A bit of nostalgia: A Salute to Mac OS X

[simX]

In honor of Mac OS X's recently passed first birthday, I thought I'd go back through some of the MacWorld articles and look at the progression of Mac OS X through the ages.

And wow, has Mac OS X changed dramatically, from what was demoed in January 2000, to what we have now in January 2002! In two short years, Mac OS X has rapidly evolved, and as most anyone would agree, it has changed for the better. It almost brings a tear to my eye when I see such things as the Apple logo decal in the middle of the menu bar (in the public beta which lacked an Apple menu), and the little purple button, used for single-window mode, that used to be in the place of the long white button in the upper-right-hand corner of each window.

Mac OS X, as we know it today, is a powerful operating system that just about lives up to the standards of the ideal operating system. I'm sure there are many features that I, and many of you, still want in Mac OS X (spring-loaded folders, RAM disks, to name a couple), but I hope that Mac OS X has lived up to the hype that Apple has given it. It sure has for me. Although I still revert to some of my old Classic Mac OS habits, I know that I couldn't live without the knowledge that my applications are much less crash prone, or even the fact that I have a command line to fall back to in dire situations. I know that many of you still have complaints about Mac OS X, but seeing as it is scarcely one year old (if you only count the days since it's been officially released), and the Classic Mac OS has had over 17 years to evolve, I believe that Mac OS X is phenomenal as it is. And I only think it's appropriate that we look back over the years that Mac OS X has been in the making.

Yet even though the future looks very bright for the Mac platform, as we honor Mac OS X, so should we honor the Classic Mac OS, and the joys of a intuitive, easy-to-use operating system that it brought us. Mac OS X would never be here if it weren't for the dedication that all of Apple's programmers put into the Classic Mac OS. And even though we are phasing out the Classic Mac OS from our lives, it will always be a part of my computer experience, and every other Mac user that has touched that Platinum interface. As we make the transition over from Platinum to Aqua, it is only fair that we acknowledge what the Classic Mac OS has brought to the Mac platform.

So here I appeal to all of you MacOSX.com users, who have no doubt embraced Mac OS X. First-time Mac users, long-time Mac users, UNIX geeks who have shifted to Mac OS X, I appeal to you now. Post what you love about the Mac platform, what you love about Mac OS X. Post what you will miss from the Classic Mac OS days, whether it be the joys of Crystal Quest (the first color game ever on a Macintosh) or the initial joys of being productive on a personal computer. Post what has brought you to the Mac platform and what keeps you here. Post anything that you feel deserves attention, from the easter eggs in System 7 to the funny genie effects of Mac OS X.

This is NOT a bash Windows thread, or a thread to complain about the lack of features in Mac OS X or the Classic Mac OS. This thread is solely to honor the Macintosh operating system in its own right. Mac OS X (and arguably the future of the Mac platform)'s first birthday has passed, and so I hope that we can all briefly honor it as well as the road it took to get here. I hope that we can keep this thread alive for a while (even if after moving it to a more appropriate forum).

I will be posting what I love about the Mac platform and Mac OS X, but first, I need to eat breakfast.

[serpicolugnut]

Here! Here! Well said!

<raises glass to toast>

[serpicolugnut]

1. Stability.
2. Ease of use. Really. After you get past your OS 9 hangups, you can navigate much faster through the OS X Finder. Sure, it needs additional work, but they got more right in version 1.0 than wrong.
3. iApps. Can't overlook this. Without great iApps like iMovie, iTunes, iDVD and iPhoto, the OS wouldn't be half as useful.
4. Did I already mention stability?
5. Cocoa. Thanks to Cocoa, rapid application development is a reality. In one short year we have gotten some great shareware apps out of developers using Cocoa. Watson. osXigen. Pic2Icon. Duality. PixelNHance. OmniWeb. Snax. This list just keeps on growing.
6. Java. Having the best Java support is a huge plus. I get a grin when I run an app like LimeWire on my PBG4/500 - because it runs so much smoother and faster than on my PIII800. And we're only at the beginning!
7. Having access to a command line when needed.
8. The speed in which 3rd party developers have rushed to make OS 9 missing features available in OS X (Unsanity's Haxies, ASM, DragThing, DefaultFolderX, Keyboard Maestro, TinkerTool).
9. The Power of UNIX. It's just incedible that with UNIX under the hood, a Mac OS X user can 1) Run X Windows and the vast majority of UNIX software, 2) Run JAVA 3) Run Classic Mac OS apps, 4) Run legacy NeXT apps through Cocoa, 5) Carbon apps, and through 6) VPC, any x86 OS and application. Amazing.
10. The Dock. While it's FAR from perfect and needs some major adjustments in my opinion, it's a good start. Give us options like the ability to turn off the floating titles (or have them appear with a yellow background , ala tooltips - the white w/ shadow text is too harsh over anything other than a dark background), ability to access stuff from the Apple menu when right clicking on the Mac OS Logo in the Dock, and the ability to have "Tabbed" groups within a dock, ala Drag Thing.

[simX]

Now that I've regained myself and don't have that tear in my eye anymore from my speech, I'd like to detail a few things about the Classic Mac OS and maybe a few from Mac OS X's beta days.

First with the Mac OS X beta thing. Look at this window:


Now look at one of your windows in Mac OS X. How things change, huh? Your window is now named the name of the directory instead of "Finder", the buttons aren't huge big buttons, there's no single-window mode button, there's no search field (haha I laughed at the caption now that the search field is taken out again -- the caption hailed the search field as a nice new feature), and the back button and the path pop-up are now all on the same line.

Also, do any of you remember the shoddy "Music Player" that was included with the Mac OS X public beta? None of us knew that that was the precursor to iTunes.

On to the Classic Mac OS:

#1: Crystal Quest. Ever played that game? I used to play it all the time in black-and-white for hours. It's like this year's EV Nova.. it was so addictive. What with all the dumples (I think that's what they're called) and the things that almost always kill you when you shoot them because they die in a spray of fatal shot thingies, I miss that game so much. It can still be played under the Classic Environment of OS X (which is VERY surprising, seeing as it was the first color Mac game, built for System 6), but it often gets errors and you can't play it full screen. Ah, well. That game will always live in my memories.

#2: Easter eggs. Dang there were so many easter eggs in the Classic Mac OS. There was the pong/waving flag easter egg that came when you typed "secret about box" in the note pad and dragged it to the Finder to make a text clipping. There was the System 7 easter egg (that was taken out in later builds because it caused problems) that like on the 7th day of the 7th month, you go to the 7th menu in the Finder and select the 7th menu item and something interesting would pop up (I never saw it personally, but I heard about it). Then of course there's the Stickies easter egg where you typed something like "Camel!" in a sticky and if you waited for a few seconds, a picture of a camel would pop up. Ohh, those were the good days (for easter eggs, anyway).

#3: Dragging windows by the sides. This was a great time-saver in the Classic Mac OS, and I'm sad to have it gone in Mac OS X.

#4: Option-windowshading. Oh come on, I know you did that when you were in the Classic Mac OS. You open a bunch of windows, and then option click the window-shade button, and you hear a bunch of window shutters closing. I always loved that. Do it again and you hear a bunch of them opening.

#5: Does anyone remember QuickTime 2.5? That version originally shipped with the original Myst game, by Broderbund and Cyan. Too bad the developers of later Myst games decided to stop supporting the Mac OS and to have Mac game developers port the game.

[Captain Code]

I just have to say this:

Crystal Quest RULES

[themacko]

I'm generally new to Macs, purchased my first (the iBook I'm on now) back in August, and ran OS 9 until January. 9.1 was okay, it did it's job and I enjoyed having something other than Windows. But now that I've updated to X, I actually have a computer I like!

Before, I just used the computer for homework purposes, mainly because I didn't know how to do anything. Now I can download and rip music, burn CDs, make iMovies, save my digital pictures. Everything Apple wants you to be able to do with your Mac.

The best thing I like about OS X? The graphical look of it, I love the doc and the colorfulness.

What do I miss from Windows? A fast browser (you know I'm right) and Counter-Strike. We were freaking addicted to that game back in the dorms.

Oh, and I'd like to thank the jackass who stole my PC our freshman year. If it weren't for you, I probably would have never gotten a Mac.

[Bluefusion]

Great post, simX!

I think that Mac OS X has rapidly become my OS of choice because of the fact that you really feel like you can do ANYTHING. Mac OS 9 always had a touch of anxiety about it, a fear of "if I force quit this app, the system will come crashing down around my head" and "wait, wait wait for it to finish starting, don't click until it's done..." or "Shhhh! Director is starting up. Don't move or it'll do something bad." (Man, I love that one)... and with OS X I feel a sense of empowerment that has been missing in every other Mac OS since 1984. The fact that you CAN emulate the OS 9 way of doing things is a testament to how brilliantly designed OS 9 was——that millions of people prefer its system functionality to that of a modern, crash-protected, stable OS based on UNIX? OS 9 was and now always will be the pinnacle of Apple's Classic OS... and it deserves respect for that. It was the ultimate evolution, the ultimate finished version of what Apple started in 1984 with one simple word: "Hello."

The Classic OS has always been very friendly; it was intuitive, it was graceful. It didn't do everything perfectly, but it was so much easier to find things and accomplish tasks than *ahem* competing systems of the time. OS 9 has had its weaknesses, but it was the best way to get anything done.

Now OS X has come, and in a year it has become a stable, usable, customizable, BEAUTIFUL operating system; one that not only CAN do everything, but it makes you WANT to do everything. I sit here in front of a screen less than an inch thick that floats in midair--- no flickering, no gargantuan tower sitting under my desk, no Blue Screen of Death, no wristwatch cursor--- and I realize that I can do anything I want to do. This is what makes OS X so powerful; it brings all of its ability together in an interface that, quite simply, makes a lot of SENSE. It takes some getting used to, but man, can it do things. And sure, I get frustrated at it sometimes (don't we all) and with its inadequacies, which at times seem much more important than its abilities, and then realize that no matter what, I'll have Classic and Mac OS 9 to fall back on. That is what is so great about Apple; they make great products, but they don't abandon the old ones. My dad's got a huge flickery CRT screen and a big tower under the desk, but hell, it runs OS X like a champ!

OS 10.2 has spring-loaded folders, so right off the bat there goes another huge complaint. (Now if only they release it soon—- but I'm confident they're simply fixing even more things) I'm sure that updates will continue to not only add in features we requested, but to also add new abilities that, quite simply, we would never imagine.

My iPod had a lot of problems. A LOT. It was obviously defective, so Apple immediately agreed to accept it for replacement. The box sent to pick up the unit was sent out a minute and a half after I put down the phone. Via Airborne Express. I got it in under 17 hours, put the iPod in, scheduled a re-pickup, sent it back, watched the tracking thing, and watched in awe as, on a Friday night, they sent it back using "Saturday Delivery"... more expensive even than using Airborne's normal Overnight system, which doesn't work on weekends... I was and always will be amazed at their commitment to actually HELPING people instead of just trying to get their money.

Those of you without an iPod won't quite understand this the same way, but when Apple went to Tokyo and released the new update, it was, to put it mildly, a stroke of genius. Not only did they add features that everyone had requested, they fixed things I had found mildly annoying once or twice (little things that I never would have bothered to mention to anyone). They improved everything about it to such a degree that I feel like a I have a new MP3 player. The iPod is no longer my favorite MP3 player, folks--- iPod with Update 1.1 is. This sort of attention to detail, the focus on what makes a product great and not what makes money in the short-term, is why Apple is and hopefully always will be the BEST company I have ever had the pleasure of doing business with.

OS 9 is still a very special part of my computer life. Even though the shockingly bland appearance (when compared to Aqua) is sometimes enough to make me say, "Oooooh, get me back to X, please," I still enjoy it for all the joy it's brought me in its daily use. OS 9 may be winding down, but a new era is starting up with OS X... and in the process I hope that I never, ever forget Classic.

Long live Apple!

[nkuvu]

Along the lines of Apple helping customers:

I ordered my iMac on the 8th of March. I waited and waited and waited until last Monday (the 25th). I got a notification of shipment on the 25th, which told me that I had 2-5 business days to wait for delivery. I had already spent a lot on the computer itself, and I knew it would be a long wait, so I figured that I wouldn't spend extra money on faster shipping. FedEx tracking numbers are entered into the system 12-24 hours after shipment, so even though I knew that the iMac had shipped, I didn't know when it would get here. Tuesday morning I was able to see the shipment. It was already in Tucson! At about 10:00 Tuesday my roommate called me at work and told me that my iMac had arrived. Apple apparently decided that I had waited long enough, and upgraded my shipping to Priority Overnight.

This is utterly amazing. Every single other company that I have ordered from tries to cut corners as much as possible, especially on shipping.

I now have a computer where I really do agree with BlueFusion -- I feel like I can do anything. I am not an experienced Mac user -- the last experience I had with Macs was on System 6. I have a little Unix knowledge (to the point where I can set up FreeBSD or Linux on my machine, and get it fully configured). I know Windows well (though I may hate to admit it. ). But with an OS that I have used for barely a month (a little experience on my roommate's iMac) I am completely comfortable here in OS X.

It's astounding to me that I can feel this happy about just sitting in front of my computer. I've never had a problem wth that before, of course. But the million "little things" that went wrong on a Windows machine (and the hundreds of "huge things") made the transition to OS X relief beyond description. It's kind of like having someone sit on your chest -- someone small enough that you don't immediately suffocate. Leave that person there for a year, or two, or ten. When that person gets off your chest, it's amazing how easily you can breathe!