That last post, the look back at the long history of the iMac, goes hand-in-hand with this one, an appreciation of the black and white simplicity of the original Mac OS. If you’ve never had the original Mac experience, take a look at Mark Wilson’s post for a glimpse at what got us here.
And if you are an old-schooler (like me), follow the headline link and immerse yourself in a nice warm pool of nostalgia.
I’m kinda with CapnVan – I not only used Classic Macs when they were current, but I’ve been getting my old collection up and running, so I’ve literally used MacOS 8 this week.
(Admittedly, in 24 bit color, because VRAM is cheap and so are the old 8*24 video cards; there’s no reason I should have to run my IIci or Quadra 700 in even 8 bit color, not in this century.)
It was a great OS for its day, but unstable as all hell compared to any modern system, what with no memory protection at all in any way*.
I remember using it on 68ks, on several generations of PowerPCs, and I’m frankly glad it’s replaced with OSX, which is better in every way.
(* My Q700 will kill the Finder and be useless until rebooted if the right kind of corrupt floppy is inserted, for instance.)
(That said, if someone wants “black and white UI” but for their system to not look utterly awful, there’s this thing called “greyscale”, which is an excellent compromise, ala the original NeXT.
Unlike the Classic Macs, which have pixels big enough to mountain climb on them, by modern standards.)
Can we please not listen to people who write things like:
“We didn’t have all of this rich digital media in 1985 when the Mac’s interface was first conceived”
Retrospectives from people who clearly never actually used the classic OS really aren’t terribly interesting.
MultiFinder or get off my lawn.
I do still have my Mac Plus and some iteration of external HDD in my closet. I haven’t turned it on in decades, though. Heck even deeper in the closet I think I still have my Apple ][+ as well.
I followed a hack years back to get my Zip drive working on the Plus (I think with 6.0.8!).
That and the 20 *MB* form fitting HDD? That was living.