Comment by asveikau
2 days ago
> A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
It's funny that this exact phrase could have been written about Apple in 1998.
2 days ago
> A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
It's funny that this exact phrase could have been written about Apple in 1998.
Mac OS 8 was new in 1997 and was pretty innovative for user-facing features, if not the underlying operating system. It blew Windows 98 out of the water as far as that went.
I was around at the time.
Mac OS 8 had no preemptive multitasking or meaningful address space protections. A single bad pointer dereference in user mode took down the entire system, and a single busy loop without a yield locked up the entire system.
Both of these were universally admitted to be bad and outdated by technically minded people.
By 1997 they had looked at replacing it with BeOS or NEXTSTEP, and purchased the latter with the goal of replacing Mac OS. The Rhapsody OS, an OS8 style UI with NeXT underneath, had already been started. Before that, they had also attempted and failed to write a next gen classic Mac OS (Copland).
Windows 9x had a lot of problems, but had preemptive multitasking and much better address space isolation. Windows NT 4 Workstation was also a thing at the time and much better. It did take them two more releases to make it into the consumer product.
> It did take them two more releases to make it into the consumer product.
Rather: It took them two more releases until they offered a version that had a price tag (setting the price was a conscious decision by Microsoft) that made a Windows NT derivate also affordable to non-professional users.
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If all you did was look at it, sure. OS 8 was a mess internally with an archaic and badly designed kernel. Windows 98 was much better at multitasking, system recovery, process isolation, etc. And that's saying a lot for the BSOD-ridden mess that that was. Then you had NT, which made both look like children's toys.
And that's just in the Microsoft vs Apple camp. If you left that then Unix, BSD, BeOS, etc also blew it out of the water.
MacOS 8 looked pretty, but it was far from a "good" OS.
OS 8 was designed to run on 68020 without the mmu so you could run on the Mac II and LC. Likewise, MS was trying to keep backwards compatibility with windows 3.11 era software which led to 98 being a compromise, where NT was a much better os. Incidentally, you could pop in an MMU and install A/UX for a os 8 style ui running Unix underneath on those older Macs.
Can't remember 98 having BSODs. Think that was a thing from NT4 on, and upwards.
98 just crashed, or showed something DOSish white on black before rebooting.
edit: Hrrm. According to Wikipedia it did. Still can't remember that, though.
Aye repent! Aye repent!
MacOS 8 was not innovative by 1997 standards. I had it running on my PowerMac 6100/60. It was crash prone and Netscape could easily crash the entire OS, cooperative multitasking, you as an end user still had to manually allocate how much memory an app could have.
None of these were issues on Windows 98.