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MacOS X 10.1 (2001) (toastytech.com)
143 points by wastedbrains on June 14, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 182 comments



Here is the John Siracusa review from 2001 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/10/macosx-10-1/


> As in Mac OS 9, it is possible to play DVD movies "on the desktop" by setting the desktop pattern to be a particular color. The DVD player uses this color as a mask for its video display, allowing the movie to appear on the desktop pattern even when the player window itself is hidden.

Today I learned!


Unrelated: in Windows you can paint on almost everything you see. You just have to get the handle and then you can paint on the canvas of the UI element at runtime. So you can have videos play on buttons for example.


Windows has this too. Something to do with sending the video data directly to the graphics card, and the graphics card doing the decoding of the MPEG data, and replacing the color (which is usually green) with the video image before outputing to the screen.

So if you're playing a video and you open a web page, and the webpage has the same green color, it looks like there's a hole on the browser window and you can see the video playing "behind" it.


This isn't probably really used much these days, but yeah, it was/is called Overlay mode.

The graphics card isn't necessarily decoding the MPEG data (though that could have been an option in the olden days too), but it is likely scaling it and spitting it out in the given-colored pixels faster than you could've done with just software back in the days.

The AVS visualizer for Winamp also supported this; if you set the overlay color to black, you could have all of the black text on your desktop be very, very funkily animated.


I was deep into OS explorations in this period. I ran BeOS, Yellow Dog linux on PowerPC, had all flavors of NT, etc.

My feeling about OS X at this time was that it was the right choice but that it was "too late" and that Apple took too long and the window of opportunity had passed.

I take that now as startup advice: It isn't too late!


I need to remember to remind myself of this more often!

The one I remember so clearly is back when I was using Pidgin (or Adium I think was another thing I used?) with a few different messaging apps, and my company was trying to figure out how to make chat work, maintaining an irc server that we of course couldn't get the non-nerds to use, looking at HipChat and a couple others that seemed really expensive for their feature set at the time. Basically none of this stuff supported mobile well.

This was 2008, maybe 2009. I remember thinking "this all sucks, but it's waaaay too late to make a chat app; I've been using IM apps for over a decade, totally saturated and commoditized".

But then I watched the rise of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Slack, all of which were tiny or non-existent at the time, and became gigantic businesses.


I remember ICQ and Aim. It's not even clear to me why they died and were replaced, but that sure did happen.


AOL actively wanted AIM to fail.

https://mashable.com/archive/aim-history


ICQ is used a great deal outside the US. Aim, well that's AOL, so reason enough.


Isn’t that the ultimate survivorship bias?


In terms of who the winners were, sure. There were many also-rans like Viber or companies that won only in certain markets like Line or Telegram.

But the idea that the network effects couldn't be overcome was definitely false. Not only are MSN, AIM and YIM so dead their servers are shut down, but the services which displaced them (Facebook Messenger and Skype) have themselves been displaced by a third wave of services (WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, Slack)


Viber is still big in certain places like the Philippines.


And several Mediterranean countries, it is easier to reach someone on Viber than WhatsApp.


My point wasn't about the specific companies that "survived" chat, but that any new chat products got huge after 2008 at all. From my perspective back then, I thought the whole category looked run out. But it had actually barely even gotten started, if you compare the number of users of chat apps back then to the number now.


OS X was a bet on the future, that double buffering everything was OK because graphic cards would get there eventually. They certainly did, but we suffered through menus taking a good fraction of a second to drop down for a few years. I can still feel the pain.

I would never have taken that bet. I want computers to be fast now. It was the right bet.


Another hard decision that was the right choice in retrospect was going with KHTML. I remember watching the keynote and waiting for them to announce it was based on Gecko. Camino had shown it was possible and worked well. Apple had hired David Hyatt. It was obvious they would go with Gecko.

There was an audible gasp when they announced it was based on KHTML. What the %^&$ is KHTML?


Yet another one was going with LLVM.

Now that they had a decent running GCC on PowerPC they want to build a compiler infrastructure from scratch?

Apple is full of those decisions. I'm just glad they don't take advices from me.


LLVM is because they don’t want GPLv3. They just went ahead with a stack where they can be in control on their own terms.

Basically GNU gambled and lost, they wanted to make a big stand against software patents and some other powerful forces had different opinions.


> LLVM is because they don’t want GPLv3.

LLVM and Clang are also about having a compiler stack that provides the information you need for a modern graphical IDE.

For instance, GCC had made some decisions that made it difficult to point to which line of code caused a particular error message.

Apple's Chris Lattner covered this in a 2007 tech talk he gave at Google introducing LLVM and the (then) new Clang project.

https://youtu.be/VeRaLPupGks?t=1133


> LLVM and Clang are also about having a compiler stack that provides the information you need for a modern graphical IDE.

Is that why all GNU utilities shipped with OSX were also stuck at the GPLv2 versions and never upgraded?


No. That's why LLVM and Clang were developed.


Yes. Apple won’t use GPLv3.

Some things have good replacements with other licenses, like zsh. Others, AFAIK, don’t, like rsync.


GPL v3 is part of it, but as I understand, back when the decision was made GCC was rather inflexible compared to LLVM/Clang which was also a big factor.


I believe LLVM was chosen because it was easier to make new compilers to work with it. GCC's intermediate representation was a bit of a mess for a long time and from what I understand, Apple did not find GCC's Objective-C support to be satisfactory.


The venerable KHTML project was just officially discontinued this year.


  > double buffering everything was OK because graphic cards would get there eventually.
and they showed it in the very next version 10.2 jaguar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OaRF9W1bJk&t=3m33s


I remember being very relieved that my card qualified for quartz extreme. Nice demo.


I remember feeling that way too but had forgotten about it! Wow, what great life lesson I nearly missed, thank you! It's never too late (well, usually not)


Are you sure that was the right lesson to take for a startup?

Apple had millions of users, an already profitable business (by 2001 barely), and marketing reach that was far outside its market share.

They had the best marketer and product guy in the business for a CEE and one of the best logistics experts for a COO.

A startup probably has none of those things.


Wow, unbelievable that it was designed in 2001! It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it appears a bit childish? But only barely.

It appears to have all the basic functionality expected from a modern operating system, I instantly feel right at home although I've never used it.

I find the review terrible though, one of the major changes was the user interface, revolutionary I would say. It's way more important than wether the GUI configuration options are well thought out or not.


> It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it appears a bit childish?

The aesthetics is called „Frutiger Aero“. Lots of colors and especially of blue, lots of transparency effects and fake light reflections. It all is inspired by natural landscapes with blue skies or blue water surfaces. Also skeuomorphisms everywhere.

Windows 7 could be called the pinnacle of the use of Frutiger Aero in UI design when Apple already started to move away and embrace material design. Windows 8 was the big cut where its UI forcefully pushed material design onto its users without any transition grace period. That’s one of the reasons why everybody hated it.

Edit: On Macs even the hardware design reflected the transition from Frutiger Aero to Material Design: The early 2000 Macs were all semi-transparent plastic shells with bright shades of blue and green. Then Apple discovered Aluminum and silver unibody cases. Now there is no color left in the design universe. This also marks the time MacOS interfaces started to look decidedly more "grown-up".

I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with heartless, cold metal designs forever?


Nah, the aesthetic is called Aqua, not a name borne out of a Windows OS that copied Aqua five years later. And Apple hardware never transitioned to a Google software interface concept.


> Windows 7 could be called the pinnacle of the use of Frutiger Aero in UI design when Apple already started to move away and embrace material design.

Windows Media Center was the origins of the Metro UI, Windows Phone 7 was the industries 21st century intro to a typography first flat design.

Sadly the good design aspects of Windows Phone 7 mostly got forgotten about by the time Windows 8 came along, IMHO it is because WP7 had a small dedicated design team compared to whatever large group I imagine did Windows 8.


Plus Windows 8 with Sinofskys .NET hate, decided to go back to the original plan of improving COM, which could have been a good idea, if the execution hasn't been so tragically performed.


> I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with heartless, cold metal designs forever?

CARI has probably cataloged it already. Apple is already going all in on colorful aesthetics recently, not sure if it will spread into hardware.

https://cari.institute/aesthetics


> not sure if it will spread into hardware

Already has for most of their devices (iPhone and iPhone Pro, iPad and iPad Air, iMac, HomePod). Their pro computers only come in one/two colors, which is understandable since their low volume would create an inventory nightmare if available in half a dozen colors.


I wonder if we’ll ever find ourselves in a “aero” nostalgia cycle? I already see a lot of hazy glass and reflections on some apple UI! Maybe it’s time for it’s renaissance!


It was heavily referenced by vaporwave movement alongside windows 95 aesthetics. And vaporwave was 12 years ago.


“ I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with heartless, cold metal designs forever”

If any design folks have an opinion on which way the winds are blowing, I’d love to see an example.


I think there's a tendency recently towards keeping the Apple-esque minimalism in terms of shapes, but moving the materials to softer, warmer, speckled, textile or textured, and the colors to earthier, more natural.

You can see these tendencies in stuff like the recent Microsoft Surface laptops and their textured handrests, the Acer Aspire Vero and its recycled plastic shell, but also in small ways in some Apple products, i.e. power cords for the Mac Studio and the handle for the box (!) being made of textured fabric instead of featureless plastic/rubber, as well as some of the new iPhone colors being Forest Green and the like.

It's not a huge change but it feels like a trend to me.


> Also skeuomorphism everywhere.

I miss skeuomorphic design. :(

I hate how flat everything is these days.


Yup. We used to apply shadows to things to give the user a sense of depth and contrast. Now everything is on a flat plane, and any overlapping elements are either indecipherable, or live on a full bleed scrim. Very boring!


> It appears to have all the basic functionality expected from a modern operating system

The truth is, for the most part operating systems haven't really advanced that much, at least from a ux standpoint. Speaking as someone who started using computers in 1997 on windows 95 and a 133mhz pentium. All the basic metaphors and mechanisms have stayed the same. Tabs in browsers were considered like a huge leap (I know it's not strictly an OS thing), and that was almost 20 years ago.


Search as the primary interaction method instead of menus and icons is pretty dramatic shift though; compare vscode command palette to traditional vs, or windows 7 and later start menu to its predecessors. Another thing, especially on Windows, is the de-emphasis or straight out removal of menu bars, once staple of desktop interfaces. As a more generic trend, I think modal dialogs with forms were far more common interaction pattern back in the day than these days.


> the de-emphasis or straight out removal of menu bars

This change irks me quite a lot. Hamburger menus are terrible and while command palettes are nice, they aren't available everywhere, and so on Windows and Linux you end up with a lot of software not having any kind of index of its functionality and burying functions in dialog tunnels.


Macs have the best of both worlds: consistent menu bars with built-in function search.


> Search as the primary interaction method

Thanks, I hate it. Search is terrible for browsing/discovery, in spite of many people liking it.


The Mac OS menubar search actually opens the relevant menus and submenus and puts a big floating indicator on the result. It does teach rather than simply surfacing the result.


Personally I love it, but I love it a lot more paired with a robust system for browsing.


One thing that makes macOS stand out, is the frameworks. Every version of the OS has come with improvements in the UI libraries. I remember being amazed at Cocoa's bindings, which developed into a way to bind arbitrary data to UI controls. It was reactive before React (although not taken that far, because the UI 'language' was limited). That's just one small part, and it's why replicating macOS is so hard.


Just like any other desktop OS since 16 bit home micros, with exception of MS-DOS.

BSDs and Linux distributions are the exception with their fragmentation, even other commercial UNIXes had a proper set of desktop frameworks.


20 year ago in mainstream; earlier if you used first implementations like in Galeon.


I’d vote the opposite on the playful aspect. Todays UIs feel oppressively monotonous and lacking heart.


I miss the textured Aqua days. Peak was Leopard/Snow Leopard.

Flat is just so... flat. And boring.

And also harder to read, because it's harder to orient yourself in a big textureless area than in a space with some texture in it.


It got to a point with Apple where I had to tell my mother, "just tap everything... there's really no indicator if anything's a button anymore". While material/flat can look pretty, it is counterintuitive to communication. I'm sure Jony Ive read "The Design of Everyday Things" at some point in his career. Perhaps he got to a point where he decided that didn't apply?


Historically Jony Ive isn't involved in the user interface. Has he been in more recent years? I know that back during Scott Forstall's time and Apple's skeuomorphism phase that Ive stated in interviews that he wasn't involved in any of that. I thought his (direct) influence was limited to (hardware) product design.


Jony Ive was at least nominally in charge of UI design for the post-Forstall iOS 7 update which removed almost all textures and pseudo-3D and most button borders, replaced the previous earthy color palettes with primary colors and gradients, and switched the system font to Helvetica Light:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-rev...


I kind of liked the “brushed metal” texture that could be found in Tiger (10.4): http://toastytech.com/guis/osx14slideshow.png


The “brushed metal means hardware” [0] concept was always something I thought would’ve worked great in practice. Of course apple never really committed to that, and made any window they could look like a slab of aluminum for a while.

But the idea of making a subtle signal that this thing you’re interacting with will have external effects, in the age of MP3 players and digital cameras, was smart.

[0] https://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushedmetal


I've seen speculation that we are slowly returning to a less flat, more depth-oriented design trend based on what Apple showed in the Vision UI demo (skip to 15:13 to see all the components): https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10076/

Notice the shadows inside of the in the inputs, and the 'shine' applied on the bottom. Web designers from the 2000s will remember all this stuff. What's old is new again!


Boring, perhaps. But definitely not harder to read. The old styles with text against textured backgrounds (for example, the pinstriped menu bars) detracted from readability. Current design is significantly better, especially dark mode, although lately there is a trend towards low-contrast UI (text against similarly-coloured backgrounds) in recent versions of iOS and macOS which is also detracting from readability, IMO.


The pinstripes were only in the earliest versions. By Leopard/Snow Leopard (which i also find the best one) the theme looked clean without looking flat.


pinstripes, brushed metal, linen; one could follow the trends by looking at cargo-culting designers were setting as the background image on their blogs. I'm sure they thought it looked good when viewing on their freshly updated Macs.


Mac OS X Tiger was not stripper and far more usbable than flat interfaces.


Likewise. Leopard/Snow Leopard were the point at which I was happen with everything Apple. It truly was peak (for me at least). I still had a Windows 7 PC and Linux (Fedora, Backtrack) on a laptop for running security tools, but I felt most "right" when on the mac.


I recall upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard on my 2008 polycarbonate MacBook. I got back 30 GB of disk space, and it absolutely flew. I straight up don't recall seeing a beachball while using Snow Leopard. Apple called it a 'purely bug-fix release', and free of bugs it was.

In my opinion, OS X has been (mostly) downhill after that. The iOS-ification began with Lion, which changed the juicy blue scrollbars to a boring grey, got rid of 'Save-As'—an extremely controversial addition, as I recall it—and added then-newfangled things like iCloud.


100%. The day I get my chunky aqua scrollbars back, I will shed tears.


It had real character, and the first time I used it, I came away from the iMac (with its soap-on-a-rope mouse) beaming with excitement.

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the peak for me.


This was the first version of Mac OS X I ran on my first "modern" Mac, a 2001 Titanium PowerBook G4. There were some performance issues in this first release, but 10.2 (Jaguar, pronounced "Jag-wire" by Steve Jobs) had a focus on performance and resolved much of it.

I vaguely remember dual-booting Mac OS 9 and X for a while, but it wasn't long before Mac OS X took over full time.


Feels playful because everything else from that era was ugly in my opinion


I wouldn't call XP (Luna) theme ugly. It wasn't as clean as Windows2k but it was just fine.


Everything after Windows 2000 was ugly.

Windows 2000 was the last system in the world with coherent and beautiful UI.

Those times are over. We can't have good things.


I disagree; I love pre-flat Mac OS X. I think Aero from Windows Vista and 7 was nice (even if I preferred the Windows Classic theme), and GNOME 2 was well-done and consistent if you stuck to applications written using GTK+ 2.

I concur that I’m not a fan of modern UI/UX, though. Give me the interfaces and the UI guidelines of Mac OS 8, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X Tiger (with Spotlight) any day.


If one took the version of Aqua from Mavericks and restored aqua scrollbars (it had flat gray pill scrollbars similar to what’s in macOS now), that would be the most perfect iteration of the look in my opinion.

Tiger’s Aqua comes in second, and Leopard/Snow Leopard’s third. I never really liked the ubiquitous dark grays found in 10.5/10.6, it felt kinda gloomy in the same way Win95/98 did relative to Win2K (also due to darker grays).


I really loved the balance Microsoft found in Windows 7 with Aero Glass


Have you tried an XFCE environment? With the right theme, it's excellent, in my opinion.

A couple examples I picked off the XFCE screenshots page:

https://cdn.xfce.org/about/screenshots/4.16-1.png

https://cdn.xfce.org/about/screenshots/4.14-1.png


Linux will never be as coherent as Windows is. It's not just about theme. It's about the whole system. Windows was built from GUI. Linux is built from CLI and GUI is just incomplete buggy slap upon CLI tools. With myriad of choices it'll never be comparable.

Linux need some visionary company which will push hard on some sane technical choices without alternatives to provide coherent vision. It would require tremendous resources and it'll cause tremendous resistance from community (just observe how much hate systemd receives and it's still not as convenient as services.msc from Windows 2000). It's unlikely to happen, so that's why I think we won't have good things, because Windows itself lost its vision as well.


> It's not just about theme. It's about the whole system.

Ahh. In that case, yes, I think you're probably right :)


Hard disagree, Windows 2000's large swathes of grey doesn't look good to me at all.


Yeah, I'm surprised to even see this praise. Win2k was just a return to the corporate grey Windows theme after XP. Just Windows 9x/NT again rather than something special.


Windows 2000 predated XP by almost two years.


Oh yeah, that's right. Though the chronology isn't important.

I think modern macOS is a decent example of how you can increment away from the drab corporate gray of that era without using flashy colors like XP and without going too far into flashy effects like Vista.


I found the “Royale” theme from Windows Media Center far superior.

https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_XP_themes#Royale


I found the bright blue taskbar and window decorators and the bright green start button, among other very bright and contrasting colors, quite the eyesore both at the time and now. Thankfully you could switch to the Windows Classic theme.


The best thing about Luna is that its existence necessitated a capable theme engine, which enabled a vibrant ecosystem of third party .msstyle themes. Some of those were very well designed and a joy to use.

Aero, or at least the slightly toned down Windows 7 version of it was better than Luna, but similarly to me the bigger benefit it brought was the more capable theme engine. There were a lot of awesome third party .msstyles for it too.

I’ll forever resent Windows 8 for ripping out that nice theme engine in favor of one barely more capable than what shipped in Windows 1.x.


There was also the silver version of Luna that was far less garish https://twitter.com/zacbowden/status/1089184545201709056/pho...


The fisher price look. For me it was a downgrade in aesthetic and seemed like trying too hard to make it appealing and friendly for the computer illiterate masses.


I called it that too! My backup was, "well, when your UI is designed by Hasbro". It really did have that Duplo Block look to it. When run at very high resolutions, it did get a bit better.


Where's the childish part? Didn't notice anything.


Maybe a few things like the finder and iTunes icons and the default choices for user pictures, but otherwise I agree.


Circa 2000 I recall playing with a developers beta version of MacOS X approx 6 months or so pre-release. The move from motorola based power pc chips to x86 already felt a decade too late. And the nextstep & netbsd origins? Very "meh". Apache, Mosaic, Napster all crashing hard requiring system reboots. Apple was playing catch-up to professional grade sgi & sunos (which is what every one was using to build the early web back in those days) ;)


Just so nobody gets confused, x86 support was released in 2006.


I think they might be referring to the transition from 68K to PowerPC.


That happened around 1994-95. By 2000, it was old news.


Windows XP looked "childish", too. That was the style for the time, it seems.


I still remember changing it to the classic Windows theme because I didn't like XP's theme.


interesting, it looks sterile to me


I'll take Puma's System Preferences, pinstripes and all, over what we have today. Blech!


I hear ya. I was so in love with that interface back in the day. I thought it was beautiful. If I have to stare at a screen all day I want it to be attractive. Everything is so flat, muted, and boring now. A button is so much less intuitively discovered these days. Tabs are hard to determine due to limited perspective. Window borders are gone and it's so difficult to determine the boundaries of applications. I'd gladly take back some skeuomorphism please.

Remember how cool those confirmation buttons were? Nice blue pill that said "Click me!" They really looked like you could touch them. If only Apple hadn't taken away the customization capabilities of the UI. Remember themes with Shapeshifter? I would love to have that back now to get some old school OS X widgets.


Agreed. I think the new System Preferences was a big step back.


And for what reason? There were things that were so easy to do - like change network interface priority by reordering the list of interfaces - that have obvious method anymore (I want to prefer ethernet when it’s attached, for example).

I can no longer navigate to settings I frequently used and need to search for just about everything. Perhaps I shouldn’t expect things to stay the same after 20 years(!), but for long time users, it’s bewildering.


It's just a big dumb list that I now have to use search to find anything in. My guess is that someone doesn't want to spend developer and designer resources curating the old design. Now they can more or less shove new things into the list and call it a day. Sad.


One thing that I think makes System Settings much worse than it has to be is how indistinguishable its sidebar icons are. They all have the same shape, some share the same background color or have very similar background colors, their glyph shapes are thin, and the white glyph color has extremely bad contrast with some of the background colors.

If the icons were more akin to 10.6 Snow Leopard sidebar icons[0] it'd give the sidebar items much more substantial visual anchors. Heck even the more muted sidebar icons of 10.7 Lion[1] would be a substantial improvement.

[0]: https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/operating-systems/mac-o... [1]: https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-8-Mounta...


I've used macOS since the early betas and could never find what I wanted in the big dumb grid. Had to use search every time.

IMO the sidebar is more usable as I can just scan down to find the right option, or just use the search as before.


I don't dispute your experience. However, for me the old grid provided a two-dimensional spatial hierarchy (if that's a thing) that made it easy for me to quickly drill down to what I wanted. The new list version has a one-dimensional flattened hierarchy with many more categories to consider at the top level. With so many choices my brain shuts down and I just resort to search.


I’m a long time user (pre-OS X) and I prefer the new settings. It always took me longer to find things in the icon grid.


Yes, the old grid layout was not good for anything that you didn’t access frequently. It was sometimes hard to find things if you didn’t already know where to look.

I agree that the actual settings controls and panel layouts are not as good as before. They are more autogenerated while the old panel layouts were more carefully planned. some of the controls seem poorly suited to the data they are controlling.

It might have been better if the navigation were changed but the original controls retained.


maybe they can take a hybrid approach and have grid for favorites and a mile-long list for everything else (with just a plain alphabetical ordering or logical grouping perhaps)


> I frequently used and need to search for just about everything

Because why couldn't they put it in alphabetical order? I want to adjust my Keyboard settings ... where the eff is Keyboard ...


I still miss the "Unix Expert" checkbox from NeXTstep, and would give a lot to have it back.


This was Tog's critique, at about the same time: https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html


I have such strong nostalgia and latent excitement about the early days of OS X. I was just a teenager in the early 2000s, and as a young Apple nerd with several iMac G3s in the house (my parents are graphic designers; there was a family Mac, and some cast-offs from my high school) I'd get so into upgrading them through the versions and looking at all the cool new stuff and thinking it was so damn clean and futuristic.


The first time I learned about OS X, I blindly bought Apple shares. I knew it would set them up for success down the road. Sounds silly now but foundation, such as OS for a computer company, matter.

Although, OS X was painful for many years.


> Although, OS X was painful for many years.

I guess it depends on how you define "many". I bought my first Mac in 1998 (the "Smurf" G3) and used MacOS 8/9 for quite a few years after that. I remember looking forward to OS X once they announced it—it was literally the coolest shit ever. Like, the ability to run Photoshop and Emacs on the same system at the same time? Wow, was that cool.

There was definitely a period where you had to dual-boot between MacOS 9 and OS X for a while, but by the time I bought my first iBook in 2002, OS X was the standard, and was way better than anything else out there. I don't think I ever booted into MacOS 9 on my iBook, except for shits and giggles.

I just don't think there was any question that OS X was leaps and bounds better than OS 9, to the point where when I had to use OS 9 for work 4-5 years later (the video editing world always lags 5-6 years behind the rest of us) I was a little bit peeved about having to used such an antiquated system that literally had no modern web browser support except for something called "iCab".

Anyway, all of this is to say… I wouldn't call 1-2 years, at the most, "many".


As I recall, the main issue with the earliest versions of OS X is that they were slow, somewhat unstable, and would occasionally do really weird things (like how on my summer 2000 iMac DV, OS X 10.0.x once randomly decided it wasn’t going to draw the cursor any more and had to be reinstalled before it was fixed). This led me to spend a fair amount of time booted into OS 9 with an Aqua Kaleidoscope scheme applied and SmoothType installed for that luxe OS X style text rendering.

10.1 made things a little more stable but wasn’t revolutionary.

10.2 Jaguar on the other hand… holy cow. It was so much faster and more stable on my iMac it was absurd. The speed gap was still there but nowhere near as dramatic, making it a lot more usable. This is where I went almost full time booted OS X outside of the odd random thing that didn’t play nice with Classic.


Yup by the time Panther came out I didn’t have any problems. Having my macports env, X11, Unreal Tournament 2k4, and World of Warcraft on the same laptop felt like the high water mark of computing at the time lol


Running on a TiBook G4 I'm guessing? I always wanted one of those but couldn't afford it back in the day. Its design has barely aged at all, it basically defined what a modern laptop looked like, and that persists even now.


To be fair, OS X was OK by 2003 but third-party softwares and especially MS Office sucked until 2007-08.


Well, depends. For music that era is just an explosion of great things. From 10.3 or so a Mac and a Firewire audio interface was an amazingly stable and portable package, with possibilities you could hardly have dreamed of even with a studio full of gear ten years before. The extra power that became available in the Core 2 Duo era was transformative, too, but the software was available for a good while before.


Hope you held onto them. I sold my apple stock at a mere 2x multiple to put the money into buying a house.


They glossed over the NeXT roots which is telling, the ideas were only half-heartedly baked into the OS. It should be strictly enforced that everything on-screen has a relationship to everything else. But that would have been hard work, and they realized eye candy was an easier route when you can just announce something else every few years. This is why desktop evironments really haven't changed since the first commercial releases and Apple is just another PC vendor. Too bad because imagine if the relationship based operating environment was well developed for their spatial headset.


What does it mean for everything on screen to have a relationship to everything else? Could you elaborate?


The classic MacOS's Finder was 'spatial'. Since each folder on disk could only be open in a single window, and that window remembered its position and layout, there was a certain physical consistency - it felt like the windows were the actual folders on disk, with the same kind of coherency and stability you expect of real-world objects.

Meanwhile, the Mac OS X Finder is not spatial. You can have the same folder open in multiple windows, each with different layouts. There's no longer that illusion that the window and the folder are one and the same – it's just a browser showing you the contents of the folder.

This article goes into a lot more detail. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/


Yeah the classic Finder exploited human spatial and muscle memory to help users navigate filesystems quickly, which was pretty smart because those forms of memory are very strong — humans are generally quite good at remembering where things are in physical space, retaining such information more easily than we do abstract information like file paths.


Yes, based on the NeXTSTEP roots, everything should be object oriented. Think of it like visual copy/paste. Pretty much every on screen item should have a meaning and relationship to everything else.

For example, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA at 35:00 you can see how an application is loaded from the network and a live chart dragged from one app to another. That isn't a one-off gimmick, it's how the OS and that version of Objective C worked.

I bought a Macbook because I was excited by this idea, but I quickly realized it was not even surface deep. I could drag some on screen elements around, but it was inconsistent at best.

But I guess there was a conflict with Raskin's idea of making everything resemble a real world equivalent (object as in "toaster app," rather than decomposed feature of "can toast") and they wanted to let third party applications do their own thing. If the whole OS (and network) was effectively the application, what's their product? Never let profound world changing innovation get in the way of a trillion dollar company, I guess.

I think of it, in my muddle headed imagineering way, this way: https://wiki.zooid.org/wiki/20120407/Raskin_vs_Engelbart

I suppose by now we would think of it all as a graph rather than OO, just add coordinates (and the required couple decades of cultural development of how they would relate) and you've got your spatial interface.


I've always been fascinated with NeXTSTEP. It's kind of unfortunate that even the basic interoperability features that made it over to Mac OS, like Services, seem underutilized. I often forget they even exist, because they don't seem core to the default workflow.

I installed OpenStep in a virtual machine after reading this comment. I poked around a bit, but I'm not sure I encountered any of the sort of stuff you're talking about in the OS. Do you have any examples of things I could try to experience some of the magic?


  > I bought a Macbook because I was excited by this idea, but I quickly realized it was not even surface deep. 
same, in some ways macos (x) still hasn't caught up with next/openstep...


Having developed for OSX in that era, IBM ViaVoice, it wasn’t a completely functional OS. The audio input was broken every alternate build, for instance.

I’d come from a NeXT background and was surprised how slow OSX (OpenStep in essence) was on PPC.


Blame Adobe and their renegging of their promise to provide a free Display PostScript runtime.

Getting Quartz née "Display PDF" up to where it was took the better part of a decade as Mike Paquette explained in detail on comp.sys.next.advocacy


I'm curious what you make of the standard narrative that OS X was a fuse of NeXTStep with UNIX and MacOS Classic. As far as I can tell that's not really accurate and OS X was basically just NeXTStep reskinned to look like MacOS, with an emulator for Classic apps bolted onto the side, and some C libraries to ease the porting process from the old Mac APIs to the new NeXTStep APIs without needing to transition to Objective-C. The UNIX aspects to it came primarily from NeXTStep and weren't something new Apple added.


Apple decided to create a NeXT Workspace clone with PowerPlant (Carbonized). My understanding that this was due to politics with both Microsoft and Adobe.

It wasn’t done very well and was clunky. The later re-write to Obj-C was an improvement.

As for the rest of OSX, most of the inbuilt apps were just direct from NeXT. Even today, Mail and TextEdit are still similar.

ProjectBuilder was much the same as on NeXT as was InterfaceBuilder. Their merging into the blob that is now XCode was a mistake IMO.

With ViaVoice, the training app was a PowerPlant port from the older Classic version. It wasn’t hard to munge PP to get it to work.

I did the UI for the VoiceCenter (a HAL-like UI intentionally) and the Preferences given my AppKit skills. One advantage we made use of is we used a UNIX voice engine that ran as a process on its own.

The OS really was just a NeXT with skinning for Apple and a few apps using PowerPlant. I think the old Sun based network management was still present (NIS??).

Obviously, a lack of Display Postscript made a difference as Apple had to develop their own renderer using the same graphics primitives. That may be why it was so slow back then.


I think one of the weirdest things to me is how unchanged OSX / MacOS is. As much as I like this specific paradigm of computing UI, I kind of see why they’ve been trying new things as of late. (Stage manager, new settings panel, iOS-y control centre)

Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean it NEEDS to change, but I can imagine the need to at least explore a bit if something stays mostly the same for 20 years.


It seems like "EVERYTHING" Apple has done in this arena just ensures I'll have to use a search function to find what I want. Same is true for Windows 10+. "I just want to format a USB Thumbdrive!!! why do I have to search for some sort of Disks section in the Control Panel??"


I mean, why not? I think a lot of people under-20 will instinctively think of “erase this whole disk and put a new file system on it” as a very “settings” sort of thing, not something to be done in a separate application like Disk Manager. (Which is technically a hold over from when OSes did not ship with extensive disk management tools, so normally you would have some flavour of Norton Utilities installed after-market.)

If you’ve grown up with phones and tablets, anything that’s a change to the device, even if it’s an operation and not a setting, is in “settings”.

I get it, doesn’t mean I agree with it to be fair! I miss old system preferences as much as you.


Why can't this function be found in several places at once?


Windows has multiple settings and control panel lists to launch the exact same control panel applications. Or even duplicate UI to control the same setting.

I think generally that’s seen as confusing, and probably not something worth striving for IMO.


Not that there aren't more settings/apps/etc nowadays, but your example doesn't apply well for macOS because Disk Utility has been in the same location since the first version over 20 years ago, in /Applications/Utilities/.


That particular example is Windows 10, that's correct.

My comment was mostly about how to find things in the new "settings" experience.


embrace search. command+space is dmenu and command+f is dmenu for a specific context


I miss that metal waste basket and the web link "@" spring. And some of the Dock animations.


Here's that mozilla.org/start page from 2001 if anyone was curious how it continues,

https://web.archive.org/web/20011017155749/http://www.mozill...


I remember how insanely quick the GUI on the first MacOS X Server (1.0) version was. It was mostly (simple explanation) a classic MacOS theme slapped on NeXTStep with some additional things added (and stripped). Then when the consumer version was released, it looked like a ”Hollywood OS” or a fancy Kaleidoscope scheme (3r party themes for classic MacOS). But it was slow as…

So the transition for me took a while at the start. Think it was Jaguar, or maybe Panther when i moved 100% to MacOS X.


> This screen shot shows the login screen. It displays a graphical list of users that can login on this system. (Interestingly Windows XP does something similar)

> Being based on BSD Unix, MacOS X inherits many useful unix features such as real security and user accounts.

> This means that, for example, you can create a special account for someone else to play games and don't have to worry about them deleting system files, accessing your personal files, or changing system setting.

> This can be somewhat confusing to users who are used to having complete control over their systems in earlier versions of MacOS. To do things like install software you must be logged in as the Administrator. While this can be annoying it prevents users from accidentally messing up their system or from malicious programs or viruses that could otherwise infect the system. There is also a hidden "root" account that has slightly more privileges than the Administrator, but this is rarely needed.

Reading this now in 2023 it seems laughably primitive, but I remember the mass confusion at the time! Very similar thing happened with Vista. When old people like me pine for the simpler days of yore, it's hard to imagine just how much simpler those times were (mostly in a good way!)

I love modern Linux and use it on my family PC and it's great having full multi-user tooling for my kids to have their own spaces with no root, but I do fondly remember the days before user accounts were a thing on your PC. Not to mention how open and interopable things were. Those days don't come back


Turns out it wasn’t enough.

What we were just barely starting to grasp then was that, among the “other users” we need to be protected from, were the software vendors themselves.

In other words, I am not a single user; the combination of me and various groupings of binaries are the user, and they must be carefully isolated. And now, it turns out I want still another layer of protection too (e.g. multiple browser profiles/containers).

Back then, most people were still on dialup internet. It was still relatively rare that software would record everything about us and report all of it to HQ. We used to call software like this “spyware”, which isn’t really a word that even exists anymore.

The idea for the need for something like Qubes OS would’ve been completely alien.


Yes great point and very true. I don't think we have complexity for complexities sake, there are real problems we are solving. It's sad that we have to protect ourselves from software vendors, but you're right we absolutely do. The simplicity of the past was based on something that is no longer (probably never was but that's another discussion) true, which is that code the user is running is running with consent of and on behalf of the user.


I get this. I started with Windows 98, and it was much easier to mess up the system, but that's how we learnt. Low security invites play.


What kind of interoperability are we talking about? Not between platforms, surely? Because I don't remember that being in good shape up until maybe 15 years ago.


Each window has Close, Minimize and Maximize button on it. The "X", "-", and "+" symbols only appear when the mouse moves over these buttons.

The "+" symbol is Zoom, not Maximize. https://iili.io/H6a1uAG.png


So, I’ve got to ask the practical question. For you early-adopters, is it stable enough to upgrade to, yet? :p


Using it since the Public Beta that came out in 2000, no complaints here


its good but i'd still recommend to wait for jagwire (^_-)


> Also folders can be browsed as a series of menus when placed in the dock. http://toastytech.com/guis/osxhddoc.jpg

That is more useful than the icon view it has now.


You can still get it like that, just right click on any folder that is pinned to the right side of the Dock, you’ll get 4 different display options.


You made my day! That’s actually really slick in the “list” mode.


Thank you!!


Also should mention "Folder Peek" by Sindre Sorhus which basically does the same but in the menubar, quite handy and free.


Still one of the best looking OSes of all time.


Having never actually interacted with a mac from that era, are the grey and white stripes in the toolbar screenshots actually visible on the screen or are they an artifact of old screenshots on modern displays?


The striations were visible and the window panes that were unselected became translucent. A lot of themes of translucent glass/acrylic with a far-side texture.

The macs of the era had a matching theme to their design. Zoom into the front face of the Power Mac G4 "graphite" tower here:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Apple_G4...


The "pinstripes" were totally there, and celebrated by many. Note that they are slightly translucent, too, just like the pinstriped housings of the plastic Macs of that era.

They really didn't look bad, though. I think if you zoom the image larger it will give you a better impression of what they actually felt like.


They were definitely visible as part of the default theme, and you can see this replicated in the other desktop environment themes that mimic this, for e.g.: https://store.kde.org/p/1290811


They were toned down a lot by the time most consumers saw this (I don’t think any machine actually shipped with 10.1? They stuck with MacOS9 until 10.2, iirc…) and totally vanished soon after. But they were there, to start with.


I got an iBook in mid 2002 that shipped with 10.1 as the default OS (with Mac OS 9 as a dual boot option).

In hindsight, the pinstriping in the first couple of releases was a bit much, but sadly the buttons also got toned down at the same time as the pinstripes, and they've never looked as good since.


They were toned down later release by release.


It's by design, I remember hearing that it would visually match the semi translucent plastic stripes of the original iMac frame, but those, while a bit similar, are vertical.


They are visible. It was a design element throughout the UI at the time.


I really liked that look. The first iOS versions also had a similar pattern in the background: https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/setting-custom-...


They matched the iMac case's stripes. See: https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/29/bondi_blue_imac/


Yes, and it was actually Microsoft who first brought the iMac stripes to Mac software with Internet Explorer 5, before OS X.


Not just the UI. Apple products in general. The G3 iMac, Apple Cinema Display, Power Mac G4 all had pinstriping elements.


I guess it was a carry over from the original Macintosh OS all the way back from 1984.

https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_1


IIRC they were part of the "theme".


"Theme" implies that there might be more than one correct answer. This is false

/s


Yeah, I remember that a fried installed a very early pre-version on his powerbook and we where all blown away.


Notice the Internet Explorer icon?

This may feel unexpected and out of place but Safari was first released only in 2003.


And the Tasman engine that IE for Mac was built around was much nicer than the Trident engine that powered IE for Windows. IE for Mac had good support for CSS and support for transparent PNGs many years before IE for Windows did. I always wondered why MS decided to fix up Trident to create the original Edge instead of porting Tasman to Windows.


I have a memory of browsing on my mac with 5 staggered internet explorer windows (this was before tabs, and I was clearly showing my tab-addiction to come already then by using five windows in parallel.)


I miss my candy coated unix as I used to lovingly refer to 10.1 on my iBook back in the day.


I wish the would modernize the Dock.


What do you mean?


E.g. window previews and virtual desktop miniatures.




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