lproven

It's cute, but why is it a comic? The comic adds nothing to the narrative. It's a tweet-length text history with illustrations, not a comic in the sense of comic strip as medium.

> I just don't think it's reasonable to assert that GGGP... was actually confusing OS 9 with OS X.

I think the clincher is this line:

« MacOS 9 ‘solved’ that by running the classic OS in a single process. »

That is absolutely unambiguously referring to Mac OS X. OS X ran what was even called Classic in a single process: the Blue Box.

MacOS 9 did not do that. It does not have pre-emptive "processes" as such at all and it does not run any older OSes in anything.

It is clear to me that this is not talking about the nanokernel, but if it were talking about the nanokernel it would still be wrong, because that did not appear in MacOS 9. It first appeared in MacOS 7.1.2 which was the first PowerPC release, I think, but that version had no tasks or anything.

But the first version with tasks and asymmetric MP support was in MacOS 8.6.

If you're very uncharitable and put on the wrap around rose tinted goggles, you could say that RISC OS is legacy tech.

Me, after a third of a century fighting modern preemptive OSes models on Unix, I'm over it, but I'm in a minority.

But what I'm talking about here is the UI design. KDE and GNOME are so accreted in layers of legacy junk that the original shape is hard to discern any more.

RISC OS isn't. It's unlike anything else.

Sure, there are lots.

Buy a kit, build your own, e.g. a Harlequin.

http://www.breakintoprogram.co.uk/computers/building-a-harle...

Or an improved clone, e.g. a Sizif 512.

https://github.com/UzixLS/zx-sizif-512

Run it in an FPGA, such as an N-Go.

https://manuferhi.com/c/n-go

Buy an improved clone. For me the best is the Spectrum Next. I own one.

https://www.specnext.com/

Or, buy an Arm/Linux based clone that is highly compatible and has better graphics. This is the easiest and maybe cheapest.

https://retrogames.biz/products/thespectrum/

Fair. It's not a vast difference though.

I would love to play with a hundreds-of-megaHertz class emulated classic 68K Mac on a Raspberry Pi! :-)

The PiStorm delivered this on a lot of classic Amigas.

https://pistorm.github.io/

After I wrote about it in 2024:

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2024/02/12/pistorm-turbo...

... Some people told me that everyone they knew still running classic Amigas had PiStorms in them. It is a cheap upgrade and it's apparently become ubiquitous.

As such, it's odd, but I don't know of fully-working versions for classic Atari ST or 68k Mac hardware.

There are 2 all-FOSS recreated ST OSes I know of now: AFROS, by the team behind ARANYM, and the formerly-commercial MagiX. It shouldn't be that much of an effort to make some bare-metal emulation that can run that on a Raspberry Pi.

Classic MacOS remains proprietary. Some of the comments in this thread hint at why -- that quite a bit of original Finder code at least made it into OS X. Pity. I'd hope that some day Apple might release whatever source it still has.

I'd love a community Copland to play with. :-D

Sadly, I gave the machine away when I moved out of the UK in 2014.

Palm at one point was talking to Symbian about licensing the Symbian kernel for the Arm PalmOS.

I wish that had happened... it might have saved both companies.

I have written about it multiple times, trying to spread awareness.

https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/21/risc-os-is-3...

Search the Reg for "riscos" and you'll find interview with the original core team, looks at the last couple of FOSS releases, the Moonshot effort to go 64-bit and more.

I know about the nanokernel, yes. Without following the links, Gary Davidian (is that spelled right?) did amazing work.

Very very little used it. About the only classic app I ever heard of that could even use pre-emption and background execution were some demanding Photoshop filters. Enough that Daystar Digital built multiprocessor Mac clones just for that alone:

https://lowendmac.com/1995/daystar-genesis-mp/

Within the MacOS kernel it is as coop as ever, and there were no different OSes inside virtual machines. No, Tenon MachTen does not count.

I tried it, about 20Y ago.

It does but not all that much.

I had a Classic II, so a very limited machine.

Not a "road apple" but a "compromised Mac":

https://lowendmac.com/1991/mac-classic-ii/

68030 on a 16-bit bus, max 10MB RAM, no expansion slots so nothing except SCSI.

So, I put 10MB in it, a bigger SCSI HDD, a SCSI Ethernet adaptor on the back, and built both OSes up from scratch.

MacOS 6.0.8 with all the extras: a menu bar clock, hierarchical Apple menu with modular Control Panel, MacTCP, etc.

And MacOS 7.6.1, which doesn't officially support the Classic II as it wants 12MB RAM minimum -- but I had RAMdoubler. OpenTalk, Netscape Navigator 3, Communicator 4, some early Internet Explorer, etc.

Honestly, there was little difference. It was usably quick on 7.6.1 and more stable. So many things that are extras on 6.0.8 are built in to 7.x that it doesn't need that much more disk or memory.

7.x did more, made it easier, and ran well.

But, as an example, on roughly 1MBs ADSL, it took about half an hour to render the top-left quarter of https://slashdot.org/.

Perfectly usable machine, could do email, FTP, Gopher, but forget it on the WWW on of the noughties (2000-2009).

The FOSS version is here:

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

It runs on all Raspberry Pi models up to the 4, and runs really well. As of version 5.30 it supports the Wifi chip in the Pi so it can connect to WLANs.

The owners of the IP are RISC OS Developments Ltd (ROD) and they have an enhanced version -- free on the Pi -- called RISC OS Direct, with an IPv6 stack and a modern WebKit browser:

https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/

They also sell more capable hardware for it.

There is another fork of the OS that is still proprietary. That's owned by 3QD. They used to sell upgrades for real Acorn-compatible kit but there's none of that that isn't vintage now, so it focuses on a software emulation that runs on modern x86 machines:

http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk/index2.htm

That is amazing to read. I never knew. I thought it was Workspace Manager, adapted to feel more Mac-like. There is even a clear line of descent:

1. The Rhapsody developer previews, which are NeXTstep with a menu bar at the top and desktop icons, and a Platinum skin.

2. Mac OS X Server 1.x which has cascading finder windows, an icon view by default, and some other things much like that.

3. Mac OS X 10.0, which I used, or tried to use, as a daily driver, with a broadly Mac-like experience with an Apple menu, but with app names next to it containing global "about" and "quit" options, and so on.

It never did acquire any of the nice stuff that came in with System 7 (e.g. drag-and-drop customisable Apple menu stored in folders in the System Folder) or MacOS 8 (e.g. folder drawers that shrink to tabs).

The counterpoint is RISC OS for GNOME.

GNOME 3 was trying to built a clean modern minimalist desktop without all the clutter inherited from the design of Windows... But all they know is, very visibly, Windows and KDE.

RISC OS is that clean legacy free desktop. It's unlike anything else, built from scratch by a team not interested in what the rest of the world was doing.

And it's still alive and still updated and works well on modern hardware. Several separate efforts are building 64-bit replacements today.

You are getting your versions muddled up.

You are describing attributes of the NeXT-based OS X but calling it MacOS 9.

MacOS 9 was the final version of Classic. No preemption, weak virtual memory, weak cooperative multitasking, no virtual machines for anything.

MacOS 9 is the OS that ran inside the Blue Box on Mac OS X for backwards compatibility.

I fervently agree.

I wish that there was some edict from KDE Project management telling everyone working on the Plasma desktop to spend a week in Haiku or something.

The amount of indirect "open a dialog box, click 6 tabs down, then enter a value" stuff in KDE that is a single drag in Haiku drives me mad.

This is not quite correct as I understand it.

32-bit Haiku can run old Be apps, but must be built with ancient GCC.

64-bit Haiku is built with modern GCC but it is not binary compatible with old BeOS.

Bought my first one 3 years ago. It's used occasionally -- I'm not a gamer at all but I have a little kid and she likes it.

It took me a little hunting, so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternating_caps

Found via:

https://wiki.c2.com/?CapitalizationRules

> as if designed for AI

Really? Really?

I am reminded of Douglas Adams:

“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

AI deals with text files because we've spent ~35 years of free Unix designing an OS that works on text files. So it's only a natural fit because we designed the tools that built LLMs on text-based OSes.

If, say, Apple had made Copland work, or the Lisa had some killer app and proved to be a big hit, we'd be working on natively-OOPS OSes built in Smalltalk-like languages where text files were one encoding, a detail about as interesting and influential as Unicode.

So, in other words, you've been using it for a long time and you're used to it. As such it no longer feels difficult. That is perfectly fine and normal, but what you seem not to realise is that the "breeze" part here is you not the OS.

Somethings I have routinely encountered in recent years, reviewing this stuff, are:

[1] When I report something that went wrong, xBSD users are very quick to castigate me, call me a liar, tell me I am incompetent, that things are fake news, etc.

[2] When I bother to chase things down, talk to the developers, etc. then they confirm that what I found was real, correct, and true -- but they never thought anybody would do that stuff.

It shocked the FreeBSD folks that VirtualBox defaults to BIOS firmware in 2025... and it labels UEFI as "experimental". What I said was correct: FreeBSD cannot readily boot from ZFS on MBR on a BIOS system. And no, it is not documented. They didn't think anyone would try, and they didn't know the defaults of the single most common cross-platform FOSS hypervisor.

Similarly, default CUA key bindings like Ctrl+left and Ctrl+right don't work and tend to emit garbage when used on the console. These are absolutely standard CUA defaults for the PC platform, but not in BSD. I don't know what it uses, maybe Vi keystrokes -- I learned that in 1988, hated it then, and never use it if I have a choice -- or Emacs. I refuse to use Emacs. I don't have a Meta key and neither does anyone on the Emacs dev team. Ain't got time for that 1970s nonsense.

My attitude is: run on the PC? Adopt PC standards or GTFO. This upsets BSD folks who think their '70s VAX standards or whatever are perfectly fine.

That's fine. I will continue pointing out the stuff that doesn't work until someone fixes it. I am sure there will be plenty of other stuff that doesn't work. It's not like there's a shortage.

> You wasted a fair bit of people's time trying and failing to get any information out of you about what you had done [1].

Sighs deeply

OK, let me rephrase myself.

Most of the community is friendly and welcoming.

The advice was very well-intentioned but included things like the wrong names for commands and settings because that's how it used to be years ago, wrong port, missing commands, and comments along the lines of "oh, I never use pkgin, I just compile from source."

> Your "irretrievably destroyed" system was always recoverable.

It's a test install on a test box. It contains no data and nothing I need to retrieve. There is absolutely zero point in spending hours resetting permissions, rebuilding account databases, and trying to retrieve a test install.

As I keep saying, and the BSD folks always object... it's like Linux was ~30 years ago. Aside from 4Y working for SUSE, when my desktop and my laptop routinely self-destructed because Btrfs is a half-finished unreliable mess of a FS, I've never seen Linux self-destruct like that in decades.

Resurrecting a Linux box these days tends to mean running `fsck` and maybe reinstalling GRUB.

Just trying to update from 10.0 to 10.1 should not be this risky.

Incidentally, I found this via a comment to one of my articles on Twitter, left in Chinese.

I do hope to try it at some point.

I for one cannot wait for all the botlickers to leave the rest of us behind.

I don't really mind where they go, so long as they go. Maybe a superhuman AGI can take them to Mars, or they can opt to "Pass 'Go', collect $200" and directly transcend.

I'm looking forward to the peace and quiet.

Please please leave me behind.

I see it the other way round.

A Linux user coming to Alpine will be startled how barebones and manual do-it-yourself everything is, but it is still Linux and a quick web-search tells you how to do most things. It's like Arch for grownups.

If they come to NetBSD, they are in for a cold hard dose of culture shock. You have to manually choose to install a package manager, for instance. If you do, when it "installs" things, you then are expected to read the little text files it leaves behind which tell you how to manually finish the job yourself -- something any 21st century Linux user would expect to have been done already. Not here.

It is hard.

Alpine is hard but not as hard. If this can bring Alpine levels of usability to NetBSD, I am here for it.

That, to be fair, was FreeBSD, and the FreeBSD Foundation has spent a lot of money in the last couple of years on improving Wifi, drivers, power management, etc. in what it terms the "laptop project".

Fortunately for the ROTW, there are hundreds of other countries, and the USA is working as hard and as fast as it can to become disunited and tear itself apart.

> NetBSD userland is not?

Honestly, no.

I just reviewed version 11. It's a pain to install, a pain to configure, a pain to add a proper desktop, etc. If you do manage to install a desktop environment, the ones in the NetBSD repos are mostly long out of date.

https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/08/20/netbsd-1...

The community is great. The mailing list tried very hard to help me to install and run CDE.

After 3 days of trying, I gave up. For reference, this was my 2nd or 3rd try.

No, the NetBSD userland is not good, and the docs are not great either. There are an absolute tonne of implicit assumptions of knowledge that newcomers won't have.

An example:

https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-upgrading.html

The recommended way is "boot from install medium, install over the top". Note that the handbook does not actually say this, and goes on to detail an alternative method called "sysupgrade" which looks much like the OpenBSD method and resembles conventional Linux system upgrade methods.

So I tried that. It irretrievably destroyed my only bare metal install.

To forestall an inevitable comment: it's a testbed, so no, I did not have any backups. It contains -- well, contained -- no data at all.

For those who won't notice, this is a gag from the OpenBSD 8.0 release song.

> just plagiarize and flip them

FWIW this is a common human tactic in general. It's called DARVO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO

I note, neutrally, that it is typically a pattern seen in cases of abusive relationships.

Me personally, I see it a lot when confronting anthropogenic global warming deniers. They tend to hysterically shriek at me that I am a conspiracy theorist, science denier, etc. when of course the truth is that climate denialism is a conspiracy theory, as realistic as Flat Earthers and Young Earth Creationists.