On 2008-08-27, at 04:03, Joshua Juran wrote:
On Aug 26, 2008, at 8:42 PM, Peter da Silva wrote:
OS 9 was made of hate. OS 9 made Windows Me look good. OS 9 was so
bad that you could wedge a 233 MHz Power PC just by trying to use
iTunes and Finder at the same time.
I never used iTunes for OS 9. I used Norman Franke's SoundApp.
I am 100% sure that you can wedge a 233 MHz Power PC using SoundApp
and Finder at the same time. Cooperative multitasking means never
having to say it's the application's fault, because there's always
some other application to fuck you up.
The only annoyance was that ToolServer (apparently) disables
interrupts, so sound would intermittently drop out while compiling.
That's cooperative multitasking fucking you up.
And, yes, right up to the end of OS 9, it really was cooperative
multitasking under the covers. Any application might as well have
"disabled interrupts" until it was ready to call
BrideOfSonOfGetNextEvent. There was a little time-slicing between
apps, but ONLY if none of the apps involved were doing anything
involving updating the screen or making any other calls that went
anywhere near bad old Mac OS, and only if you had no DAs up.
The OS 9 Finder, however, is a pretty cool app, as we all know from
using the OS X Finder.
The OS 9 Finder wasn't "bad", but I sure as hell wouldn't call it
"cool", and the spacial views always drove me crazy. Apple should
have kept the NeXTstep file manager as a separate program and let the
Finder fans keep their spacial views without dragging us down into
the single-tasking uncooperative-multitasking world of the Finder on
OS X.
OS 9 was less responsive on a 233 MHZ 604e than NeXTstep on a
68030 (let alone OS X on a 233 MHz 604e).
I've used NeXTstep on a 68030. It's a bit pokey until you double
the RAM to 16MB, but then it's great.
I see you interpreted that as a dig at OS X. It wasn't. I'm saying
that OS 9 was less responsive than OS X on the same computer.
I don't know what happened to make [NeXTstep] so slow on Macs,
Nothing. It's fine on Macs. What made OS X slower than NeXTstep was
Quartz. Quartz is incredibly processor intensive and CPU hungry
compared to Display Postscript, because of things like the
compositing window manager. Imagine running Compiz without any GPU
acceleration on a 233 MHz processor, because really the graphics
support in the 7600 might as well not have been there.
And even then, OS X was MORE responsive on the same hardware than OS
9, if you turned off the expensive graphical effects like the drop
shadow.
Yes, I am saying that on the same hardware, OS X is MORE responsive
than OS 9, not less. Really. I was running both of them on the same
7600 with 112M RAM, and if ANY program under OS 9 was doing anything
even slightly CPU intensive, you were locked up, completely, every time.
Yes, I've had people tell me that they didn't have any problem on OS
9, and I've watched them work, and watched them sitting there and
happily waiting for the computer and never trying to get any
advantage from multitasking. because with cooperative multitasking
you really *can't*.
If you don't ask OS X to do all the swoopy GUI effects, it's just as
responsive as NeXTstep.
Whereas OS 9 on a G3 is much more so than even OS X on a G5.
Only if you put on your "OS 9 head" when you're running OS 9.
If you put OS 9 and OS X on the same machine there's simply no
comparison.
Absolutely. Been there, done that, and OS X smokes OS 9 in every
category.
