On Oct 12, 2004, at 11:02 PM, Larry le Mac wrote:
From: john slavin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Boy that is really unMaclike.
I have been a Mac user since 1993, but I have also gone back in time by buying over 100 old Macs and have therefore experience of all versions of Mac OS and pre-Mac Apples.
I've been one since 1989, all OSes from 6 on up.
The funny thing that I now reflect on is in the amount of ways in which OS X is so non-Mac.
Heh, one of the things I've noticed about OS X is that, for a completely new OS (and one with a rocky start, Rhapsody and 10.0 were virtually unusable, and really bad) it is so Mac. Things just work.
So many of the things we used to say about the Mac OS are no longer the case. We have moved away from what was and copied everything we used to criticise.
What has been moved away from? The VAST majority of OS X users use it just like they use their macs with OS 9. There's no absolute need to muck with fixing permissions (which is pretty much the same as running Disk First Aid, or rebuilding the Desktop in OS9), Terminal, etc etc.
People don't write in to forums like this to announce "Well, my Mac worked flawlessly today, just like I expected it to!". No they come here when they have problems. Same for online forums, and many Mac sites. They're a concentration of problems.
They give an entirely false sense of what the actual experience is for the majority of users, which is that they just went on using their macs only now they don't crash, and when PowerPoint craps out, they just quit it and start PowerPoint again.
I know many people used to mock PC users as having to struggle with a command line; now we have one. The difference is that we don't HAVE to use it.
Yes now we have security patches, where once we didn't. But OS 9 didn't come with Windows file sharing, mail servers, Apache Web server, SSH, and the host of useful network services that come with OS X.
Some things were better before, even with crashes and restarts.
What things? That we can't go in and sort our startup extensions by hand to figure out which is interfering? That any program could, at will, take down the entire system? Manual memory management?
Yes you had total access to everything in the system folder, none of this permissions stuff to worry about. But you NEEDED that access to fix things when they broke. OS 7.3, for example, would randomly eat my Finder file, causing the system to need a total re-install (I later found it was fixable by copying the Finder from the boot CD, no need to re-install).
Users? As someone whose neighbor's 4-year old discovered he could make the Trash can go fat then skinny again, I would have KILLED for effective user control in OS 7. (I won't EVEN go into the UnSPEAKable Evil that was the Oscar the Grouch trashcan mod! ;-)
OSX offers the best of both worlds: Unix and the Mac. It's an enormously powerful combo. It's a work in progress, but it's still so much better than OS 9 was it's not funny.
It's perfectly fine to like OS 9, warts and all, and prefer it to OS X, but calling OS X 'Not a Mac' is wrong.
-- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pha rmacy Information Technology Group
Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs
-- G-List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and...
Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- We have Apple Refurbished Monitors in stock! | & CDRWs on Sale! |
Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html>
G-List list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/>
Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
