Asklemmy

43810 readers

1288 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

People who used older macintosh OS in the 90s, what was it like for your daily use, work, games etc? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by Tekkip20@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have uses the newer OS's of Mac but never the classic series that were numbered.

For those who have used apple computing back in the day, what was it like using it? Was it a lot more snappier and better user interface intuitiveness?

I say this because it always seemed to me that the macintosh operating systems seemed to be more.. "smooth sailing" than Bill's 50/50 BSOD contraptions (Windows ME anyone?)

Obviously things have changed a lot more with newer macos being more fisher priced down in looks but I'd really like to know what you guys thought about OS 8 or 9!

Thank you!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] noughtnaut@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I used to joke that the last Mac I used was the first one they made that had colour - I've used every Mac from the seminal one up to and including the Color Classic (MacOS 1 up to 7) - but my last job gave me a MacBook. I was curious about it since I've seen many a coworker love them, but I soon found myself hating the damn thing so much that I ended up installing the work tools on my own Linux-laden ThinkPad.

Used to be, they were fast and no nonsense, simply effective and efficient work horses. No doubt they still are, but it was fighting med in everything I wanted it to do. What do you mean "there's no way to mount a USB stick on MACOS"?!

Hardware wise they're still brilliant wrt. power and battery life, but getting a 2nd (or, gasp, even 3rd) monitor to work with it? Yikes what a shit show that was. Truly a walled garden, I stand by my usual words of "they're excellent machines if you want to use them exactly as Apple intended."

...sorry for going off track. So, back in the day. There was MacWrite, MacPaint, Aldus PageMaker (which, then, was way more useful for actual publishing work than after the Adobe take-over), and a ton of games! Granted, you only had 512*whatever in pure black and white, but it was crisp and the games had excellent sound. Pinball Construction Set had 4-voice digital sound and flawless physics (hmm, except I don't actually remember if it had a Tilt feature). Oh yeah, add in AppleTalk which blew Novell and Windows for Workgroups plain out of the water. The ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) connector predates PS/2 and curiously allowed a Mac to have any number of keyboards and two mice connected, something we made good use of when gaming.

There was the ImageWriter which could do plain copy paper rather than Leparello paper and had exquisite resolution compared to the clunky 8-pin DOS offerings. Really, the Mac SE and the ImageWriter II are, in my mind, the pinnacle of industrial design - at least of the 80s era.

Thanks for reading all that. You should go have a look at folklore.org if you're interested in stories from the inside.