Yeah, so basically Classic is only not "crappy" if you never have to use it.
DOS/Win16 programs do run in a VM "out-of-the-way" in Windows. It's actually better in most cases than actual Windows 3.1, which I don't think you could say about Classic and OS9.
My understanding is that there was a threading ABI change, and as a result most of the "commercial shrinkwrap" Linux software that appeared circa 1999 no longer runs. (eg Word Perfect, Loki Games etc).
So, while it's probably the case that simple Linux software from 10 years ago still runs, I don't think that's due to any concious effort not to break binary compat, much less anything fancy like regression testing.
Well, I ran A/UX on a 16MB IIfx, and I think "decent" was stretching things. It swapped quite a bit and was much less snappy than regular MacOS. Also, 16MB was $Hundreds or $Thousands of extra memory in those days.
Carbon isn't necessarily "modernized" -- there's still stuff pulled straight over from the old MacOS (pascal strings, handles, etc). Which isn't a problem -- it's just the fact that Apple did not start over clean.
as people I know at IBM would put it, "sometimes you have to drag the customer, kicking and screaming, into the future."
Funny, because IBM still makes most of their money from Mainframe platforms that have 40 years of backward compability built-in. IBM is the King of Legacy.
As I noted in another post, "Classic" doesn't exist anymore, and when it did, it offered only middling-level compatibility with System 7/8-era programs.
1984 Mac apps generally didn't use that many hacks/undocumented tricks and tend to run a lot better than (say) 1994 Apps. I have an old Quadra with a large variety of apps, many of which don't run on System 8, much less under OS X Classic.
As someone who has used Macs since the 1980s, I don't think there's ever been a time when Macs were broadly compatible with 5-6 year old software packages. New OSes and hardware comes out and stuff breaks. That's just how it is onthe Mac.
While the Design folks were really critical to Apple back in the 90s, I think that's a lot less true now. A huge chunk of folks in that market have bailed off the Mac; and for those who haven't, "Quark" is not pushing highend hardware as much it used to. PowerMac sales have been steadily declining (although it's not clear is if this because people are buying laptops/iMacs.) Even if graphic design is steady, the overall market has doubled or tripled since the good ol days 10 years ago.
The fact that Apple kept Adobe largely out-of-the-loop as far as their Intel plans went just shows that Apple doesn't feel that Graphic Design is very important to their overall market. I think the Consumer Sell of OS X itself is a lot more powerful nowdays than the niche pro app market.
I don't know, that seems mostly like an incoherant an "Apple Rulez" rant.
But, you're right, I over-generalized things. There is a small part of Apple's market that comes for *only* the Professional apps (Final Cut, WebObjects, etc) and doesn't care about the hardware/OS/etc. But for the most part, Apple sells machines on the base system and not the niche pro apps.
If they would drop all 16bit support it would help a ton.
The 16-bit support is already in a "VM" and is pretty cleanly implemented. The issue has more to do with bug-compatible support for the various old varients of Win32 and obsolete ancillary APIs (e.g. "Video for Windows", old versions of DirectX, etc).
Fiddling with the settings to trick it into thinking it was Windows 98 made it work.
This setting didn't magically appear. It's something Microsoft specifically engineered to improve back-compat with old, broken programs. There's a list somewhere of a few hundred games and other apps that have specific compatibility handling in XP/2000.
I think Microsoft needs to do away with native legacy support like Apple did, but keep it around with emulation.
OS X is still loaded with legacy API support, don't think otherwise. It's just that there was fundemental issues that prevented classic apps from being pulled forward.
Oh, and as for the general presumption that Apple knows better than MS about how to produce an OS -- Let's not forget that OS X was two years late itself, and shipped in mostly unusable state. A dollar says Vista will be much less buggy/slothy than 10.0.
Interestingly, I've found Apple to be very willing to integrate backwards and forwards support in their OS
I know everything must be wonderful in Apple Land, but the compatibility issue is nowhere as good as Windows.
The fact is that if you buy a new Intel Mac, it runs no pre-OS X software which is only 5 years old. Virtually all Windows software from 2000-1 still runs without any issues. The Mac situation is OS for most consumer users, but for larger shops, the "upgrade-cycle" can become an issue.
Your entire post seems to be "spin" to me.
Re:Apple Provides SOME Legacy Support
on
Why Windows is Slow
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
First you make a system that works according the specifications, and only after that should you worry about optimizations.
That's easy to say in 2006, but 10-15 years ago the "footprint" of the OS was a huge purchasing decision.
Why do think Apple dumped so much money into Copeland? Because at that point in time, the average Mac had 8MB of RAM and they could never have shipped a Unix-based OS that required 64MB or so of memory.
I was thinking about this, and it basically boils down to a simple proposition:
People buy Macs to run OS X People buy Windows PCs to run Applications
Because of this Apple has a lot more leeway on compatibility. They can break every application there is, but the users will still be happy as long as OS X and Apple apps continue to run. If Microsoft breaks Windows application support, they've removed the main reason people run Windows in the first place. (Maybe there is a hardcore 2% of Windows lovers out there, but apps are what counts for the vast 90% of the market.)
The other issue is that Apple is heavily consumer-based and therefore can totally focus on quick-turnarounds and user-centric features. For example, there's been various complaints over the years about poor I/O speeds on OS X. This hasn't been a huge priority for Apple to fix because frankly they don't sell that many corporate server systems. Much better to put those resources into developing 'widgets' or something the end user can see. Microsoft has to spread out resources across Server systems, Tablets, Media Centers, Corporate Desktops, Consumer Desktops, etc etc, so that Windows is the single solution for every problem.
The end result is that OS X is a pretty damn nice solution for the home or SOHO user. But whether Apple's approach would work for the market as a whole? Don't think so.
Under the supervision of researchers Eli Vance and Dr.Kleiner, crystals are retrieved from Xen, and organisms are analyzed.
This is justified by the Opposing Forces expansion, where you see scientists experimenting with Xen crystals and aliens. There's even a Headcrab Zoo. It's still speculative, because particular scientists were never named, AFAIK.
I'll agree that timeline page is pathetic resource by and for idiots, due to the lack of footnotes.
FUD is a good acronym: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. What other term would you use to express the concept?
More like FUD used to be a good acronym, but the "Open Sores" community pretty much ruined it through over-use.
Groklaw is the perfect example: 1) Every critism, no matter how minor, is obsessively labeled "FUD" 2) Most of their non-legal content about vendors like Microsoft actually is FUD
So, maybe if people were talking a high-ground principled stand against "FUD", it might be credible -- but the fact is that "FUD" flies faster and dirtier from the Linux side of things.
It's great when someone goes for the "Funny" mod and gets "Interesting" (aka "I don't get it, but it sounds good.")
Gasse was a good fit for the arrogant, proprietary Apple of the 1980s -- "Ze ah-deh-beh is ze ezquizite for ze kayboards!" But for a company like Microsoft that has to make boring, functional technology for the proletariat masses? Probably not.
One of the comments in the blog addressed this. Basically every Microsoft OS project has been a mis-managed death march that shipped years behind schedule. Yet, for the most part, they've been successful on the technical level. When Windows 2000 came out, I don't think anyone cared that it was two years late.
I guess you'd have to be about 18 to get into the idea of having a ueber-computer. After you've been around a while, it's pretty obvious that all computers are basically worthless junk after about 5 years.
Just for the sake of discussion, I went and checked. A high-end workstation from five years ago was a 2x 1.7Ghz first gen Pentium 4 Xeon with (ridiclously expensive) RDRAM and most likely a middling-level 10K SCSI drove.
Would you rather have that or a new 3.2Ghz Pentium Dell with a SATA disk? Tough call. I'd probably go for the "real computer", but I think the average joe would go for the cheap&fast system.
Bullshit. Well over 90% of current Mac apps are Cocoa based -- if that were not the case, then they couldn't be ported as native apps to new Intel version of OS X, which doesn't have the Carbon compatibility layer
100% false. You must be really confused, because Intel OS X supports the Carbon API just fine, which is good because that's what vast majority of commercial Mac applciations use. Honestly, up to this point you made a reasonable emulation of someone who sounds like he knew what he was talking about. But not having read the first page of Apple's programming manual puts your entire argument in doubt.
1) I asked which major Windows apps weren't multithreaded. Haven't got an answer yet.
2) Finder is a Carbon application, and so is every other major Mac app except maybe one or two. So much for the magic multithreaded APIs -- the majority of Mac apps do it the same way as the Windows apps do.
3) Yeah, that sucks. Fortunately there's an option to run Explorer windows in seperate processes, which solves all the "threading" issues.
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Yeah, so basically Classic is only not "crappy" if you never have to use it.
DOS/Win16 programs do run in a VM "out-of-the-way" in Windows. It's actually better in most cases than actual Windows 3.1, which I don't think you could say about Classic and OS9.
My understanding is that there was a threading ABI change, and as a result most of the "commercial shrinkwrap" Linux software that appeared circa 1999 no longer runs. (eg Word Perfect, Loki Games etc).
So, while it's probably the case that simple Linux software from 10 years ago still runs, I don't think that's due to any concious effort not to break binary compat, much less anything fancy like regression testing.
Well, I ran A/UX on a 16MB IIfx, and I think "decent" was stretching things. It swapped quite a bit and was much less snappy than regular MacOS. Also, 16MB was $Hundreds or $Thousands of extra memory in those days.
Carbon isn't necessarily "modernized" -- there's still stuff pulled straight over from the old MacOS (pascal strings, handles, etc). Which isn't a problem -- it's just the fact that Apple did not start over clean.
as people I know at IBM would put it, "sometimes you have to drag the customer, kicking and screaming, into the future."
Funny, because IBM still makes most of their money from Mainframe platforms that have 40 years of backward compability built-in. IBM is the King of Legacy.
As I noted in another post, "Classic" doesn't exist anymore, and when it did, it offered only middling-level compatibility with System 7/8-era programs.
However, there are quite a few 1984 Mac apps
1984 Mac apps generally didn't use that many hacks/undocumented tricks and tend to run a lot better than (say) 1994 Apps. I have an old Quadra with a large variety of apps, many of which don't run on System 8, much less under OS X Classic.
As someone who has used Macs since the 1980s, I don't think there's ever been a time when Macs were broadly compatible with 5-6 year old software packages. New OSes and hardware comes out and stuff breaks. That's just how it is onthe Mac.
Interesting post. Just one thought:
While the Design folks were really critical to Apple back in the 90s, I think that's a lot less true now. A huge chunk of folks in that market have bailed off the Mac; and for those who haven't, "Quark" is not pushing highend hardware as much it used to. PowerMac sales have been steadily declining (although it's not clear is if this because people are buying laptops/iMacs.) Even if graphic design is steady, the overall market has doubled or tripled since the good ol days 10 years ago.
The fact that Apple kept Adobe largely out-of-the-loop as far as their Intel plans went just shows that Apple doesn't feel that Graphic Design is very important to their overall market. I think the Consumer Sell of OS X itself is a lot more powerful nowdays than the niche pro app market.
I don't know, that seems mostly like an incoherant an "Apple Rulez" rant.
But, you're right, I over-generalized things. There is a small part of Apple's market that comes for *only* the Professional apps (Final Cut, WebObjects, etc) and doesn't care about the hardware/OS/etc. But for the most part, Apple sells machines on the base system and not the niche pro apps.
Windows NT was very successful in that it basically eliminated IBM OS/2.
If they would drop all 16bit support it would help a ton.
The 16-bit support is already in a "VM" and is pretty cleanly implemented. The issue has more to do with bug-compatible support for the various old varients of Win32 and obsolete ancillary APIs (e.g. "Video for Windows", old versions of DirectX, etc).
Fiddling with the settings to trick it into thinking it was Windows 98 made it work.
This setting didn't magically appear. It's something Microsoft specifically engineered to improve back-compat with old, broken programs. There's a list somewhere of a few hundred games and other apps that have specific compatibility handling in XP/2000.
I think Microsoft needs to do away with native legacy support like Apple did, but keep it around with emulation.
OS X is still loaded with legacy API support, don't think otherwise. It's just that there was fundemental issues that prevented classic apps from being pulled forward.
Oh, and as for the general presumption that Apple knows better than MS about how to produce an OS -- Let's not forget that OS X was two years late itself, and shipped in mostly unusable state. A dollar says Vista will be much less buggy/slothy than 10.0.
Interestingly, I've found Apple to be very willing to integrate backwards and forwards support in their OS
I know everything must be wonderful in Apple Land, but the compatibility issue is nowhere as good as Windows.
The fact is that if you buy a new Intel Mac, it runs no pre-OS X software which is only 5 years old. Virtually all Windows software from 2000-1 still runs without any issues. The Mac situation is OS for most consumer users, but for larger shops, the "upgrade-cycle" can become an issue.
Your entire post seems to be "spin" to me.
First you make a system that works according the specifications, and only after that should you worry about optimizations.
That's easy to say in 2006, but 10-15 years ago the "footprint" of the OS was a huge purchasing decision.
Why do think Apple dumped so much money into Copeland? Because at that point in time, the average Mac had 8MB of RAM and they could never have shipped a Unix-based OS that required 64MB or so of memory.
I was thinking about this, and it basically boils down to a simple proposition:
People buy Macs to run OS X
People buy Windows PCs to run Applications
Because of this Apple has a lot more leeway on compatibility. They can break every application there is, but the users will still be happy as long as OS X and Apple apps continue to run. If Microsoft breaks Windows application support, they've removed the main reason people run Windows in the first place. (Maybe there is a hardcore 2% of Windows lovers out there, but apps are what counts for the vast 90% of the market.)
The other issue is that Apple is heavily consumer-based and therefore can totally focus on quick-turnarounds and user-centric features. For example, there's been various complaints over the years about poor I/O speeds on OS X. This hasn't been a huge priority for Apple to fix because frankly they don't sell that many corporate server systems. Much better to put those resources into developing 'widgets' or something the end user can see. Microsoft has to spread out resources across Server systems, Tablets, Media Centers, Corporate Desktops, Consumer Desktops, etc etc, so that Windows is the single solution for every problem.
The end result is that OS X is a pretty damn nice solution for the home or SOHO user. But whether Apple's approach would work for the market as a whole? Don't think so.
Under the supervision of researchers Eli Vance and Dr.Kleiner, crystals are retrieved from Xen, and organisms are analyzed.
This is justified by the Opposing Forces expansion, where you see scientists experimenting with Xen crystals and aliens. There's even a Headcrab Zoo. It's still speculative, because particular scientists were never named, AFAIK.
I'll agree that timeline page is pathetic resource by and for idiots, due to the lack of footnotes.
FUD is a good acronym: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. What other term would you use to express the concept?
More like FUD used to be a good acronym, but the "Open Sores" community pretty much ruined it through over-use.
Groklaw is the perfect example:
1) Every critism, no matter how minor, is obsessively labeled "FUD"
2) Most of their non-legal content about vendors like Microsoft actually is FUD
So, maybe if people were talking a high-ground principled stand against "FUD", it might be credible -- but the fact is that "FUD" flies faster and dirtier from the Linux side of things.
It's great when someone goes for the "Funny" mod and gets "Interesting" (aka "I don't get it, but it sounds good.")
Gasse was a good fit for the arrogant, proprietary Apple of the 1980s -- "Ze ah-deh-beh is ze ezquizite for ze kayboards!" But for a company like Microsoft that has to make boring, functional technology for the proletariat masses? Probably not.
One of the comments in the blog addressed this. Basically every Microsoft OS project has been a mis-managed death march that shipped years behind schedule. Yet, for the most part, they've been successful on the technical level. When Windows 2000 came out, I don't think anyone cared that it was two years late.
I guess you'd have to be about 18 to get into the idea of having a ueber-computer. After you've been around a while, it's pretty obvious that all computers are basically worthless junk after about 5 years.
Just for the sake of discussion, I went and checked. A high-end workstation from five years ago was a 2x 1.7Ghz first gen Pentium 4 Xeon with (ridiclously expensive) RDRAM and most likely a middling-level 10K SCSI drove.
Would you rather have that or a new 3.2Ghz Pentium Dell with a SATA disk? Tough call. I'd probably go for the "real computer", but I think the average joe would go for the cheap&fast system.
Sounds like you completely backtracked on your original post. I don't blame you.
Bullshit. Well over 90% of current Mac apps are Cocoa based -- if that were not the case, then they couldn't be ported as native apps to new Intel version of OS X, which doesn't have the Carbon compatibility layer
100% false. You must be really confused, because Intel OS X supports the Carbon API just fine, which is good because that's what vast majority of commercial Mac applciations use. Honestly, up to this point you made a reasonable emulation of someone who sounds like he knew what he was talking about. But not having read the first page of Apple's programming manual puts your entire argument in doubt.
You don't use Safari or iTunes? Strange.
More likely you have no idea what apps are cocoa and what aren't (most of them).
1) I asked which major Windows apps weren't multithreaded. Haven't got an answer yet.
2) Finder is a Carbon application, and so is every other major Mac app except maybe one or two. So much for the magic multithreaded APIs -- the majority of Mac apps do it the same way as the Windows apps do.
3) Yeah, that sucks. Fortunately there's an option to run Explorer windows in seperate processes, which solves all the "threading" issues.