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Whilst the Apple II was a nice micro, the worst thing Apple ever did was produce the MacIntosh. It had a pushbutton-on-a-string called 'mouse', and included a silly video game called 'desktop'.
There was no command prompt with which to use it in any way.
A small unknown company called Microsoft later made the mistake of imitating
the Mac, when they had a perfectly usable OS called MS-DOS (or PC-DOS).
From anonymous comment in this article
posted by entropop @ 6:45 AM
7 Comments:
Hey Andrew... I'm too lazy to create a user ;)
Everyone knows that Mac OS 9.2 (and below) were crap, unstable and couldn't multi task... just like Windows 9x. But take note that windows 9x was built on DOS so it still had a command line (dos box) =P
BTW you might want to have a look into BeOS and the new open source version in development called Haiku. http://haiku-os.org/
AstrO (Toby)
Actually, I don't think I made it too clear that I had copied and pasted those words from an anonymous comment on an article some dude wrote about Apple's failures such as the newton and pippin and that sort of thing. Looking at the post again out of its context it is entirely uncharacteristic of my philosopy. In it's origional context it was ironic because of coarse, the common man's Gui and windows were obviously success stories.
I actually loved old macs and combined with hypercard they were a mean toy for any introverted tween. I Also liked BeOS in its day and might dust it off again, I knew it was still kind of going but hadn't really considered giving it a shot until your post.
I'm decidedly an OS X lover these days but my ibook is dead so I've taken the plunge and adopted Ubuntu Linux. I tried windows for about 30 seconds and was extremely frustrated with it. Primarily its handling of memory, I mean for christ sake young men need to open more than two applications in this day and age.
What hardware do you have in your PC? If it's nothing fancy/new then you could borrow my copy of BeOS Pro R5 (which I paid good money for in the day). Last time I installed BeOS it took longer to get past the post screens than it did to boot into the OS.... but getting it to run with my raid controller is a bit of a pain :( If you have a pre G3 mac you can also run BeOS ;)
BTW what version of windows did you install, was it XP or 2000? (this is assuming you wouldn't install a 9x based OS or NT4)
Personally I would have to say that I find it very easy to use windows... but I've been using it from the early years. I've also been using macs for most of my working life. I can't say that OS Classic was very good, although it might have been back in 88, it's just that all the later version were getting more and more unstable. The good things is that OSX is getting better, in the beginning it was very unstable for me but now it's almost perfect. Just wish you had options in the interface to turn off some of the process hungry effects. It would also be nice if it had a easier to user file browser built-in and if you were given a decent mouse when you bought the thing.... One mouse button that takes up the entire surface of the mouse isn't a good idea, even the bloody OS supports 2 mouse buttons and a wheel.
One thing you should remember is that Windows has to run using an infinite number of hardware combinations and macs don't, so for what it's worth I think Windows 2000 Pro with SP4 runs stable 24/7 (well it does for me).
AstrO (Toby)
OS 7 was pretty rockin, and actually there was a way to pop up a debug command thingo but I only ever really used it to quit the finder and compared to Windows 3.1 it was lightyears ahead.
And it's really not such an amazing feat for windows to work with all manner of hardware because the burden of writing the drivers falls largely on the manufacturers of the hardware. I guess there's something to be said for those drivers interacting with each other.
I'm running Windows XP on my windows partition and actually I using it now to surf the web because I was playing around with Freehand a bit and decided to hop on. I haven't taken the time to take care of whatever it is that makes windows shutdown automatically whenever you get on the internet and haven't set it up to block the popups that seem to infiltrate automatically. But I picked up the shutdown -a command somewhere along the way and can go about using it without trying to fix it whilst on the end of a dialup connection.
Its iteresting becuase while Linux has got a bit of a steep learning curve to get into the amount of effort to get it up and running witout a hitch, if you include reasearch or whatever, is about the same. Especially with my OS X Unix tinkering experience.
I've used Windows a lot as well but usually on crappy computer's that I didn't expect much out of or on computers that were maintained by other people such as at universities etc.
I've only got 128 k of ram on a 700 mhz p3 laptop so virtual memory is a pretty important component of the OS . And linux actually seems to handle VM a bit better than my mac did when I only had 128 of ram in it.
I guess what it really comes down to is the computer training you to work around its weak points, because really there isn't an OS that doesn't suck at doing something. Have you ever noticed that you can use your computer for weeks without it crashing once and then somebody will sit down at it for 30 seconds and it all falls apart?
I would like to borrow BeOS sometime. It might be a pain getting it to work with the LCD screen on my laptop, I don't know if I've ever actually seen BEos in colour because It never worked with any of my video cards. You can install it without creating a partition can't you. It might be a pain to have three partitions on a 10 gig hard drive. What filesystem does it work best with?
Not sure why your XP is shutting down when you connect to the internet... never seen it do that before. Are you using IE? If so you should install FireFox as it's much safer (virus free), you might also like to try out Thunderbird (e-mail) and OpenOffice (MS Office replacement). Also if you are using a motherboard which isn't using and intel chipset you might need to install motherboard drivers to get things running smoothly.
Here is the bad news. if you install BeOS you will need a partition formatted using the Be File System.. This could be a pain with a 10 gig drive :(
BTW the issue with 128MB of ram and OSX is that it needs a lot of ram to run... I would probably say it needs more than most versions of Linux which means it does more disk thrashing. That's also not good if you are using a slow laptop hard drive which spins at 4200rpm (compared to a not 3.5" 7200rpm drive). It's a bit painful to try and run OSX with just 128MB or ram, if it's possible try to get at least 256.
Andrew said: "Actually, I don't think I made it too clear that I had copied and pasted those words from an anonymous comment on an article..."
Yeah sorry about that. I didn't notice that detail until too late. I thought it seemed like an out of the blue sort of comment. I wouldn't have put Toby onto it otherwise and you two wouldn't have had that lengthy, tech-heavy discussion.
I don't know what you two are talking about so I don't really know if you're arguing or agreeing but if things are sour, I'm sorry. If not, then I'm thankful.
I like Norm MacDonald. He's real funny.
Yeah, Norm MacDonald IS funny. Did you know that he was fired from SNL because he wouldn't lay off the OJ Simpson Jokes and one of the TV execs was tight with old OJ.
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