
Mac System 1.0 (1998) - ingve
https://www3.nd.edu/~jvanderk/sysone/
======
justinhj
The trashcan comments reminded me of a comment by the late Douglas Adams about
how it was better not to know that the trashcan had things in it. You're
tempted to empty it right away, defeating the purpose of having it there in
the first place.

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trm42
Based on the screenshots, it's amazing how little the Mac System UX has
changed between 1.0 -> 6 -> 7.1 (and to some extend even the newer versions,
the latter UX changes were mostly theme-remake + little usage helpers).

Now it's good time to go and check out screenshots of Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3 and
3.1 to see how "ready" System 1.0 was compared to the Windows.

Other good thing to note is that the window manager of System was really good
getting lots of windows to fit the puny 512x324 resolution. Something the Mac
OS X is really bad at even with the 5k resolutions =(

~~~
Razengan
I'm always impressed with how the Mac menu bar + Apple menu has remained in
the same place since 1984 [1], performing pretty much the same functions for
_over 30 years!_

Compare that to the lack of concrete UX decisions in the world's other major
OS, unable to settle on a single menu style and so much flip-flopping on key
features (cough-Start Menu-cough); removing them in one version and bringing
them back in the next.

Is the Mac OS Menu a design that simply cannot be improved on, or are the
users just not clamoring enough for a change?

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_menu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_menu)

~~~
digi_owl
I dunno. To me both the Apple bar and the MS bar do the same thing, offer a
target in accordance to Fitts' Law.

While the layout of the menu itself changed some over the years, the base
location in the bottom left has remained the same.

Even with Windows 8 you could get to the startscreen(?) by flicking the mouse
to the bottom left corner. That would case a square to come into view holding
a preview of said screen.

~~~
cpeterso
> both the Apple bar and the MS bar do the same thing, offer a target in
> accordance to Fitts' Law.

Not until Windows 2000. Prior to that, the Start button had a single "dead"
pixel along the left and bottom sides of it in which clicking didn't open the
Start menu. Microsoft design: it _looks_ right, but it just doesn't quite
_work_ right.

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/08/22/711808.as...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/08/22/711808.aspx)

~~~
digi_owl
Been ages since i used the 9x series, so perhaps my hindsight is rose colored.

------
userbinator
It's interesting to see the Apple aesthetic of abstracting and hiding things
from the user in general is many decades old and was there since the
beginning. No command line, paths, or even a simple debugger is present.
(Compare MS-DOS' DEBUG and EDLIN, which were included in version 1.0.)

Apple's way is inherently more idiot-proof, but makes a sharper division
between developers and users. PC magazines in the late 80s and early 90s had
articles consisting of short assembly-language programs the user could create
with DEBUG, and I think in general it encouraged somewhat more open culture of
tinkering and learning with their machines than Apple's philosophy of
opaqueness.

It wasn't anything like the walled gardens of today, but I remember the effort
required to even get started writing applications (or just modifying existing
ones) on the Mac was significantly higher than the PC.

~~~
nine_k
Did you have a chance to compare it to Apple II? My memory is fuzzy already
but I vaguely remember it to be significantly more open?

~~~
mcculley
The Apple II was definitely more open. It was physically open in the sense
that one could pop open the top and add cards to it. It was also open in the
software sense as one had to write 6502 assembly code to get the most out of
it.

~~~
Someone
You have to write assembly code to get the most out of any computer, but
getting the most out of a computer has become less necessary over time.

The Apple ][ was also open in the sense that it shipped with full schematics
and an annotated listing of the ROM
([https://archive.org/details/applerefjan78](https://archive.org/details/applerefjan78))

Inside Macintosh had a high-level description of the hardware, explained the
memory map and how to call OS calls, and had good descriptions of the various
data structures, but didn't go as far as including full schematics or a full
listing. It also was a separate thing to buy, so most users wouldn't have it.

------
orionblastar
You were lucky to get what you got in System 1.0, they had to fit it on a
floppy disk and had to take some things out to make it fit.

Later on when SCSI hard drives became more common there was more features to
the Mac System.

System 1.0 was like a proof of concept. It just worked and you were lucky if
you didn't get a system bomb error message.

The old Macintosh laptops had to power them on to show airport security they
weren't a bomb, and hope the system bomb error message didn't come up and
confuse the security guards.

~~~
kalleboo
What I still find fascinating about the Apple machines of the OldWorld era is
not how small the on-disk system was but how much they tried to stick in ROM.
My Centris 660AV had _QuickTime_ burnt into the ROM chip. Of course, before
anyone used the machine there was a software update to QuickTime so there was
no point.

We also had a Mac Classic that has a whole system disk in ROM that you could
boot from if you held down a secret key combo.

~~~
yuhong
I am not sure about QuickTime being part of SuperMario ROMs, but it is funny
that the Quadra 660AV/840AV and the PowerBook 190 was the only 68K Macs that
used it.

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rasz_pl
>system 5.0 never existed (typical Microsoft ignorance)

Microsoft Works was not written by Microsoft, typical random blog ignorance :P

Microsoft Works was developed and licensed from Productivity Software, company
launched by ex Apple employees Don Williams & Gene Carter. Microsoft
threatened to destroy their company if they didnt sell. From horses mouth
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai24F4Nel7U&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai24F4Nel7U&feature=youtu.be&t=1h27m50s)

Mac OS revolutionary? Not really, try AmigaOS with preemptive multitasking on
~same level of hardware. Mac OS was a quick hack and a kludge, whole
switcher/multifinder ordeal was just sad for a modern 32bit operating system
:(

------
cbd1984
> try finding a PC that can run operating systems from 1984 all the way
> through 1996

Why would this be hard? The x86 CPU boots into 16-bit real mode, the video
card emulates the IBM PC text mode, the hard drive supports ISA, and
everything else is ignored, right? The PC architecture is notorious for
supporting weird old backwards-compatibility stuff.

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tbrock
He's actually incorrect about the "Set Startup" option being removed. The
author claims it was not replaced by "startup items" in the system folder but
that is another thing entirely.

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lobster_johnson
Why does he say that folder icons were "much, much rounder" in System 1-6?
This [1] is System 7. The only thing they did was add colour and make the tab
a little taller. Same shape, and not very round at all.

[1]
[http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/ipod/images/1/13/Macinto...](http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/ipod/images/1/13/Macintosh_System_7.5.3_screenshot.png/revision/latest?cb=20100819232719)

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JonathonW
> Nowadays, a full system folder easily tops 100 megs, and can easily have
> over a thousand items in it. A thousand! That's a far cry from the six that
> made up the original system folder.

And now, on El Capitan, I've got a /System that's 8 GB, with just over 296,000
items in it. And that's not even the whole OS these days, since there's the
unix-y stuff in /, a few bits and pieces in /Library, and some more stuff that
ships with the OS in /Applications.

Makes for an interesting contrast.

~~~
xenadu02
Yeah... And I can edit 4K video, encode/decode dozens of video/image formats,
render a web page, etc. I get a JavaScript JIT, Perl, Ruby, and Python. I also
get frameworks for mapping, photo editing, asynchronous execution, and many
others.

The OS is bigger but it sure is more capable.

~~~
JonathonW
I'm not complaining... just observing. I'm not one of those who pines for the
"good old days" of cooperative multitasking, unprotected memory, and
application errors taking down the whole system.

Although I do find it remarkable that they were able to stuff so much into
such a tiny amount of space (everything had to fit on a 400KB disk plus the
64KB Toolbox ROM, and the OS plus applications only had 128KB of RAM to run
in).

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philoye
Funny how that in 2016 we are further removed from when this article was
written (18y) than it from the original Mac (14y).

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digi_owl
Typical Apple-oriented article, spending whole paragraphs talking about the
look of icons.

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fastflo
it feels really strange to me how mac people actually only talk about the
visual appearance... ...considered to be not a good trait between civilised
people.

