But I do believe that the old Mac makes for a timely reminder that the digital age hasn’t always felt so frantic, or urgent, or overwhelming. And maybe, even if an old Mac interface isn’t the solution, we can view it as a subtle north star for its sensibilities, and how much it was able to accomplish with so little.
This story is far too light on details and quite fluffy, and the final sentence quoted above is far too simplistic – “how much it was able to accomplish” was, in fact, quite little compared to today’s machines – but it’s interesting to see people discovering the classic Macintosh operating system for the first time, and recognizing its many fun little affordances that made using it so pleasant.
Personally, I consider Mac OS 9 to have one of the most pleasant and usable graphical user interfaces ever designed. Sure, the underlying operating system was a grossly outdated technical mess by that point, but the many subtle animations, the spatial Finder, the consistent and elegantly understated Platinum looks made the UI a pleasure to use, to this very day. And considering I never used the classic Mac OS back when it was current, this isn’t a case of rose-tinted nostalgia; I didn’t get to try out OS 9 until 2005 or so.
I wish Apple’s current software designers were forced to use the classic Platinum UI for a month or two, just to experience what it was like. Maybe they’d step up their game, because as it stands today, macOS’ UI is mere shadow of OS 9.
The new one is OK, but so much was lost in the transition. But then again, much was lost through 7–9, as System 6 was the pinnacle of the Mac OS. It was clean as could be, fast as lightning, and small. I’d love to see a System 6-level Finder for the current Mac, if for no other reason than to have a powerful system when I needed it and a sane interface to use for 99% of my work (though Terminal has to stick around…oh, yes).
What would really be great, however, is if the NeXT/OpenStep could be brought back instead. Making a Mac-like interface made sense back in the takeover years; ditching a far-superior interface did not. And you can see the mess we are left with today.
You should have a look at gnustep.
GNUStep is good, but it isn’t something one can easily (if at all) bolt over macOS or Windows. I am more than a little annoyed that interfaces are so intrinsic to operating systems these days — if there is a properly developed set of calls to do X, Y, or Z, switching between (or even running concurrently, but in different workspaces) interfaces should be no problem at all.
Hm, IIRC/AFAIK, GNUStep allows its apps to be compiled also for Windows at least, where they retain that NextStep look. But perhaps you’d be more happy with GNUStep live cd (the only ~active GNUStep distro that I know of) in a virtual machine / it should be soothing.
And there are still alternative shells for Windows, like Litestep and its ilk, that can be run alongside Explorer…
Didn’t like the article as I thought it got fixated on irrelevant details (‘monochrome screen’) and lost what made the Mac special – its slavish attention to detail and the total simplicity of using it. (I do agree with Thom on Platinum, however.)
What the Mac lost in the transition to X was direct manipulation. There’s something to be said for changing your system just by dragging preference files to the trash or manipulating the control panels as the files themselves.
I agree completely. There’s a lot that I liked about classic System 7-9, but the things mentioned in that article wouldn’t make my list.
To me stuff like only having outlines when dragging windows just made it feel a bit dated compared with the other OSes I was using at the time.
The same with nonsense like sticking with non-proportional scrollbars without live scrolling – I always just considered that kind of thing a little annoyance that Apple took far too long to fix. For me they aren’t things that somehow created a more purist and minimalist experience.
As someone who used Mac OS from the monochrome days up to the final PowerPC days, I really feel the apex was at 10.3, just before the “brushed aluminum” era.
The UI was highly consistent, the customization options tended to be what was actually important, and there was a clear culture of UI consistency for the developers of apps for Mac.
I probably consider that last point to be the most important, since that’s what made using the OS in the early days of downloading most of the programs you used from the Internet quite a lot nicer than using Windows. Almost every program I downloaded, no matter how minuscule, followed the same design principles, and looked as though they came with the OS. I distinctly remember a Diablo 2 save editor that looked like a native OS X program, in comparison with the “UDIETOO” on Windows XP.
In terms of looks, I agree, I think Panther was great in that regard, it also was very snappy and Aqua was toned down a little bit so It looked great and apps followed the aesthetic criteria.
In fact, trying to remember those years a little bit, Panther was the first “usable” OS X… I mean Cheetah was beta-like software, almost unusable, Puma and Jaguar were super slow and almost everybody had to dual boot with OS9 to do real work… the definitive jump to OSX was Panther… and it was like 2004 or so.
It’s funny because We (stupid Mac people like me) laughed about Windows XP back in the day… but Windows XP was miles ahead of OS9 from a technology point of view and It was a much polished product than early OS X releases… but hey, with Panther OSX started to be truly superior product, great OS.
I got a Mac in 1986 and pretty much refused to work on anything else until the early 2000’s when I abandoned Apple entirely.
Classic Mac didn’t have virtual or protected memory: you programmed right down on the metal and it was a blast. With OS X the program crashed rather than the computer, but OS9 rebooted in a flash and was so much quicker and pleasanter that we used it exclusively except for necessary testing on X. OS X was almost impossible to develop on until 10.2 or so.
Metrowerks was on the way out by then anyway, but I never liked Apple’s treatment of the company that literally saved their lives during the PowerPC transition, just to push their own free-but-not-worth-it junk tools. The heck with them!
Looked into writing a MacOS driver back in the day. The manual spent at least a chapter explaining why I probably didn’t want to write a device driver since I could just reach out and touch things before giving me the necessary information. Struck me as a bit odd.
Yeah OS9 looks great if you think about it as a late 80s or early 90’s OS like Windows 3.1 or NT3… very romantic!!! but FALSE.
The problem with this romantic view of OS9 is that OS9 WASN’T an early 90’s OS!!! Apple launched it in late ’99 and sold it as its main OS until late 2001… yeah, OS9 coexisted and competed with Windows XP.
Some Macs were sold with OS9 preinstalled until late 2002 and early 2003 because OS X was too heavy for weaker low-tier Macs.
Yeah OS9 used ancient technology, but it is NOT an ancient OS, so please stop talking about it as a pinnacle technology of an advanced lost human civilization because it was not. It was crap. It was crap with a funny looking UI, yes, but nothing else.
PS: I think the perfect match between a good UI and solid as a rock OS was Snow Leopard. That was the real Mac OS pinnacle at least in the last 20 years (I’m using Macs since 1998 (OS8) don’t know much about 68k stuff because I didn’t use them).
The GUI in 9 was descended from the GUI in 7, which was released in 1991. The theme was later retroactively named Platinum in OS 8 with the introduction of Appearance Manager
Edited 2018-05-08 07:35 UTC
I was never a Mac user back then, but I understand the feeling since I have similar memories of most GUIs of the era. Even the unbearable Windows 3 was pleasant to use compared to the modern mess of divergent interfaces, wasted space, meaningless graphical elements and inefficient gestures that is any mobile, web or desktop experience commonly used today.
The old GUIs were simple, both by design and due to the machine’s limitations, which made them more pleasant to use. It was easy to focus on your tasks, since there was no other fluff to keep you distracted. File managers, for example, had just a dozen of commands or so, and in fact your entire file hierarchy was small and to the point. The article’s author misses the point though when he links the positives of that experience to the fact that old Macs were black and white. I recognize the brutal color limitation forced a superlative visual language design, but that is just one part of the equation. Low resolution has a similar effect: when pixels are at a premium, everything from typefaces to icons to widgets must have the minimum set of visual features to be immediately recognizable, and nothing else. The lack of fluff imposed by the tirany of the pixel grid is great for usability.
There is a modern trend about removing features from software in order to make them more accesible, but it misses the point entirely by keeping all the other sins of modern software development, giving you the worst of both worlds.
I never got the opportunity to play with Mac OS until El Capitan, but encountered a lot of other desktops, from monochrome Windows 2.0 and CDE on HP-UX or AIX to countless Linux desktops. So the article made me curious, I followed it to the Internet Archive and played a bit with the Mac OS 7.0.1 there. What can I say? Just “meh”, nothing impressive. Monochrome? Yes, it was a time for it, but it was not that useful. Wireframe for moving windows? I saw that. Spatial navigation? I hated it on GNOME. Animations? You can chose/customize a desktop today with the level of animations you like.
I don’t think forcing Apple engineers to use OS 9 for a month is really going to change anything, because, as we all know, macOS has to become more and more like iOS at this point. So even if they were to come up with some ideas to make it more like OS 9, Tim Cook will most likely shoot them down in favor of iOS-like macOS ideas.
but System 7 was really cool.
On a Mac 8100/80 that I stored in the attic, after it was given it for free, as recyclable e-waste a decade ago. For me it was just a slow PowerPC. until I recently realised this was the very first Power Mac! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LkGLtQC8Ss
Edited 2018-05-08 13:09 UTC
The 8100 was one of the first 601 based PowerPC models, but didn’t Apple release the 6100, 7100 and 8100 on the same date?
I used to own a lot of these machines as I bought a lot of old Power Mac’s circa 2003, from a local repair shop getting rid of old inventory. I had a load of non working machines, including a few [x]100’s. They were all fun.
I had a 7300 that I sold on with a copy of BeOS installed. And the rest I scrapped mainly as I had no use for a lot of the parts. (I only actually wanted the 7300, but the guy twisted my arm for an extra £20 I could take the lot, and I had a hard time saying no.)
I also had a 6100 at one point. I would still, but the battery leaked whilst in storage and killed the computer.
For what it’s worth, I messed with computers since the PET-2001 and Apple II in 1977. Not trying to be a wise-guy, but I remember when the mac came out in 1984. It was not “minimalistic, subtle” or anything like that. The high resolution was jaw-dropping, wireframe animations were super slick and the gui-concept was from another world. Heck, it could even play real audio-samples. It was cutting edge, and every bit as fancy as the “colorful skittle interface on a retina interface” is today (not an apple-fan btw., except Apple-II). Maybe I didn’t get the point of the article, but it just came across as if people were somehow more selfrestrained and subtle back then. Nope, this was full blast on the firewoks. It just seems like that from todays perspective. Cheers!
As someone that regularly uses an Amiga 1200 at home. I don’t really get it. Macs and Amigas at the time were pretty much the same hardware wise. The interface was decent but so was the Amiga’s interface.
Also the Amiga’s with some upgrades were better mac than the actual macs.
tps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI&feature=youtu.be