[HN Gopher] Infinite Mac
___________________________________________________________________
Infinite Mac
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 600 points
Date : 2022-04-26 15:25 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (macos8.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (macos8.app)
| beders wrote:
| It comes with Civ preinstalled? Just one more turn....
| thomasfl wrote:
| The biggest change to Adobe Photoshop since version 3.5, seems to
| be the retail price.
| amlib wrote:
| 1 minute in and I'm already making delightful landscapes in
| Bryce...
| dhagz wrote:
| This makes me realize how much I miss the old (spatial) Finder.
| breck wrote:
| I really like the Equation Editor in the Claris Works folder.
| Specifically, I like the "holes" UI when writing an equation
| using a summation editor, for example. I feel like modern
| equation editors have lost that, but maybe I've just used the
| wrong ones. Does anyone have any ones they'd recommend, or
| pointers to more uses of 2D editors with "hole" UIs?
| jasomill wrote:
| While I'm a LaTeX person myself, the equation editor (Insert-
| Equation) in Microsoft Word appears to work this way.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Strangely, my AT&T fiber gateway blocks this website and claims
| spam risk.
| doubled112 wrote:
| It's exactly how I remember the Macs my grade school was using
| back then.
|
| Click around a little bit, and boom, it is frozen. Do you wait?
| Do you force quit? The watch gives little feedback.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Set the system clock to display seconds and then you can tell
| when/how long it's been frozen.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Hehe, you bet my menu bar clock on macOS 12 still displays
| seconds, some 25+ years later :)
| unpixer wrote:
| Found another greybeard Mac user! I learned this trick under
| System 6 and used it religiously until just recently. (My
| clock keeps perfect time, but seconds don't update, under
| MATE Compiz. Go figure.)
| [deleted]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Cooperative multitasking architecture. If the frontmost thread
| doesn't `WaitNextEvent`, not even the OS gets a chance to
| update the UI (with some key exceptions... I think the mouse
| was interrupt-driven?).
|
| OS 8 started to add preemptive multitasking, but it wasn't
| mandatory and apps had to buy-in to it (so they didn't break
| backwards compatibility).
|
| Incidentally, games would squeeze a few more cycles out of the
| computer by using `getNextEvent` or accessing the input drivers
| directly, which wouldn't give other processes a chance to do
| things. This would lead to the hilarious consequence
| (especially when the networking era came along) that you'd play
| a game for a couple hours, quit it, and be greeted by several
| error dialogs as various processes that had been wanting to
| poll for timed events discovered they'd missed their polling
| windows because they essentially just came out of suspended
| animation.
|
| The need for always-available network access finally spelled
| out the death of the non-preemptive architecture; networking
| simply couldn't tolerate the client dropping out of the
| universe for ages at a time.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Hah same. If it had kid pix it would be just like when I was a
| little kid.
| idreyn wrote:
| Check the Graphics folder! (It crashed immediately for me in
| Firefox, though)
| duskwuff wrote:
| FWIW: The emulator dynamically loads chunks of the hard
| disk over the network, and will usually crash if that fails
| -- which can happen if the site is busy.
| idreyn wrote:
| I tried it again and was able to use it this time!
| killingmehardly wrote:
| stakkur wrote:
| I would _still_ use OS 8 /9, warts and all, if it were practical
| and worked reliably with modern software/hardware.
| leonbailey wrote:
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| How do you shutdown?
|
| I'd lose my mind if this had "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing"
| animex wrote:
| Tried to play Battle Chess and got some weird out of memory
| error. Gaming on the Mac...true to form! xD
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| I was able to start Marathon 2, but couldn't figure out the
| controls. (I didn't play it back in the day but knew of it)
| kirykl wrote:
| This will be impossible to do with iOS and apps vaporized into
| history off the App Store
| whyenot wrote:
| I wish one could get Macintosh Common Lisp working on this. My
| introduction to programming was with MCL, and it was amazing to
| use. So much has changed over the past few decades. I wonder what
| it would be like to use it now.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Oooh how nice!
|
| That digs up some memory from my childhood - an aunt had an Apple
| with the OS looking very similar to this one, and there was a
| game where you had to place railroad tiles and could then operate
| a train. Anyone here remember that game?
| adregan wrote:
| I have really been missing window shading lately (and the control
| strip).
|
| Working on OS X and beyond has always felt slower (animations)
| compared to window shading. It's been 20 years and I still prefer
| it.
| yoyopa wrote:
| yeah, there's no argument for getting rid of windowshade. it's
| way better.
| nevinera wrote:
| Will it run bolo?
| nevinera wrote:
| The answer is "yes it's on there", but more meaningfully - does
| it handle networking enough that we could have a massive bolo
| lan party?
| mihaip wrote:
| Creator of the site here. There's a blog post with the technical
| details if you're curious about how it works and whose work it
| builds on: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html
|
| There are also a couple of variants that boot either System 7.5.3
| or KanjiTalk 7.5.3 (the Japanese version of MacOS):
| https://system7.app/ and https://kanjitalk7.app/
| wk_end wrote:
| Just as a heads up -
|
| I went to go create a new project in Think Pascal, and when I
| tried to enter a name all my keystrokes came out as boxes.
|
| Using Chrome 100 on macOS Big Sur. English (Canadian) key
| layout.
| mihaip wrote:
| This seems to work OK for me. Any chance a modifier is stuck
| down (try pressing command, option and shift to reset their
| state). If this still happens, can you file a bug at
| https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/new?
| kalel83 wrote:
| I would love it if you could include the game lunatic fringe in
| this.
| mihaip wrote:
| Lunatic Fringe was part of After Dark, which is in the
| Control Panels & Extensions folder. If you drag that to the
| "Control Panels" folder in the System Folder and restart,
| it'll be enabled, and you can choose it.
| bredren wrote:
| In middle school, we had a math teacher with an old mac setup
| that ran a physics simulator program. It came with a variety of
| starter templates, one of them was this crash test dummy in a
| car.
|
| It was all polygons, but you could hit run and the car would
| accelerate and hit a wall then the circle head and arms would
| sort of fly around.
|
| Anyone know what this software was? I remember running and re-
| running little simulations repeatedly, with little
| understanding of the science but very much enjoying the ragdoll
| physics of it.
| Throw6away wrote:
| Working Model, by Knowledge Revolution. I used to work there,
| and my first project was making the jump from 2D to 3D.
| bcjordan wrote:
| Any stories / surprising bits from working there?
| Throw6away wrote:
| https://www.design-simulation.com/wm2d/
| jrowley wrote:
| Oh wow, I remember this for sure. What a throw back. What was
| it called?
| sirmarksalot wrote:
| I remember two programs like that, one that my middle school
| had called "Fun Physics," and one my high school had called
| "Conceptual Physics." The interfaces were exactly the same,
| and it wouldn't surprise me if Conceptual Physics was a
| rebundled version sold along with Paul Hewitt's course.
| Unfortunately, those names are so generic that I can't find
| them on Google.
| aasasd wrote:
| Old software can frequently be found on archive.org--with
| much more focused selection than 'the whole web'.
| Throw6away wrote:
| You could author workspaces in Working Model and I dimly
| remember Fun Physics was built using WM.
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| MATLAB or something from MathWorks?
| RulerOf wrote:
| I caught this the last time it came around HN. Thanks for
| making this. Browser accessibility of these classic systems and
| the painstaking work you undertook to integrate all of the
| third party software is really important for preserving the
| experience we had growing up with these machines.
|
| My son regularly asks me to play Lemmings now because of this
| app :)
| smm11 wrote:
| Can I update the System 7.5.3 machine to A/UX?
| gattilorenz wrote:
| A/UX is very picky about hardware. You can run it in the
| Shoebill emulator
| dillutedfixer wrote:
| Thank you for the magnificent trip down memory lane!
| samstave wrote:
| HOLY SHIT! You have a working ver of Bryce KPT! from 1994!
|
| Jeasus - that brings back so many shitty 3D city scapes I made
| back then/
|
| Can you get Aldus Pagemaker (5.0 preferably,
| /r/beggingchoosers, and all that) running on this please.
| mihaip wrote:
| I haven't tried this myself, but you should be able to
| download and install it from
| https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aldus-pagemaker-50 (drag the
| .sit on the emulator, and it'll be copied to the "Downloads"
| folder). You can then use StuffIt Expander to unstuff the
| .sit and Disk Copy to mount the install images (both are in
| the "Utilities" folder)
| jasomill wrote:
| Incidentally, Apple reseller resource CDs[1] also contained
| fully functional copies of PageMaker, licensed only for
| customizing Apple marketing materials, along with the
| assets (product photography, custom Apple internal-use
| fonts) required to do so.
|
| Creating period-correct marketing materials for projects
| like this emulator could be a fun art project.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/search.php?query=arple
| samstave wrote:
| Welp, I can sorta get it there -- but I cant figure out how
| to install it after mounting:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/WRNDdjB.png
|
| https://i.imgur.com/Pedlilm.png
|
| ---
|
| Whats really interesting to me about this, was that just
| ~last week or so, I was wondering what ever happened to Kai
| (Kai's Power Tools - Kai was the inventor of it and it was
| a revolutionary glimpse into the future of what 3D worlds
| were going to be put into the hands of the masses via PCs.)
| twoodfin wrote:
| I poked around a few weeks ago and ran into a variety of errors
| when I dug into the more hardware-specific bits.
|
| So I was shocked when I could use the Disk Copy utility to
| image Macintosh HD right into the Uploads folder & onto my
| (real) desktop.
|
| "It Just Works" in the best Mac sense. Amazing job.
| royalewithchees wrote:
| Is there a way to use appletalk on a LAN? I would love to get a
| game of multiplayer bolo going in my office.
| gr33nq wrote:
| This took me on a trip down memory lane back to my days in
| elementary school. I recall our class going to the computer lab
| once a week and having an hour to spend on an iMac G3, of which
| some were on OS8 and others OS9. Going back even further to
| kindergarten, our logins on those Macs were forced to use a
| simplified UI that displayed only icons/tiles of applications --
| no browsing files or anything sophisticated from what I remember
| (edit: looks like they were called "Panels") [0]. The Incredible
| Machine [1] was what I personally looked forward to playing most.
| I'm sure nostalgia plays a big role in the feeling I get when
| toying around with emulators like this, but I'm also convinced
| that the simplicity, curiosity, and novelty of computing in the
| late 90s/early 2000s is something that I may never be able to
| replicate again in my lifetime.
|
| [0] http://toastytech.com/guis/macos9users.png
|
| [1] https://macintoshgarden.org/games/the-incredible-machine-3
| makerofspoons wrote:
| Now if only someone could replicate the fan noise and that old
| computer smell.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Don't forget the grinding/croaking of those old hard drives!
| doubled112 wrote:
| The wurr chhkchkchk of floppies is what does it for me
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Chk chk.... chk chk.... chk chk..... chk chk.... dkdkdk.
| Not ready reading drive A. Abort/Retry/Fail?_
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I believe you're remembering "At Ease"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease
| gr33nq wrote:
| This is exactly what I'm remembering. Thank you for sharing.
|
| We had one staff member in charge of both the library and
| computer lab at my school, and I always admired her know-how
| when we'd watch her demonstrate something or troubleshoot a
| problem. Looking back now at the selection of software she
| curated for us, the uniformity of the look-and-feel across
| all Macs on campus, having a networked file share accessible
| from the 2-3 iMacs/Macintosh LCs we had in each classroom and
| in the lab, I appreciate how she really went above and beyond
| for that period of time and fostered so much intrigue in me.
| I really have to attribute a lot of my interest in tech to
| her during those formative years.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I don't have any specific memory of using At Ease on a
| school computer, but we had a couple of them in the
| children's section of the local library.
|
| My middle school is where they got really into computers, a
| bunch of early G3 iMacs in each classroom and each student
| had a networked home folder with a schoolname.org/~user
| website, back in the early 2000s.
|
| I ended up not going into computers as a profession (so
| far), but I poke around with hobby projects and really
| appreciate how powerful the modern web tooling has gotten,
| though it's also vastly more complicated.
| kleer001 wrote:
| OMFG Photoshop 3.0, I learned on that! Even bought 4 MB of ram
| for $400 to run it on my PC. Damn!
| sakex wrote:
| Is that emulation or compiled to WASM?
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| According to https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-
| post.html it is emulator.
|
| Note, the Mac OS and the apps in this emulator are running
| proprietary code. So it can't be "compiled" because the source
| code isn't available. The only options are binary recompiling
| or binary translating or emulation.
| robbyking wrote:
| I'm not sure how many people will remember this, but macOS 8 came
| with a program called Hotline, who's main activity was
| "publishing and distribution of a multi-purpose client/server
| communication software."
|
| Most people I knew used it to pirate software and MP3s.
|
| The way most of us used it was we'd find a server that had
| something we wanted (software, a crack, or music), and the login
| would be password protected. There would be a public readme file
| with instructions on how to find the password, which was
| typically behind a banner ad you had to click to generate revenue
| for the file host.
|
| I was working as a web developer at the time, and the start-up
| where I worked literally had a dedicated server just for
| downloading music on Hotline, but Napster came along and we
| mostly forgot about Hotline.
| 0des wrote:
| The network is still up! Check out the Preterhuman wiki for
| some software listings and networks to join:
| https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Preterhuman.net_Hotline_Server
|
| Most people use the KDX software, or PitbullPro, there are
| other implementations as well.
| carlmcqueen wrote:
| I don't know why I never looked into it more but this comment
| caught me off guard. I always wondered what hotline was because
| a friend of mine in high school's dad was a bartender part time
| in the carribbean and during the summer in chicago and he would
| source things his son needed or wanted through 'hotline' and I
| could never find it as a windows user.
| AyyWS wrote:
| I used it on windows and it had a chat feature. It's how I
| learned about the band Yellow Magic Orchestra from some
| random person that I'll never meet again.
| fintler wrote:
| A few developers of the original Napster for Mac client usually
| hung out on FORTYoz's (RIP) Badmoon Hotline server (e.g.
| catalyst). My teenage self always had fun watching them work
| through some problem they were facing.
|
| On a side note, the https://hx.fortyoz.org link still works
| (although it points to a mostly outdated clone of ror's
| original hxd).
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Hotline was amazing! I remember downloading software mostly.
| guywithabike wrote:
| Hotline was full of warez and such, but it was also home to a
| number of vibrant, welcoming communities. I was a little bit
| late to the BBS heyday, but Hotline served that purpose for me
| and for many others. There was one called REALbasic Cafe
| centered around a commercial cross-platform programming
| language that I spent a lot of time it. I even attended
| conferences with other members, flying across the country alone
| as a high school kid. I have nothing but fond memories of
| Hotline.
| flemhans wrote:
| Hotline didn't come bundled with the OS but was definitely good
| times.
|
| Edit: oh and Carracho!
| robbyking wrote:
| What's funny is I didn't remember it coming bundled, but it
| was on the linked site so I figured I just forgot.
| smm11 wrote:
| I was at a place in the very early 2000s, and ran into our
| 'music server.' Everyone seemingly brought in and ripped
| all their CDs to this folder, and it was basically Spotify
| or something. Several terabytes - we were a re-seller of
| computers, so had the room for it.
|
| This may have been during the iPod times, I recall having
| all the music I'd ever need. Knowing who was there, I have
| no doubt that's where a lot of Spotify came from.
| steffen84 wrote:
| http://www.carracho.com/aboutus/index.html
|
| Website is still online, great times.
| david422 wrote:
| Hotline impressed me most because they wrote cross platform mac
| and windows servers and clients.
|
| If I recall correctly - back when MacOS didn't have true pre-
| emptive multiprocessing, holding down a menu or a button would
| stall other processes/tasks. Hotline wrote custom controls so
| you could hold a button and things would still run.
| Davertron wrote:
| I definitely remember Hotline! Got me into trouble in
| college...a friend and I opened up Hotline servers on our
| machines and threw a piece of software on there (probably a
| cracked version of Macromedia Flash or something like that...)
| and a README that said "please leave something if you take
| something". A few weeks later, we both got calls from the sys
| admin at our school asking us to come in for a little chat...we
| hadn't really been paying too much attention, and apparently
| people had put all kinds of software/games etc. on there and
| that we had been serving up from our machines (I believe the
| admin said "millions of dollars"...but he may have been trying
| to scare us straight...). We didn't end up getting into too
| much trouble for it (I believe we were banned from using the
| internet for a few weeks) and ultimately I got hired to work in
| the IT department, so it worked out for me at least...
| samstave wrote:
| Heh, in HS I convinced the Drafting Department (1988) that if
| we were ever going to draw anything in the "real world" (I
| was in 8th grade, but took HS level drafting) that we would
| only ever do it on a computer.
|
| I pitched the school board and we were funded to set up a CAD
| dept - which of course I needed a server to share cad files
| etc...
|
| I setup the system, and then my buddy and I setup a BBS on
| the server and were running a warez site frm the HS CAD Lab.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| It was BBS for the rest of us
| [deleted]
| prawn wrote:
| That banner-password trick was how I made my first money
| online, decades ago. I'd password protect a zip of Pamela
| Anderson photos.
|
| Made $2k in a week for a few minutes of effort, used it to buy
| my first computer, taught myself web development and went on
| from there.
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| anyone still using KDX? i have a server running on telnet.asia
| exikyut wrote:
| This was followed up with KDX, an idiosyncratic, extremely
| curious program that even offered a native Linux binary (that
| still works!). The program was (closed-source) freeware, and
| without a viable business model behind it, the developers
| eventually moved on. But I think that dynamic supported a
| refreshing alternative experience that flew beneath the radar,
| took the path less traveled, and achieved closure: my memory of
| KDX is of a quietly efficient program that felt largely
| _finished_. My goodness literally nothing feels like that
| anymore.
|
| It's still offered for download by some of the few remaining
| Hotline/KDX-compatible file servers that are still floating
| around out there, like
| https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php (scroll down to the
| KDX heading).
|
| I definitely recommend downloading it for the sole reason that,
| connected to a server, bunch of windows open (what do you
| expect, it came from Mac OS, of course it's a GUI program),
| transfers flying along... it'll be using 8MB of RAM. Yes, on
| Linux.
|
| Finished. Compact. Efficient.
|
| I wish I could pull out some references for similar programs
| like it, but I have none :( the closest I can come
| ideologically is LIST.COM for MS-DOS (!). Ha.
|
| But on the subject of file transfer itself, if anyone's
| curious, a very obscure alternative to Bittorrent and news
| servers besides Hotline/KDX is DC++. There are _quite_ a few
| DC++ servers still out there, mostly in Russia (or at least
| there were when I last checked). I don 't remember what client
| I used when I played with it a while ago, but I remember one of
| its features was that it would show the total amount of data
| available across all of the servers currently connected (the
| protocol works very similarly to Bittorrent but users send full
| directory trees to the "trackers"). Well, after connecting to
| _every_ server I could find >:D my client started having
| serious swap issues so I had to give up, but for a little while
| there I think the statusbar was showing something like 4 PB+
| available. Fun times.
| ellisd wrote:
| Just seeing the logo gave me flashbacks to hogging two phone
| lines at night downloading -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications
| webscalist wrote:
| now I can install protools and produce grammy award winning album
| all in internet explorer
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Some of y'all are YOUNG. LOL.
|
| I first used a Mac in about 1989, in college. I first got DEEP
| into one, for desktop publishing, a couple years later. I didn't
| OWN one until my late 20s, which by that point was an OS 9
| environment for a couple years until OS X happened.
|
| I never loved the old System like some Mac people do. It was
| faster and more stable than Win98, and definitely worked better
| on laptops, but that was a low bar indeed. It wasn't until OS X
| that the Mac got crazy stable and attracted the attention of web
| devs, which in turn drove the renaissance of the platform.
| endemic wrote:
| Yeah, I remember thinking how awesome it was to open up a bash
| shell and ssh into a server while using a Macintosh.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| That's cool, but even cooler was that for many things you
| didn't even NEED to do that.
|
| OS X shipped with regular Apache, and builds existed for all
| the dev tools and server languages you could want. I ran
| Mason on my Mac for a project I was on. I could develop
| locally, and then just rsync to my dev server to do next
| level tests, etc.
| smm11 wrote:
| My Apple IIe was a BBS in 1982.
| spike021 wrote:
| Whoa!! This is amazing.
|
| My brother and I used to play the FA-18 "sim" all the time.
| Thanks for the blast from the past.
|
| Now if only I still had the joystick controller...
| julienb_sea wrote:
| Damn Simcity 2000 crashes, that's disappointing
| based2 wrote:
| macbugs is not installed...
| duxup wrote:
| Netgear's Armor software considers that site "Spam".
|
| I wonder why.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Mouse is lagging
| martopix wrote:
| That is accurate experience
| scarface74 wrote:
| Back in the day, the mouse never lagged. It was using a
| hardware interrupt.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| This is probably because the emulator is using relative mouse
| coordinates, rather than absolute mouse coordinates. I use a
| high-DPI/sensitivity mouse and as soon as my cursor touched the
| screen of the Mac the response was off.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's pretty damn complete. It has Think C, CodeWarrior, etc.,
| and they seem to work.
|
| It's awesome, but I could see the copyright police coming after
| it.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| MetroWerks has a lot of reason to be annoyed at this
|
| source: I wrote the MPW setup scripts for MWerks on a contract,
| presented to MWerks VP of Engineering; subsequently Jobs+black
| ops locked them out
| zippergz wrote:
| Metrowerks doesn't even exist anymore does it?
| housel wrote:
| The name CodeWarrior is now used by NXP for development
| tools targeting legacy (old Motorola/Freescale) platforms;
| see for instance
| https://www.nxp.com/design/software/development-
| software/cod...
| ok123456 wrote:
| It loads very fast and the performance is alright. What
| optimizations did they do to pull this off?
| marcodiego wrote:
| I could not run create a new file with PowerPlant Constructor. It
| complains "because selected printing resource could not be
| found."
| kornork wrote:
| I was hoping to find Enchanted Scepters in there (I'd guess it
| would be in the system7 version), but no luck. I tried a few
| years ago to get it working on a Mac emulator but I wasn't
| successful, and I have fond memories of that game.
| kencausey wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/EnchantedSceptersMacintosh
| kornork wrote:
| What!?!? No way - thank you so much!
| anthk wrote:
| You can try downloading mounting the IMG file from that
| page, getting Scummvm https://scummvm.org and select the
| path for the mounted image to play the game under the Wage
| Engine.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Damn, that's cool.
|
| Avara and Bolo in one place really takes me back.
| noer wrote:
| F/A 18 Hornet in the games folder! I really loved that game in
| 3rd and 4th grade
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Another World runs at full speed too
| jbverschoor wrote:
| You know what's nice? The 13" (rescaled) 4:3 screen is easier to
| read than my current setup. Also, the menu's are nice and short.
| Very focus. I totally understand how I, and many people in the
| past, were able to pump out huge amounts of code in a week
| projektfu wrote:
| Menus were short because they had to fit on the screen of a
| classic Mac (342 pixels) and the pull-down operation used to
| require holding the mouse button. I think by Mac OS 8 you could
| click to open a menu and yhey could probably expect at least
| 480 pixels if not 600.
| pantulis wrote:
| Other forgotten niceties are the spatial Finder and how double
| clicking on a window title basically folds the window into just
| the title bar.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| Menus are supposed to have 7 +/- 2 items. Inside Macintosh
| Volume 1, if memory serves.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Yes. This matches to what was thought (at the time? I'm not
| sure if research has changed the thinking on this) to be the
| size of human working memory.
|
| 7 +- 2 was believed to be about how much a human could
| understand with zero layers of abstraction, i.e. "in
| parallel" (you can imagine your brain has 7 +- 2 registers,
| though that's a highly inaccurate model). Any larger, and
| your brain has to build abstractions to reference the item
| (i.e. item 10 becomes "the last item in the second half of
| that honkin' huge menu").
| jasomill wrote:
| As opposed to "nested two levels deep under one item or
| another on the File...or was it View...or maybe
| Window...menu? No? Okay, then try holding down Option..."
|
| I still think that searchable menus was one of the killer
| features of OS X vs. anything else at the time, and it's
| frankly amazing that the majority of Windows apps _still_
| don 't have menu search.
| dgreensp wrote:
| As a Mac user since about 1988, this brings back memories!
|
| It's sad but the UI feels almost futuristic.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| Am I the only person that thinks that Classic Mac OS looks better
| than _any_ modern GUI operating system today?
| schwartzworld wrote:
| On HN? I think you are not
| thewebcount wrote:
| This looks great! But is there any way to turn off the blinking
| LED light on the faux monitor? It's so spastic it keeps drawing
| my eye away from the actual software. I never had a monitor that
| did that in real life!
| paco3346 wrote:
| What browser/OS are you on? The LED doesn't blink for me on
| macOS with Chrome.
|
| Edit: it seems like it's the HDD activity light? It blinks
| during boot.
| thewebcount wrote:
| I'm using Orion (Webkit-based) on macOS. It was blinking non-
| stop while just reading the Stickies. I couldn't get past
| that to do anything else because it was so distracting. It
| definitely wasn't HDD-related for me. It was constant.
| dmje wrote:
| PostIt note on your screen? :-)
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Virtual PostIt on the virtual screen.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| MARCHintosh project
|
| related site: system7.app
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30893212
|
| And plenty of previous discussion over here from earlier this
| month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30875259
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| Heh. I've still got a G4 PowerBook and can run Clsssic. Not that
| I've tried in many a year.
|
| The OSX on it seems still pretty spritely today though I've
| obviously had to get the FireFox back port branch to be able to
| use a browser.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| Check out Sorbet Leopard. It's an enthusiast enhanced version
| of Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. It's been updated to support modern web
| browsing and had the "bloat" stripped out of it so it runs
| extraordinarily well on G4 systems. I have it installed on a
| 1.67GHZ PowerBook G4 and it makes the computer totally usable
| today. It's amazing how well a 17 year old computer can run.
| Youtube is the only thing that doesn't work well, but it'll
| play back 360P video if you give it plenty of time to load.
| Amazingly, if you download "CorePlayer" this old G4 machine can
| play back local 720P h.264 files.
|
| https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/sorbet-leopard-your-pow...
|
| May 1st Sorbet Leopard is going to be updated with an App Store
| full of old PPC Apps. PPC Lives!
| MarketingJason wrote:
| Wow - I didn't realize the stickies feature is basically
| unchanged since then
| etchalon wrote:
| Since System 7!
| scarface74 wrote:
| As is AppleScript... unfortunately.
| jdsampayo wrote:
| If you select Thousands of Colors it changes the resolution and
| everything looks like negatives, I thought it only supported 256
| Colors, but unexpectedly choosing Millions of Colors is also
| supported. ex: https://imgur.com/a/nqo8v0e
| asvitkine wrote:
| Looks like the project uses GitHub for issue tracking, so you
| can submit bug reports there:
| https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/new
| mihaip wrote:
| This particular issue has been reported as
| https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/20
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just for giggles, I tried launching with extensions disabled, and
| it worked so that "Extensions Disabled" appeared in the boot
| screen. Didn't click around enough after that to see if things no
| longer worked without these extensions.
|
| Also noticed the scroll bar when navigating folders did not
| behave as expected. It's the only thing I noticed that made me
| notice which I find very impressive.
| [deleted]
| soapdog wrote:
| There is also its cousin https://system7.app/
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| So what was Key Caps for? Some kind of virtual keyboard pops out
| but I wonder what for.
| yoyopa wrote:
| it helped learn the various symbols... if you hold down option
| (alt)
| ivanhoe wrote:
| ohh, the maelstrom, this brings memories...
| dom96 wrote:
| Pretty cool. Tried to launch Warcraft though and it had a lot of
| graphical glitches (this is on Firefox/Windows)
| PortiaBerries wrote:
| Sigh, this makes me realize how much I loved computers when I was
| a kid (1990s) and how much I hate them now.
| grishka wrote:
| May that be because most of the modern software, including
| operating systems, is a royal clusterfuck of superfluous
| abstractions and arbitrary design decisions prioritizing looks
| over function?
|
| And games. Games back then were definitely better.
|
| (I've never used classic Mac OS when it was current -- almost
| no one here could afford a Mac, and those who could didn't buy
| one either because everyone else used Windows)
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Huh, that's funny. I never really thought about it, but I kind
| of feel the same way now that you point it out. Or rather, I
| used to love computers just for the sake of being computers and
| was always a little annoyed by people who saw them rather as a
| means to a different end. However, today, I _definitely_ see my
| macbook pro, ipad and iphone as nothing more than a means to an
| end, the way people saw old PCs.
| gfody wrote:
| same. it's hard to describe how 10-year-old me felt about
| 8bit dithered graphics sparkling through phosphorus but 30
| years later the magic is gone. I can't point to any one thing
| (maybe the advent of webapps) but it has something to do with
| software just generally becoming more and more sucky.
| robbyking wrote:
| When I was in my late teens I lived with an older friend who
| worked as a web developer at the beginning of the dot com
| boom. He would come home stressed from work and I'd think
| _how can be stressed? He gets to work on a computer all day!_
| perardi wrote:
| I can't tell if it's just simple nostalgia, but I feel it too.
|
| I got my first Mac when I was in 4th grade in 1994. _(A
| Performa 630CD, which is so slow that I assume my AirPods have
| an order of magnitude more computational power.)_ By god I
| loved that thing.
|
| And I think in part it's because I could _poke_ at it. You
| could fiddle around inside the System Folder. You could modify
| application resources with ResEdit. You could really dig in and
| see all the files, and then probably accidentally ruin
| something, but still, you could do it. And you simply cannot do
| that on an iOS device outside of jailbreaking, and increasingly
| you cannot do that with SIP and other security measures on
| macOS.
|
| Which is probably for the best, for obvious security reasons.
| But I feel like I miss that joy of exploration...
| PortiaBerries wrote:
| The first app I opened up was ResEdit; the jack-in-the-box
| gave me a big wave of nostalgia... But yeah, it's hard to
| separate fond memories of youth from the changes in
| computing. Plus when I was a kid learning HyperTalk and then
| C on System 7 it was all for fun; no one was asking anything
| of me. Now my coding supports my family; I haven't done any
| coding for fun since a few years ago when I took a sabbatical
| from my SDE job and worked half-time as a farm hand.
| layer8 wrote:
| It was a uniformly designed tool and simple enough that you
| could feel to have full control over. Nowadays not so much,
| either because of walled-garden aspirations (Windows, macOS)
| and/or increasing complexity and fracturedness (on Linux for
| example the whole X/Wayland, DE, GUI toolkits, hi-DPI and
| font rendering mess, package managers vs. snap/flatpak and
| containers, ...).
| lekevicius wrote:
| Fantastic! It even has Adobe Photoshop 3. So much fun.
| bluedino wrote:
| Photoshop is one of those things that easily illustrates how
| far computers have come.
|
| Anyone who used graphic design software, even well into the
| PowerPC days, remembers having a tiny preview window to show
| filters/effects, and then waiting seconds or even minutes for
| the filter to be applied to the entire image. Yes people, even
| a blur took a long time in the old days.
|
| The real-time manipulation we have on our phones these days is
| insane by comparison.
| david422 wrote:
| There is a funny video -
|
| 8 current Photoshop experts using Photoshop 1.0 and recording
| their reactions.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtA46JT2q_0
|
| The funniest I think is when they all find out they only have
| 1 undo.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Fantastic! It even has Adobe Photoshop 3. So much fun._
|
| Makes me wonder if in the year 2040, we'll be able to do
| anything similar at all.
|
| "Oooh! Photoshop CC on Microsoft Windows 13 running inside a
| browser running on macOS 43! Oh, wait. 'Cannot connect to DRM
| server.' 'Cannot connect to advertising server.' 'Cannot
| connect to marketing server.' 'Cannot connect to telemetry
| server.' 'Cannot authenticate login. Aborting.'"
|
| (I'm not harshing on MS. Just moaning that software is so tied
| to ephemeral services these days.)
| vmoore wrote:
| If you like this, check these:
| https://github.com/zriyansh/awesome-os
| tomxor wrote:
| The preloaded apps and games really lock in the nostalgia...
| Infini-d, Bryce, ResEdit, Stuffit, Afterdark
| fitzroy wrote:
| The Warcraft startup options are reminiscent of the 'about to
| edit video" ritual of the time. Just need to disable all
| extensions and plug in a "certified" (i.e. heavily marked up)
| SCSI drive.
|
| [] Quit other applications [] Quit Finder also [] Switch to
| 640x480 [] Hide desktop [] Turn off File Sharing [] Disable
| screen saver [] Hide Control Strip
| orangepurple wrote:
| What is the best way to take an offline mirror of this site
| before it is taken offline?
| ksherlock wrote:
| git clone https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac.git
|
| Or just use Basilisk.
| chrisstanchak wrote:
| Quack not working
| dmje wrote:
| Anyone remember any names of DAWs back then? - I had it on my Mac
| Classic round about 92-95. I thought it was called EasyStudio but
| man, apparently it was a while ago and I seem to be getting
| forgetful...
| wazoox wrote:
| I used Digidesign Sound Tools and Sound Tools II on a Mac IIx
| at the studio from 91 to 93, also Opcode Studio Vision (using
| the Digidesign card); then we upgraded with another piece of
| Digidesign kit that was some sort of "ProTools lite", with a
| large rack-mounted audio I/O box.
|
| Most people still used Cubase on Atari 1040ST back then for
| their musical musings ;)
| dmje wrote:
| Aw man, I loved the Atari for sound. I never had one but some
| mates did, we used to write some epic stuff. This has also
| reminded me of much later when I started using Tracktion,
| which it turns out is still a thing...
| yaomtc wrote:
| I remember Launcher having buttons at the top of the window for
| categories. This version of Launcher doesn't have that, though?
| It's just a window with Script Editor and SimpleText (which
| doesn't launch)
| tomc1985 wrote:
| It runs? I guess.
|
| Neither Sim City 2000 nor Warcraft II could start.
|
| Is this just another enscripten rush port or something?
| scarface74 wrote:
| SimCity 2K ran fine for me once I "registered" it - with all of
| the horrible music.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| "The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear
| dances at all."
| tomc1985 wrote:
| With the amount of in-browser emulators how there it doesn't
| seem particularly difficult to recompile something existing
| to WASM. Archive.org has been doing something like that for
| years at this point
|
| This project is a nice resume badge. Just wish it was called
| that
| natly wrote:
| The idea that we could one day run todays operating systems in
| emulation (in the browser) seems so insane and infeasible but
| maybe one day it'll be possible. Advances in computation is one
| rare thing that cheers my spirit up in a world where a lot of
| scary trends are pointing down.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| JSLinux, which was started in 2011, has been able to run Linux
| in a web-browser for some time now. [1][2]
|
| [1] https://ostechnix.com/run-linux-operating-systems-browser/
| [2] https://bellard.org/jslinux/
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Isn't it already possible today with Wasm? Sure the browser
| adds overhead, but merely running an OS isn't super intensive.
| killingmehardly wrote:
| rileyphone wrote:
| Yes, with https://leaningtech.com/webvm-server-
| less-x86-virtual-machin.... Wild stuff.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I was hoping I could use Netscape Navigator to go to Hacker News
| and post a comment from it, but it has no network connection. And
| I guess it probably wouldn't be able to HTTPS.
| killingmehardly wrote:
| mihaip wrote:
| https://oldweb.today/ gives you that experience, using some of
| the same building blocks.
| chefandy wrote:
| Oldweb.today kicks ass. Great project. If you're scrolling by
| wondering whether it's worth putting in your list of sites to
| visit, definitely do it.
| lostgame wrote:
| I'm sorry this is so vague, I'm in transit right now; so I'm a
| little lazy to try to Google this from my phone - but there is
| some sort of proxy-type thing for these old Macs that allows
| you to use the 'modern web', to an...extent?
|
| I think it kinda works the way Opera Mini does or something, if
| that makes sense?
|
| It does totally solve the HTTPS issue. You could _easily_
| access HN using this method through even Netscape.
|
| There is also - I want to say - again pardon me if I'm wrong
| here, but I believe it's called 'Classzilla'?
|
| This is for - AFAIK - at least MacOS 9 (you might be screwed
| for 8, though) and does old.Reddit.com pretty okay for me as
| long as I have enough RAM in the unit, so it should also handle
| HN totally fine.
|
| I actually think it - along with, unfortunately; an absolutely
| incredible modern Firefox port for PPC Macs running 10.4/10.5
| called 'TenFourFox', are now abandoned - but very much still
| available.
|
| It was a pretty big hit to the (admittedly small) PPC Mac
| community when it happened.
|
| I personally still use TenFourFox almost every day as I use my
| PPC Mac collection often for various tasks, especially my quad
| G5 that has 16GB(!) RAM.
|
| (Yeah, a PPC Mac with I believe 2 processors/4 G5 cores at
| 2.5(?)ghz, 2 512 GB SSD's and 16GB of RAM. There is literally
| no better way to experience the heights of the PPC Mac days. So
| cool.)
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Not specific to the HTTPS issue, but useful for older
| browsers on lower-powered machines:
|
| Youtube creator and classic mac community contributor
| Sean/Action Retro has been running a proxy called
| FrogFind[0]. The project uses the Firefox "reader view"
| algorithm to serve stripped-down web pages for older
| machines. It's great for G3 and older machines that expect
| the web to be a bit more 90s. It really reminds me of using
| Google in/around 1998-99.
|
| [0] http://frogfind.com
| simulate-me wrote:
| I believe some people have written WASM networking using a
| WebRTC data channel as the transport.
| ivank wrote:
| https://github.com/tenox7/wrp WRP - Web Rendering Proxy
| macintux wrote:
| Related discussion from a few weeks ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30875259
| mohamez wrote:
| Is this WebAssembly? Because if it is then we've come a long way
| in the web!
| Narishma wrote:
| Font rendering seems off. It looks too pixelated and the pixels
| aren't even the same size. That said, I haven't used a real Mac
| so I don't know if that's how it's supposed to look.
| scroot wrote:
| This system was designed to be used primarily with CRT based
| displays, so back in the day it wouldn't have "looked" as
| pixellated even though these things were definitely defined
| that way.
| snerbles wrote:
| It looks like a fractional scaling issue.
| moth-fuzz wrote:
| What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as
| that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps
| to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy,
| antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out.
|
| Of course you can always run dwm on linux with a hodgepodge of
| makeshift utility apps, write your own keybinds to set your
| brightness and volume and other such inanities, but in order to
| get a 'complete' desktop experience you kinda have to opt-in to
| GNOME/KDE which are trying to do the same things as Apple or
| Microsoft, aesthetically speaking. And tough luck if you actually
| use Apple or Microsoft to begin with. I tried running bug.n and
| it seems to not work in win10, let alone win11.
| ynniv wrote:
| Most of the time when I notice poor font antialiasing it's due
| to the OS resolution or subpixel antialiasing not precisely
| matching the panel. An old OS will not have subpixel
| antialiasing, so if it looks correct you could try disabling
| subpixel/ClearType, or testing a bitmap font. If the old OS
| still looks wrong, your panel may be pretending to be 4k and
| actually stretching things a little. Also, any OS level scaling
| is likely to mess with things, so check that it's either 100%
| or 200%.
| unicornporn wrote:
| _> but in order to get a 'complete' desktop experience you
| kinda have to opt-in to GNOME/KDE which are trying to do the
| same things as Apple or Microsoft, aesthetically speaking._
|
| This is so true and that's why I deep inside mourn the end of
| this UI era.
| [deleted]
| btrettel wrote:
| With respect to the anti-aliasing on Linux, I run Xfce, which
| easily allows one to control the font anti-aliasing in the
| Appearance settings under the Fonts tab. I assume that GNOME
| and KDE have similar configuration settings. You can also get
| the same sort of controls in fonts.conf [0] for applications
| that don't respect Xfce's settings, like Firefox, as I recall.
| I could make everything as sharp as I'd like with the right
| settings.
|
| In my experience, basically every window manager has some
| 90s-esque style as well.
|
| [0] There's more information buried in here:
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Font_configuration
| michaelmrose wrote:
| You might be overestimating the complexity of creating such a
| hodgepodge.
|
| i3wm = tiling window manager lxappearance = set gtk theme and
| settings qt5ct = set qt5 theme and settings kvantum more
| settings for qt ponymix cli for pulseaudio that sucks less than
| pactl pavucontrol gui mixer nm-applet tray applet that lets you
| select a different network i3status-rust nicer and more
| powerful status line for i3bar rofi a launcher that looks like
| nice and is more powerful
|
| To this add all the other apps you already use.
|
| The thing about this hodgepodge is that there really isn't much
| to be said about integration as the different components don't
| require or benefit from such. The connection between such are
| so bare direct and obvious that there isn't much of a question
| how to put it together. You change a line in your i3 config to
| start a different app at startup or trigger a different one
| with a keybinding.
|
| If you had done so 5 years ago you could be using much the same
| configuration now and much the same configuration 5 years
| hence. I guarantee you that whether you use KDE or Gnome or
| Windows you are liable to spend a day here or there tweaking
| your environment even if Bob in accounting doesn't.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| XFCE is pretty complete and can be tweaked into just about any
| retro desktop experience you want--i.e. you can make a panel
| feel like a start menu and task bar, or sit in the middle like
| a dock, have both a dock and top bar panel, etc.
|
| If you really want you can also tweak some settings to totally
| disable antialiasing and switch to bitmap font rendering. On
| modern semi-high DPI displays (like a 14" 1920x1080 panel) it
| isn't that great though as most bitmap fonts are far too small
| to be readable (~8-12 pixels tall). For the most crisp and
| clear text, even crisper than old bitmap stuff, you really want
| a high DPI display in the 4k+ range. Try using a modern mac and
| you will be blown away at how clear and sharp the text renders.
| usefulcat wrote:
| I switched to a Mac recently, prior to that I'd been using
| Elementary OS. I'm still using the same monitor though (a large
| 4k display), so any visual differences are quite obvious to me.
|
| The Mac is definitely fuzzier than Elementary; that clarity is
| the main thing I miss. It seems pretty obvious that modern
| MacOS is designed for high DPI displays.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| >Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago
| and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard
| to make out.
|
| That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while
| vectors are infinitely scalable.
| dkarl wrote:
| Vectors will scale to any pixel density, but they look
| irritatingly fuzzy at the lower pixel densities you commonly
| see in large widescreen monitors.
|
| Obviously it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but
| decades ago bitmapped fonts could give you crisp text on any
| monitor, and in 2022 I'm using a popular, >$1300, very
| favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly
| fuzzy. It's plugged into my Macbook Pro right now, and the
| difference in how well the text renders on the two displays
| is plain.
|
| I guess as soon as Apple started making laptops with 300dpi
| screens, it became okay to render fuzzy text on any screen
| that wasn't 300dpi.
| necovek wrote:
| I've recently gotten a MacBook Pro 14 for work, and tried
| out Ubuntu 22.04 RC on a laptop, and I was confounded with
| how fuzzy both of them look today (Ubuntu with fractional
| scaling, but Mac even with 2x scaling on 4k screen).
|
| Whatever setup was there on Ubuntu 20.04 which made text
| render clearly needs to come back (I used to use slight
| hinting setting, but it seems subpixel rendering is going
| away on Linux too). Please!
| jassmith87 wrote:
| The problem is you have it plugged into a macbook. Apple
| doesn't support subpixel anti-aliasing in any of its latest
| releases. Your monitor looks so fuzzy because Apple has
| removed the capability to make it not look so fuzzy.
| js2 wrote:
| Context:
|
| https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/07/13/macos-10-14-mojave-
| remove...
| jefftk wrote:
| _> I 'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed
| monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy._
|
| Some programs let you use pixel-perfect fonts, even today.
| For example, in iterm2 I do "Profiles > Text > Monaco
| Regular 10pt non-antialiased"
| murermader wrote:
| This has nothing to do with the display, this is a MacOS
| scaling issue. Plug in a Windows device, put it at 100%
| scaling and it will be as sharp as it can get.
|
| macOS is really limited when in comes to displays, because
| the display must have a PPI of around 110, or a multiple of
| that. It sucks how bad macOS is at scaling, especially with
| the terrible font rendering.
| rsanek wrote:
| I think the secret is to go with much larger monitors and
| blow up the text size. Right now I'm typing this on a M1
| MBP plugged into a curved 48" 4K TV that I use as a
| monitor. I can have the text scaled about 3-4x as large
| (physically) as on my Macbook and it looks great. Slight
| bonus, avoiding reading small text is healthier for your
| long-term vision.
| necovek wrote:
| To mitigate the issues you mention, I've long wanted higher
| res screens since forever (I had one of those early Vaio
| VGN-Z that was the only 13-14" laptop with 1600x900
| displays when 1366x768 dominated; they were also the first
| to move to 1920x1080 with their next model).
|
| And I had that Dell's first 24" 4K screen that required DP
| MST to go past 30Hz. I've tried disabling subpixel
| rendering to see if that resolution was really sufficient
| (185dpi) but you could then see text regain jagged edges.
| Thus I reasoned that, with my glasses correcting my myopia
| to better than 20/20, I needed to wait a while until I can
| fully enjoy nice, laser-printout-like text.
|
| As a reminder, even laser printers printing at 600dpi use
| techniques similar to subpixel rendering to render that
| smooth text.
|
| I am hoping for some 8K screens at 32" for productivity
| work (though that's still probably too low at 275 dpi), and
| I never get it why people keep talking about there not
| being any 8K content. My desktop is my 8K content, though I
| also lack the GPU to drive it at more than 30Hz :)
| dmonitor wrote:
| You can turn off ClearType to get rid of the aliasing in
| fonts on Windows
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Text fuzziness has had nothing to do with your monitor ever
| since we've gone digital with HDMI and DVI
|
| Linux & Windows generally use implementations of
| antialiasing that aren't so "fuzzy," so you could always
| ditch that Mac for something that won't forcibly abstract
| away the details for you
| necovek wrote:
| It can still happen when different display panel pixel
| colour arrangements don't match subpixel rendering
| settings in software, though that'll usually happen with
| non-monitor displays like TVs.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| True, though in practice I haven't noticed it to be
| nearly as obnoxious as Apple stuff trying to upscale at
| non-integer intervals
| necovek wrote:
| Yeah, I was completely surprised when I moved from Ubuntu
| 20.04 to MacBook Pro 14 on the very same Dell U3219Q:
| MacOS made text editing completely unpleasant.
|
| Then I upgraded my son's laptop to Ubuntu 22.04 RC, and I
| was greeted with the same fuzziness. I hope that's only
| due to Wayland, I haven't tried out the X desktop when
| docked.
| xvolter wrote:
| Sounds like he used to be younger and needs to see an
| optometrist.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Not necessarily; I fired up some old devices last month,
| and the way their bitmap icons and apps and screens
| appeared, can only be defined as "Crips" and "Sharp". I'm
| not saying prettily or beneficially so! But they were
| definitely very stark and constrasty (let alone colourful
| and "stand-out-ish"!) holding them next to my modern phone
| or PC.
|
| I don't think "Vector vs bitmap" is necessarily the cause -
| more of design sensibility. When I look at the lineup of
| google apps on my phone which all look EXACTLY the same (3
| primary colours in random rotation; I can only effectively
| use / distinguish them if I memorize location of icon), and
| then the same as slack and my son's daycare app which also
| use swirls of same 3 primary colours; and when I compare my
| Windows desktop and icons and browsers to old apps -
| there's a definite brutal sharpness to old stuff.
| throwanem wrote:
| Because the pixels are larger on old display devices, I
| suspect.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Back in the day, the fixed pixel density of the bitmaps was
| 1-to-1 aligned with the pixel density of the monitors. Every
| line was crisp and clean because there was no antialiasing
| across partial pixels.
|
| The world in which we now live allows for a lot more
| crispness when it matters (because the pixel density
| approaches indistinguishable-by-the-human-eye-at-viewing-
| distance), but with the tradeoff that UIs designed to work at
| whatever scale on whatever monitor with whatever DPI do a lot
| of aliasing, and things tend to look, sometimes, just a tad
| muddier. Especially when vectorized icons get drawn in a
| rendering pipe that passes through the graphics accelerator.
| cobbaut wrote:
| > but in order to get a 'complete' desktop experience you kinda
| have to opt-in to GNOME/KDE
|
| try XFCE, it works.
| kevingadd wrote:
| I don't get it. Windows 10 is all crisp 1-2 pixel lines and
| rectangles for me with sparse use of gradients, and the windows
| theming engine (used in XP, 7, etc) was all based on bitmaps.
| opan wrote:
| I use Terminus 9pt whenever/wherever I can easily get it going
| for this reason. It's funny seeing all the replies from people
| who don't get it. Other fonts really do all look blurry next to
| bitmaps. I've switched terminal emulators at least once due to
| Pango dropping bitmap support. Still works in foot and
| alacritty. Probably others as well, but I also need Wayland
| support.
| m_eiman wrote:
| > now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to
| make out.
|
| Use a high-DPI screen, for starters.
| giobox wrote:
| For fuzz, anti and anti-aliasing issues, you can sometimes
| make them _worse_ with a HiDPI display.
|
| All of these issues really boil down to render resolution not
| integer scaling to the display resolution.
|
| If the render resolution is an integer multiple of the
| display resolution or vice versa, you will generally always
| get beautiful crisp rendering - this is exactly the approach
| Apple adopted, and is why they had to use some slightly less
| common resolutions like 5k on some devices - 2560x1440/"QHD"
| has integer scaling factor of exactly 2 for a 5k display etc.
|
| The problem though is that outside of Apple devices, almost
| no hiDPI display will neatly integer sale. The vast majority
| of Hi-DPI monitors on sale today are 4k, and only 1080p
| really has a useable integer scaling factor there. 1080p of
| "useable" screen real estate on a 4k monitor is going to make
| all UI elements too big usually though... So you are forced
| to non-integer scaling and images that will not cleanly map
| to the grid of pixels in the monitor, which is where the fuzz
| and anti-aliasing etc starts... 1440p of "usable" space does
| not cleanly map to a 4k monitor, but many people run them
| this way.
|
| 5k is frankly a brilliant resolution for high quality ~200ppi
| style HiDPI rendering on 27 inch displays with 2x integer
| scaling for macOS and Windows especially, its tragic the
| resolution hasn't become more mainstream.
| m_eiman wrote:
| Yes, it's a shame that there are only two 5K 27" displays
| to choose from, and both are expensive. The industry has
| dropped the ball on this for years, all those 32" 4K
| screens may be cheap but they're no use to me...
| michaelmrose wrote:
| On Linux
|
| Step one plug in 4K 27" monitor.
|
| Step two set scaling factor for gtk/java apps to 2.
| KDE/QT apps can figure out the correct DPI without
| hassle.
|
| Step three set fonts smaller or larger if desired.
|
| On Windows plug in 4K 27" monitor. Text doesn't look in
| my opinion quite as nice as Linux but it isn't fuzzy,
| small, or giant. Possibly font rendering could look nicer
| if I bothered to tweak it but since its basically boot to
| steam I see little reason to bother.
|
| I keep hearing this argument that 4K somehow doesn't work
| or looks shitty and only 5K Mac displays provide an
| acceptable high dpi experience and I feel like I'm
| getting transmissions from an alternate universe where
| nobody had to scale UIs from screens that varied in DPI
| by a factor of 3 for almost 20 years. Long before 4K
| screens.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| This is an interesting analytical failure. To explicate.
| You go through your day wearing only boots. You see people
| wearing sneakers and so one day you buy a pair the wrong
| size and put it on with a tag inside and walk around like
| that for a day. You think to yourself how do all these
| people do this every day did nobody ever show them a good
| pair of boots! Sir Boots4Life's analysis is faulty they
| aren't all walking around uncomfortable because they don't
| wear the wrong size nor wear a small object between
| footwear and foot for extra penance and everyone isn't
| walking around with a fuzzy screen.
|
| There as it turns out are other ways to scale a UI other
| than integer scaling factors. Even if you don't use svg you
| can use different image sizes and scale fonts by smaller
| increments yet.
|
| You describe their being 1080p of usable real estate which
| is a complete failure to use a meaningful unit of measure.
| Your 5K display, future 8k displays etc use more pixels to
| draw a button 3cm x 1 cm. They aren't wasting increasing
| number of pixels they are drawing the element with
| increasing fidelity. If we measured screen real estate in
| pixels one would conclude that a 5" screen and a 32" screen
| both drawn in 1080p have equal screen real estate. This is
| a clearly incorrect conclusion. Clearly screen real estate
| is measured in area with fidelity not real estate measured
| in DPI.
|
| Increasing fidelity might bear on the smallest element one
| can possibly usefully use but its not going to bear as much
| on what size element people desire to use which has much
| more to do with how far the object is from a users face.
|
| You are saying that 4K monitors require one to choose
| between giant elements that somehow waste all the pixels or
| exceptionally tiny ones. This is silly. First off 108Op
| displays that range from 12" - 32" already had to adjust
| elements to be usable even before 4K became a thing and
| there were already more knobs than scaling factor to
| achieve the same end result. 4K changed the existing
| equation that has existed for 20 years by an exact factor
| of 2. 8k changes it by an exact factor of 4.
|
| TLDR: Set an integer scaling factor then tweaking your
| fonts a little bigger or a little smaller until it looks
| nice according to your taste. Nobody on earth expected a
| 24" 4K monitor to display twice as much content as a 1080p
| 24" monitor because they want things to be the same size on
| the screen only prettier.
| dkarl wrote:
| It's pretty poor to regress on the vast majority of currently
| available displays just because there are a handful of multi-
| thousand-dollar monitors available. Apple can't even sell a
| 27" monitor for less than $1500 because the experience
| wouldn't be on-brand. If you look at the big-ticket items
| that Apple sells, they have cheaper versions of everything
| except displays. They only put their brand on the most
| expensive displays because they know what their software
| looks like on anything less.
| [deleted]
| jasomill wrote:
| Ha! I remember feeling the same way when Apple started
| replacing the classic Mac system fonts (Chicago, etc.) with
| newer, anti-aliased alternatives ca. Mac OS 8. A couple dozen
| years later, I guess I'm used to it.
| Joeri wrote:
| _What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as
| that on the modern desktop OSes?_
|
| Buy a retina mac ;)
|
| I kid but only partly. Running at integer (2x) scaling on a 200
| dpi screen makes everything perfectly crisp. Anti-aliased text
| no longer appears blurry and lines are rendered at exact pixel
| boundaries.
|
| Those old bitmap art displays didn't do any scaling. Every
| pixel appeared exactly as someone drew it, with crisp
| boundaries. It's the scalable part of vector graphics that
| fuzzes things up.
| bad_good_guy wrote:
| > What does one have to do to get as ... pretty of a UI
|
| Are you being intentionally disingenuous? It is objectively not
| a pretty UI, it's a functional but quite ugly one.
| toephu2 wrote:
| I think it's quite subjective actually. I like the UI.
|
| "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"
| masswerk wrote:
| I think, this is a rather relative statement. Modern UIs
| would have been perceived as toy-like and not fit for
| business back then. It all comes down to what we are used to.
| (That said, personally, I always favoured the System 7 UI
| over OS 8.)
| tomc1985 wrote:
| MATE Desktop is still pretty simple and great
| sandgiant wrote:
| Oh man. Hotline. Fond memories. Thanks for sharing!
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| Awesome! I'm going to dig up the source for my custom After Dark
| module and see if it works!
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Does anyone know of a way of running Windows 98 in a browser, but
| with a custom hard drive image that you can point it to? There's
| several sites for running 98 in browser but none let you use a
| custom virtual hard drive image. I'd like to do it for some fun
| retro stuff. I guess self hosting, but how do you do the whole
| QEMU <-> Browser part?
|
| (custom floppy/CD image would also be an option as I could load
| the retro app that way)
| lioeters wrote:
| > Windows 98 in a browser
|
| This might be a good start:
|
| https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98
|
| The emulation has load/save state (.bin file), and apparently
| includes a floppy disk controller.
|
| https://github.com/copy/v86
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| When I look at this I think how these old UIs like MacOS, windows
| 95 or 2000 were designed for clarity and usability. And how
| things have gone downhill since then. I really miss easily
| distinguishable UI elements.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm of two minds.
|
| The Mac famously had User Interface Guidelines that tried to
| keep everything consistent. I loved it and, like you, miss it.
|
| But then designers came along and we got drawers (and then we
| lost the drawers), editable toolbars, brushed metal (and then
| not), etc...
|
| The point at which I called bullshit was when Safari combined
| the URL text field with the loading progress bar. I disagreed
| with the design and said so -- it looked to me like the URL was
| being text-selected as the page loaded. (Ah well, it appears to
| be gone now anyway.)
|
| But I digress. I had begun to consider that users are now more
| comfortable with inconsistent UI with the ubiquity of the Web.
| That has perhaps freed designers to try random stuff on a per-
| app basis and not adhere so religiously to User Interface
| Guidelines.
|
| But, yeah, it made life easier for developers too.
| toast0 wrote:
| > The Mac famously had User Interface Guidelines that tried
| to keep everything consistent. I loved it and, like you, miss
| it.
|
| > But then designers came along
|
| I mean, the Guidelines were written by designers. I don't
| have a problem with designers; I don't care for the Mac
| design, but at least it was consistent. But I don't think
| there's an OS with guidelines anymore; at least not any OS
| where 95%+ of what ships with the OS follows the guidelines
| (never mind what else the OS developer ships or 3rd party
| software). </rant>
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Interestingly, that the progress bar/URL field combo was co-
| invented by Steve Jobs: See
| https://donmelton.com/2014/04/10/memories-of-steve/
| abruzzi wrote:
| before the OS vendors started ignoring their human interface
| guidelines, we had Kai's Power Tools, which some people loved
| --but I hated. I dont know if that was the beginning of
| custom UIs for every applications, or if it was just an
| outlier.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| Civilization and Battle Chess is in the games folder!
| stuart78 wrote:
| Marathon Infinity is what I was excited to see in there. Runs
| well too! I can't say how many hours I spent between the base
| game and Anvil.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| "See you starside."
| arprocter wrote:
| And Hellcats - this takes me back
| dkonofalski wrote:
| I couldn't get Battle Chess to work. It kept giving me a memory
| error. I even read the readme file that says how to fix it but
| the option it mentions isn't available in the Controls pane for
| Memory. :(
| Davertron wrote:
| And Out of This World (or Another World...), which is one of my
| favorite games of all time!
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