It was all supposed to change with the Office 2016 release finally, but it doesn't change the fact, the up until that moment using MS Office on Mac wasn't a viable option.
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I fire up LibreOffice, maybe, once in 2 months.
I don't trust LibreOffice. I've had it wreck documents by deciding to replace images with zero-length files (inside the ZIP archive that is the overall document container, that is) causing the overall document render to choke and die. No idea what happened, but that was a day when I was very glad I could just extract everything from an old version and the new one and do a tree diff to fix everything up, as opposed to being stuck with having shit software shit all over my work.
I have a friend using the latest Excel on Mac and he says it's unusable: crashes a lot and is incomparable to Office for Windows in terms of features.
We're still on 2011 here. I use it mostly for Word and Powerpoint, which are better on Mac than on Windows (comparing with a colleague on that platform). I deal with maybe one spreadsheet a year?
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I deal with maybe one spreadsheet a year?
You're in luck, then. Excel for Mac is so shitty, that they're (friend's company) switching to Google Spreadsheets wherever it's possible, so imagine just how shitty it must be.
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I've recently found a feature in Google Sheets that was a killer scratch for my particular itch. No shit, they have improved over the recent years.
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I've recently found a feature in Google Sheets that was a killer scratch for my particular itch. No shit, they have improved over the recent years.
Might be, but the interface is still a piece of shit, though. Like most of Google's stuff.
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You sound like Blakey…
Our users seem to prefer to use Google Sheets to Excel precisely because they better at allowing collaboration. They have tried doing it with Office 365 and Sharepoint, and they hated both of them. As far as I can see, users like what Google offers because Google gives them something that closely matches what they really want, while leaving out the complex features that they usually don't want.
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while leaving out the complex features that they usually don't want.
I'm not talking about complex features. I'm taking about general ease of use and Google sucks at it. All of the office stack apps are clunky and ugly (well, maybe except for the writer app). Also, they tend to overcomplicate stuff (I hate the new Gmail and had to switch to a stand alone client), to suck at design (all Google apps for iOS are very poorly integrated, with their bold icons and fonts) and they've broken YouTube in so many ways I hate using it nowadays.
I know, Google docs are great for collaboration, this is true, but they lack in all other respects and are much worse than competition.
Overall, I really don't like Google apart from their search (although it used to be better usability with the sidebar) and I'm using Gmail only out of habit.
I get it that they can be functional and allow yheir users to get the job done, but there is no pleasure in using them, these are not great tools.
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I know, Google docs are great for collaboration, this is true, but they lack in all other respects and are much worse than competition.
Since the collaboration stuff is a total killer app for doing this stuff online, they're going to shove their thing down your throat. (
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I think that MS was supposed to roll out a collaboration feature in cooperation with Dropbox, I wonder how that went…
Plus, does MS office online lack the collaboration feature? I always thought that if its online, it has to have it.
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I think that MS was supposed to roll out a collaboration feature in cooperation with Dropbox, I wonder how that went…
Still limited to online previewing of Office docs stored in your Dropbox account, as far as I can tell.
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Plus, does MS office online lack the collaboration feature? I always thought that if its online, it has to have it.
Probably requires that everyone is joined into the same Exchange domain and that the domain administrator has enabled writing by multiple people. That is, it's using some bastardisation of what they already did in Sharepoint. Certain types of admins love it, but users really don't as it ends up with Computer Says No most of the time.
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Other False Claims on Apple's Website
If I can't believe every word on Apple's website, where the heck am I going to get my world news?
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@kt_ said:
Plus, does MS office online lack the collaboration feature? I always thought that if its online, it has to have it.
Probably requires that everyone is joined into the same Exchange domain and that the domain administrator has enabled writing by multiple people. That is, it's using some bastardisation of what they already did in Sharepoint. Certain types of admins love it, but users really don't as it ends up with Computer Says No most of the time.
Actually, that's not quite true. The Online version of Office has had a collaboration feature for quite a while now and Office 2016 has it for the desktop versions as well now.
Don't need Sharepoint, it just needs everyone to have a valid Office license (for the desktop version. Online is free). And Office Online even allows anonymous edits if you set the sharing option to "Anyone with the link can edit".
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I was too. And it was a lot easier to give Apple the benefit of the doubt when they actually had a superior product. Now, though, I find this disgusting.
Why is your new avatar Pacifist Bowser?
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I disagree entirely with that assessment, but I suppose that's the fun of UI - some people love it, others hate it.
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http://i.imgur.com/OMzlnP3.png
What the shit-cocking Bard-hell is this? This has to be a photoshop, right? There is no way any hardware company would be so insane as to actually put the USB port there.
=(
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Wireless mouse, USB recharge, and don't want to ruin the beautiful appearance with the port? There's probably someone out there.
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No.
I bought this Apogee Classic Games pack and it had a bunch of DOS platformers in it. One of them is called something like "Realms of Chaos" or something, and you are a barbarian and the enemy in my avatar is literally the first enemy of the game.
He's some kind of cat-bear-monster with a cape and a sword, he's twice the size of the hero of the game and-- he's a goomba! He doesn't even fight you, he just walks back and forth. Made me laugh because it's so ridiculous.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
http://i.imgur.com/OMzlnP3.png
What the shit-cocking Bard-hell is this? This has to be a photoshop, right? There is no way any hardware company would be so insane as to actually put the USB port there.
=(
When I first saw that, I assumed it was the head of a golf putter.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
What the shit-cocking Bard-hell is this?
Apple. Sometimes they don't just lose the plot, they drop-kick it into the San Francisco Bay.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
What the shit-cocking Bard-hell is this? This has to be a photoshop, right? There is no way any hardware company would be so insane as to actually put the USB port there.
You're first problem was assuming that a hardware company designed it. That's an Apple mouse, so your assumptions about what a hardware company would do don't apply.
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Why? Are you trolling me?
It seems to be Linux's fault whenever software doesn't work right on that platform.
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He's some kind of cat-bear-monster with a cape and a sword, he's twice the size of the hero of the game and-- he's a goomba!
Try all you want to mislead us, but we all know it's in fact Reepicheep.
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The classic Mac OS was certainly not a superior product.
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Every executable file had a user-configurable setting in its file attributes, determining the size of the ram slice to allocate. The program could not start with less free memory (even if it wouldn't need it) and could not take more memory (even if it would be available).It was superior when it was invented (as a part of MultiFinder, in System 6, in 1988) where the competition was MS-DOS and 16-bit Windows-over-DOS. The memory allocation system (and other "interesting" APIs used internally) made perfect sense on a system without any concept of virtual memory.
The problem is that it outlasted its usefulness. And Apple was aware of this, hence the many (failed) projects to modernize Mac OS before they decided to migrate everything over to what was effectively NeXTStep with a new GUI and a backward-compatibility layer.
BTW, applications could allocate more memory than their partition. Mac OS had the concept of "temporary" allocations, which were allocated separately from the memory partition.
The reason Windows got those features in 3.x and Mac, say, 6.x didn't is because Apple was barely breaking even back then while Microsoft was using bulldozers to move around its huge piles of money
Also note that Apple tried very hard (at that time) to remain compatible with old hardware. You could load System 7.5.5 (September 1996) on a Mac Plus (basically the same architecture as the original Mac with 1M or 4M RAM and a SCSI port.)
System 7 would support virtual memory on Macs with hardware support - either a 68030 or a 68020 with external PMMU chip, but this was not required hardware, so apps couldn't rely on that behavior.
It wasn't until System 7.6 (January 1997), which required 32-bit clean ROMs and more than 4M RAM (and therefore could not work on any Mac with a 68000, and several later models.) System 8 required at least a 68040.
It wasn't until 8.5 (October 1998) that a PowerPC chip was required.
In other words, they were supporting their oldest mainstream hardware (the Plus and Mac II) for over 10 years since their introduction, and they were supporting the 68000 series processor for 14 years (and for 4 years after the introduction of PowerPC Macs - introduced with System 7.1.2 in 1994.)
That level of commitment to backward compatibility wasn't unusual for the time (MS-DOS's last commercial release, PC-DOS 7.0, shipped in 1995 and would work on any PC with sufficient memory, going all the way back to the 80's) but it does explain why radical architectural changes (which would mandate new hardware) were not done. We can argue about how, with 20:20 hindsight, it was a dumb idea, but it made perfect sense at the time.
It's worth noting that Microsoft themselves was supporting three mainstream OS's simultaneously, in great part for the need for backward compatibility. DOS (MS- and PC-) shipped as a standalone retail product from 1980 to 1995. DOS-based Windows (1.0 through Me) shipped from 1985 through 2000). Windows NT (3.1 through 10) 1993 to the present day.
But, as you wrote, Apple didn't have anything close to the manpower necessary to ship and maintain two (let alone) three mainstream OS products at once for more than a short transitional time.
I'm talking about things like that it took 15 minutes to print a low-res color picture, or that it took 45 minutes to scan a 600 dpi photo, time during which the whole computer was unusable because of the lack of preemptive multitasking. That was indeed WAY ahead of Windows 95 in mulitple metrics - but in the wrong direction.
You forget what Win95 multitasking was like. Yes, you could quickly switch between apps, but lots of things were timing-critical and would malfunction in all sorts of annoying ways if you actually tried doing two things at once. Scans ended up with image glitches and CD burners produced coasters, for instance. I remember having to quit all apps and disable all networking while performing these actions in order to get them to work right.
Windows didn't get the ability to multitask properly until NT. All of the DOS based Windows environments got flaky when trying to multitask while running timing-critical applications. I think a lot of us would have preferred Apple's approach (give enough CPU time to the critical app so it doesn't glitch, even if everything else slows down.)
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Scans ended up with image glitches and CD burners produced coasters, for instance. I remember having to quit all apps and disable all networking while performing these actions in order to get them to work right.
Combine that with the fact that most (cheap) CD burners didn't have Burn-Proof or any kind of protection, and they were slow as shit so you'd have a longer wait before you could use your computer for anything. I don't miss those days at all.
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The problem is that it outlasted its usefulness. And Apple was aware of this, hence the many (failed) projects to modernize Mac OS before they decided to migrate everything over to what was effectively NeXTStep with a new GUI and a backward-compatibility layer.
So am I wrong then, if I conclude that maybe, given the situation of Apple at the time, switching to NextStep with its Unix-underpinnigs was just the least bad choice? Even if concepts like the resource-vs-data-fork distinction were alien to that new foundation.
