On 14 June 2016 at 01:56, Sean Conner <s...@conman.org> wrote: > It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated: >> > System 9.x and before are >> > "something different" for me, a break from my mostly hardcore CLI >> > existence. >> >> Yes, true. An OS I still miss, for all its instability and quirkiness. >> I'd love to see a modern FOSS recreation, at least of the concept and >> the style, even if it was binary-incompatible. > > What do you feel is still missing from OS-X today? About the only thing I > can think of is the unique file system, where each file had a data and a > resource fork.
This is an interesting question, not directly but as a sort of meta-question. Often, in non-retrocomputing circles, when I express nostalgia for dead platforms, people ask "what is missing?" It's not that anything is _missing_. It's that there are things present that I wish were not present. Note, this doesn't mean that it's theoretically possible to strip down a complex system to make a more simple one. What did I like about classic MacOS? * Simplicity -- the Finder integration with the OS, the desktop database, etc. Move items around, aliases still point to them. Even to other drives, even to other machines on the same network! * Clean conceptual model -- not merely the spatial thing, but the way that you can never see 1 particular icon in more than one place. Open another window to view something already being viewed, the old window closes. * The clean, totally CLI-less nature of it. Atari ST GEM imitated this, but it had the DOS-like legacy baggage of drive letters etc. * The simplicity of the self-arranging magic System folder. Drop in a file, it automatically goes into the right folder, whatever it is -- INITs, CDEVs, etc. Move them _out_ of that folder into, say, the "Disabled Control Panels" folder and bing, it's disabled. Clean, visual, obvious, simple. * Pop-up folders, drawers, etc. -- UI features never recreated on OS X. It was a clean, simple, *elegant* system. Not perfect, no. Snags? Poor interprocess protection, poor VM, poor multitasking, poor stability. >> I wish the Star Trek project had come to some kind of fruition. >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project > > Reading that, it sounds like it would have been much like early > Windows---an application that would run on top of MS-DOS (or in this case, > DR-DOS). My impression is that DR-DOS would have been a bootloader, little more. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)
