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Today Marks 20 Years Since Mac OS X First Launched

I still miss NeXTSTEP and that sweet, sleek hardware. Used a Canon NextSTATION for InPosition back in the mid-90s. Boring grey/beige box, but it was NeXTSTEP, which is all I cared about. Miss BeOS too, but twas not to Be!;)

Happy birthday MacOS X! You’ve made computing better, kept me gainfully employed and kept me from having to use Windows to make my livelihood. I owe you a debt I can never repay.
 
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gammamonk said:
I was using either Window 2000 or the really janky Solaris workstations in the computer lab back then and bought a 15" PowerBook G4 when I graduated. It was unreal, so much better than anything I'd ever seen.

A lot of people here are saying Snow Leopard was the best, but I missed that one. PowerPC capped out at 10.5. I should try a 10.6 hackintosh for a weekend project some time.
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SPARCstation 20? It’s been so long since I’ve had to deal with Solaris. Loved that hardware as well. Costly, but nice.
 
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Hot take: after using old versions of MacOS, give me post-10.14 versions any day.
Calling Snow Leopard the best version is 50% nostalgia. Having used it in desktop publication, I’ve managed to have Finder crash and corrupt pdf files repeatedly. Something that doesn’t happen with newer versions. Skeuomorphism was decent while it lasted but it wasted a lot of screen real estate, something at a premium especially on old machines with 20 inch 720p screens or less.

Big Sur’s visual design has grown on me I must admit though. And it kps far, far less than Catalina. But I’ll be a fan of Mojave for the foreseeable future.
 
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Zdigital2015 said:
I still miss NeXTSTEP and that sweet, sleek hardware. Used a Canon NextSTATION for InPosition back in the mid-90s. Boring grey/beige box, but it was NeXTSTEP, which is all I cared about. Miss BeOS too, but twas not to Be!;)

Happy birthday MacOS X! You’ve made computing better, kept me gainfully employed and kept me from having to use Windows to make my livelihood. I owe you a debt I can never repay.
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Good News! You can run Haiku OS. The open source BeOS still alive today.

www.haiku-os.org

Haiku Project

Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by BeOS, Haiku is fast and easy to learn but very powerful.
www.haiku-os.org www.haiku-os.org
 
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velocityg4 said:
Or they'd have finally gotten Copland out the door then Gershwin. If they got a good CEO to get the departments and feature creep under control. Which was the huge problem with the project. The tug of war between departments and the constant addition of new features. Rather than finishing the project and adding new features in new versions.
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Even if Apple had cleaned up their act and focused on Copland, I don't think they had the time to deliver in a timeframe that would have saved the company. The Mac platform was generally seen as dead at that point. It was Steve Jobs return and the promise of the Next platform* that bought them some leeway to develop OS X in which stalled the mass exodus from the platform.

* I suppose Steve could have focused on Copland, but from what I've read it seemed Copland needed much more development.
 
JMacHack said:
Skeuomorphism was decent while it lasted but it wasted a lot of screen real estate, something at a premium especially on old machines with 20 inch 720p screens or less.
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Seems like it wasted a lot less screen real estate than Apple's modern UIs do:

it.png
 
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I still miss the classic OS, 20 years later.

Some reasons:

1. For years, Mac users prided themselves on not having to run an operating system that was a shell upon a command line operating system. Now we're stuck with Terminal to get serious stuff done, which is no different in a sense than MS-DOS being the underpinnings of Windows--something Mac users liked to complain about when using Windows. Sure, there was a debugger on the classic OS, but some things need Terminal that should be accomplishable without it.

2. I like computers that don't require passwords for everything. Anyone can argue that they are more necessary today, but if a computer is being used offline by one person, why the passwords? Why a password for something as trivial as changing something in the control panel? It's a major pain and something I've always despised about the current Mac OS. We used ResEdit without that inconvenience to do much more to our systems years ago.

3. The interface has too much dark gray and it's not customizable. The grays on the classic OS, from System 7 onward, were light and pleasant. I've long equated the OS X and up grays with dark clouds. In fact, the lack of customization in general is bad. Where is the ability to change things like menu bar fonts from the ugly sans serif typeface to something like Chicago?

4. Icons that bounce up and down when a program wants attention. It's obtrusive and annoying. Under the classic OS, the application menu would blink, but that was small and out of the way. Why not bring back an option like that? I know it can be customized, but it requires a lot of backdoor work.

5. OS X and up are just less friendly. There's no charm left in anything, even the error messages. Remember the playful "oops" with the alias error message in the old days? That's gone, as though our friendly coworker left and was replaced by a cold, serious ice cube.

6. Likewise, there's a lot less fun in the new OS. Gone are things like the hilarious alert sounds, the crazy fonts, and the zany desktop pictures.

7. The Apple menu still isn't customizable. I miss having a calculator and the scrapbook within reach no matter what program I'm using. Why put another jumbo icon in the dock? Soon, it becomes as messy as the Launcher or At Ease from the old system.

I begrudgingly use OS X because I can't use OS 9 on a new machine. I really wish Copland would have made it. At least I still have an iBook with Microsoft Office that can run from a battery.
 
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gammamonk said:
I was using either Window 2000 or the really janky Solaris workstations in the computer lab back then and bought a 15" PowerBook G4 when I graduated. It was unreal, so much better than anything I'd ever seen.

A lot of people here are saying Snow Leopard was the best, but I missed that one. PowerPC capped out at 10.5. I should try a 10.6 hackintosh for a weekend project some time.
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Leopard blew my mind with some of the new features like quick look, and then Snow Leopard refined it in such a massive way. I was say SL was one of the highest quality releases.

Someone else has mentioned this already - but I miss the 1.5-2 year cycle of OSX. So many more refinements, one year in between puts a lot of pressure to put something out for the sake of change.
 
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CJ Dorschel said:
Nothing beats snow leopard. Also important to note development required wiping the system and installing a new beta every two weeks over a 2 to 3 year period. This allowed for proper debugging of the core OS to ensure that third-party apps and plug-ins weren’t causing issues.

I’d rather go back to two to three-year release cycles for $129 than a rushed annual release for free. Big Sur is a big mess. The UI is terrible on desktop systems. It’s washed out and lacks any depth and consistency. No matter how hard I tweaked my 5K displays to compensate for the harsh washed out finder windows and icons it never seemed to make a difference. It’s essentially iPadOS on a Mac.
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Erm, there is/was a better one, Mojave was way better from even the first beta, stable as a rock, Snow Leopard first few point releases were not stable, people even lost data, as in whole disks.
SL wasn't really stable until the last release.
 
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Introducing... the spinning beachball of death! (God, I don't miss that cursor. Do almost anything, and the cursor would start spinning for several seconds. Never really got fixed until about Panther I think?)
 
Wow I sort of still remember installing it when it was released. I had just switched over to a blue and white G3 the year before because of work, and was getting really comfy with 9.2. The GUI alone blew us all away (we had the beta at Kinkos Corporate helpdesk to play with), but I had no software. At some point I said hell with it and went all in once Logic was available and MOTU released the drivers for the first Firewire audio interface, the old 828. Not having to setup OMS for MIDI was worth it. Pretty awesome to refresh and go back to see how far its become.
 
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