The letter 'X' in Mac OS X's name refers to the number 10, a Roman numeral, and Apple has stated that it should be pronounced 'ten' in this context. 5by5 makes podcasts for geeks, designers, developers, gamers, entrepreneurs, and people like you, with shows hosted by people including Dan Benjamin, Merlin Mann, Horace Dediu, and Jeffrey Zeldman.Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure's official soundtrack, containing 26 warm and dark tracks that accompany you throughout the game.
![]() After Dark Install Media FromThe concept of "Control Panels" that are installed and used like individual apps is alien to someone used to the all-in-one convenience of System Preferences. Niceties like scroll wheels and right-clicking aren't supported, even with an external mouse, and the third-party software created to enable those features didn't like my Logitech wireless mouse. It looks like the Windows 98 version of Mac OS.There are oddities to get used to, though. Even for someone who has primarily used OS X, this is still recognizably Mac OS, even if its underpinnings are much different. I booted to the classic Mac OS desktop, thanks to Mac OS 9.2.2 install media from Ars Senior Science Editor John Timmer. The system should automatically restart into the Setup Assistant.Available in MP3 and FLAC formats, 44100 Hz, Stereo26.First I found LowEndMac.com’s still-active Mac OS 9 Google group, and from there I was pointed to the abandonware archive at Macintosh Garden.Abandonware (a handy portmanteau of "abandoned" and "software") is one of those software “gray areas,” sort of like old-school PC and console game emulation. For any product that was sufficiently popular in its day, you'll still be able to find some group of people, somewhere, that continues to sing its praises (remind me to tell you about the time I dissed the Apple Newton in an article). Even back in the earliest, slowest, buggiest days of OS X, it brought much-improved stability and memory management to the table, and it's something we've come to take for granted.The best way to get started if you're revisiting a relic is to find the pockets of people on the Internet who still use it. That is, unless you get a pop-up message that momentarily freezes the OS, or you have an odd, possibly memory-related crash that requires a restart. Mac OS 9 feels much faster on the 800MHz G4 than does OS X 10.4 or 10.5, and when the system is working smoothly things open and close pretty much instantaneously.Entourage nearly worked—I could receive mail, albeit with many connection errors, but I could never send it. In the early 2000s it wasn't even a given that applications would support basic SSL/TLS encryption.Most e-mail apps I tried (Eudora, Microsoft Entourage 2001, Mulberry) didn't support SSL encryption at all, or they supported some older version that our e-mail server didn't care for. In this post-Snowden era, we often worry that the encryption hardware and software we rely on is flawed in some way that will allow it to be circumvented. Trying to work? Good luckMy efforts were further hampered by the near-nonexistent state of desktop operating system security in the late '90s and early 2000s. Whether you'll still find these apps useful depends on what you're trying to do, though. But many of these companies aren’t even around anymore, and the ones that are still around aren’t really interested in offering or maintaining decades-old games and productivity software.Macintosh Garden is full of such abandonware, and for this article we’re going to download it indiscriminately in the name of Science. Steve Jobs called the computer the " digital hub" for all your other devices, and the software reflects that philosophy. You didn't need to sync stuff to a phone or a tablet or another computer, because you didn't have a phone or tablet or another computer. Back then, your computer was the one computing device you had. I was only able to do some file transfers using FTP, yet another unencrypted and insecure protocol.Most people's habits have changed drastically since the year 2000. Even using a network share isn't possible—Mac OS 9 doesn't support Windows' SMB protocol, and its version of the AFP protocol is too old to interface with my Mac Mini server running Mavericks. And since Classilla makes such a mess of things, the Web client isn't an option.And it goes without saying that syncing files between Mac OS 9 and any other system just isn't going to happen (I mostly use Dropbox, but the service you use doesn't make a difference). A whole bunch of them were educational games that were supposed to teach me about long division and running a hot dog stand and traveling to Oregon during the Olden Days, but in any case they appealed to my SNES-addled brain.If you want to relive these games exactly as you remember them, there's no substitute for real Mac OS running on real PowerPC hardware. AdvertisementMost of my pre-OS X Mac experiences happened on computers in our school's lab, and most of them centered around games. This old operating system is really only useful when you're trying to run old programs exactly the way they ran back in the '90s. Trying to drag a Mac OS 9 system kicking and screaming into the modern age is a fun thing to try for an afternoon or two, but it's ultimately a pointless exercise. And since users have abandoned it, developers have abandoned it. Again, unlike old-school DOS, even the most ardent users of classic Mac OS have abandoned it. Selena for mac cosmeticsNo matter how much you love something, time marches on. If anything, experimenting with it validated my "go with the flow" approach to hardware and software updates. Once I discovered that I couldn’t actually get anything done in Mac OS 9, I decided to fire up my Mac OS X 10.4 partition and just play them in Classic mode instead.Further Reading Why documenting every Android version has become a logistical nightmareIn the end I really couldn't do a whole lot with classic Mac OS, which was kind of too bad. If you’re running into these kinds of edge cases, you’ll need to get even older hardware or try your luck with some emulation.Aside from the occasional bug, old classics like Civilization II or Age of Empires 2 (which I played on the PC back in the day), ran just fine. Oregon Trail plays without sound, a known issue, and you’ve got to do some fiddling to get those old After Dark screensavers up and running. Macintosh Garden's list of old games is pretty expansive, and I was able to find a lot of my old favorites there.If you run into any problems gaming on a machine like this, it might be that Mac OS 9 is actually too new for the stuff you want to run—crazy, I know. From a historical perspective, though, it makes it harder to appreciate Mac OS 9's strengths (low resource usage, good performance on old hardware) and the concepts it introduced that modern Mac buyers still use every day.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorTim ArchivesCategories |