Yes, they were quite unstable. I didn't say that they were stable; I said that they were easy-to-understand and easy-to-disable, which they were: each extension had a distinct icon displayed at system boot; disabling one was as easy as dragging it to another folder; disabling all was a matter of, IIRC, holding down Command as you booted.
> Windows preferred large windows that contained the entire app UI, and users typically maximized them.
As a Mac user at the time, I much preferred the multi-window mode: it meant that I could customise my desktop as I liked. The Windows single-window mode was terrible, as it meant that I couldn't layer windows properly.
> You saved a JPEG file from Photoshop, and it forever insisted on launching the full Photoshop when you double-clicked on it, instead of your preferred lightweight image viewer.
We considered that a plus at the time: it meant that different files of the same type could be opened up by different apps by default. One could always, IIRC, Save As if one wanted to change the file type — or use ResEdit.
> Windows NT 4 and its next version Windows 2000 were just heads and shoulders above MacOS 8 and 9 in terms of performance, stability and usability.
Stability, probably. Performance, maybe. But usability? Never! That was back when Apple cared about UX.
Windows 9x and maybe OS/2 were far and away the dominant OSes on actual workstations. Macs and even aging Amigas at some creative shops, some more Unix workstations at places where most people could recognize and identify the purpose of (if not actually use) a slide rule. But what I essentially never saw on any desktops was Windows NT. Lack of driver support and inability to run many business applications kept it out of that space.
But NT was the first winOS which supported multi-proc, correct?
NT4 was the first OS I could have my dual 266 intel procs run softimage IIRC
NT4, Adaptec 2940u2w, and mirrored segate cheetah drives.
You had to space them out because a stack of two cheetahs would cook the upper one to death ...
I actually recall that Cheetah problem. :-)
Mac was so set on being different, that they aschewed UX tropes that were natural.. and had to spend ridiculous amounts of resources trying to convince people that their way was the right way, but clearly it was not.
This, IMO, is where the “fanboi” concept evolved.
Brainwashing.
Who cares - in the long term - where the UX and UI elements came from, the point is to make machines immediately accessible to humans creative desires, not to mold workflows to a corporate ego...
So, Apple figured out how to develop products that were managed through the extension of the desire of the user, but they are still struggling with the requirement from Jobs to be “different” - and Ives’ perception of a common user is skewed toward “Ives’ has stated that this is how it should be done” type design, which I find completely ironic given the whole “think different, so long as it’s exactly how I am designing you to think” campaign is a hypocracy that goes up to an 11
The original Mac released in 1984 and was produced through 2000, sixteen years. OSX released in 2000 and is now in its eighteenth year. Whilst each system has seen some evolution over time, the general metaphores and interfaces have remained consistent.
Apple have realised and internalised a core concept of GUIs: change is bad. There is a far higher cost to changing interfaces than can be gained through efficiency, and the retraining and unlearning costs are exceedingly high relative to benefits.
This is a message apparently lost on Microsoft and most of the leading Linux desktops.
Mind: I write this as someone who whilst using a Mac presently doesn't much care for the interface. My preferred desktop remains WindowMaker (itself based on Aqua's predecessor, NextStep), which has a key advantage of having changed almost not at all in the 20+ years that I've been using it. It's also configurable in ways I find useful, and I schlep around a configuration directory to new systems as needed.
That and a terminal window.
* MS-DOS/Windows 3.1-like * Windows 95-like * Windows 8-like
Windows 8 basically was born and died in a couple of years, to be replaced with Windows 10, which is very much the same basic set of metaphors as Windows 95. There's a start menu, a little dock of pinned icons next to it, a taskbar, a clock and some little icons for what are basically background processes. There's a maximize and minimize and close button on windows. There's a File/Edit/Whatever set of menus. You can right click for context items, many of which are consistent with Windows 95 20+ years ago. That basic system is now something like 21 years old now.
You can maybe argue that Microsoft forgot your message five or so years ago, but they obviously rediscovered it.
Windows 3, 95, NT, and 2K each saw significant changes in where and how major system functionality was presented.
During the same period I was using numerous Unix and Linux platforms (and still do). Those have largely seen far less substantive change at the shell and system level, with a few notable exceptions.
I'm not discussing Linux GUIs, which have been all over the goddamned map. I've used twm, fvwm, fvwm2, VUE, CDE, WindowMaker (my preferred option), GNOME and KDE through multiple generations, Enlightenment, various of the 'boxes (black, open, flux, ...), ion, xfce4, ... And those are the ones I've trialed to some significant extent. I've at least fired up and looked at virtually all the options mentioned on the XWinMan page: http://www.xwinman.org/
There are several fairly central components which have changed fairly markedly. The shift from telnet to ssh, multiple iterations of firewalling, various scripting languages of preference (bash, perl, python, an oddment of others), mailers (sendmail, qmail, anything reasonably sane, mostly exim and/or postfix now), and of course, the whole init replacement clusterfuck.
But the notional concepts of files, filesystem, shell, utilities, pipes, etc., has remained consistent, and even across several utility / server replacements (particularly ssh and mailers), command-level compatibility has been preserved to a remarkable extent with previous options (e.g., rsh and sendmail syntax).
If Microsoft can only be relied on for five-year stints of "having learnt this lesson" then they have not learnt this lesson.
This includes a hell of a lot of systems configuration tools. The corrective force on failure to adhere to this norm is strong.
Hell, you can today configure Windows 10 to behave much like 8.1. The one thing i see some people miss with the 8.1 to 10 transition is the charm bar. In particular that it gave easy access to printing and such.
While Apple may retain the UI across time, they are more than willing to change APIs etc on a whim.
MS on the other hand may change the UI (though outside of 8.x, the core layout and behavior has remained much the same, and even 8.x could to a large degree behave like the older UI) but they bend over backwards to maintain APIs across time.
Microsoft was always more vendor / ISV / VAR oriented, and stable APIs matter there.
Being able to get a new computer but install from the same software library (i can hear the _sec people getting hissy already) as was used on the old one makes people more likely to pick the same "platform" over time.
The counter is that Apple caters to a smaller software development community, though several of the tools also see extensive use and support (particularly photoshop). But there's a heck of a lot fundamental functionality on Apple's platforms that you can get without relying on third-party software, or at least, third-party proprietary software. Given the dynamics of proprietary software markets, particularly toward adware, nagware, and malware, this seems a possibly positive development.
(I've made much the same observation in recent years about the Android marketplace, which I see as a growing cesspit, and of the Windows application space, particularly at the peak of its crapware / spyware / adware period in the decade of the 2000s.)
Linux solves the software compatibility problem by allowing for recompiling of software for which the source is freely available, for the most part. This isn't a perfect solution, and there are complex systems which tend to not be particularly forward-compatible. One possible argument is that such complex systems are themselves inherently problematic and ought perhaps be avoided. You may not agree with the argument, but I'd expect you'd admit to its existence.
Microsoft was addressing a different space, and one in which there was a massive focus on desktop-distributed client software, much of it aimed at very specific business applications. This is a major application area for computers, though it's also one that's shifted significantly toward client-server Web-based solutions (or app-based, now). Which presents its own set of features and limitations.
And again, all this is what I was hinting at earlier with noting that you'd presented a very interesting point. I'll be thinking about this for a while.
That's Macintosh all over. "You're holding it wrong" is not a new failing of Apple, nor is it exclusively post-Jobs.
Jobs was just better at convincing people that, yes, they were holding it wrong.
Extensions could easily bring down the entire system because there was no memory protection. Full OS crashes (what modern macOS calls kernel panics) were a daily occurrence for the typical Mac-using professional who ran complex software.
The window system was often difficult to understand because apps tended to use a plethora of little panel windows that could overlap even from different apps. Windows preferred large windows that contained the entire app UI, and users typically maximized them. The Windows 95 Task Bar was much better for actually keeping track of your tasks than whatever the MacOS 8 thing was.
File extensions were always a hack, but one that Apple adopted too for Mac OS X. The days of Mac's file-specific associations were numbered when the Internet happened, because Unix servers wouldn't keep track of that metadata, so you needed file extensions anyway.
Besides, the file-specific associations were often super annoying because they were created by the editor app even for exported files. You saved a JPEG file from Photoshop, and it forever insisted on launching the full Photoshop when you double-clicked on it, instead of your preferred lightweight image viewer. This would happen even when you copied the file to someone else because the association was in the file metadata.
Windows NT 4 and its next version Windows 2000 were just heads and shoulders above MacOS 8 and 9 in terms of performance, stability and usability.
(And programming in Mac OS 8... Ugh. No memory protection, no multitasking, APIs originally designed in Pascal.)