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What are old Mac OSs made from? (Previously "Dunno if this...")


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prior to Mac OS X, all Mac OS's are based on the "Classic" platform

 

From Wikipedia:

The "classic" Mac OS is characterized by its total lack of a command line; it is a completely graphical operating system. Heralded for its ease of use, it is also criticized for its singletasking (in early versions) or cooperative multitasking (in later versions), very limited memory management, lack of protected memory, and susceptibility to conflicts among "extensions" that extend the operating system, providing additional functionality (such as networking) or support for a particular device. Some extensions may not work properly together, or work only when loaded in a particular order. Troubleshooting Mac OS extensions can be a time-consuming process of trial and error.

Mac OS originally used the Macintosh File System (MFS), a flat file system with only one kludged level of folders. This was replaced by the Hierarchical File System (HFS), which had a true directory tree. Both file systems are otherwise compatible.

Most file systems used with DOS, Unix, or other operating systems treat a file as simply a sequence of bytes, requiring an application to know which bytes represented what type of information. By contrast, MFS and HFS gave files two different "forks". The data fork contained the same sort of information as other file systems, such as the text of a document or the bitmaps of an image file. The resource fork contained other structured data such as menu definitions, graphics, sounds, or code segments. A file might consist only of resources with an empty data fork, or only a data fork with no resource fork. A text file could contain its text in the data fork and styling information in the resource fork, so that an application which didn't recognize the styling information could still read the raw text. On the other hand, these forks provided a challenge to interoperability with other operating systems; copying a file from a Mac to a non-Mac system would strip it of its resource fork.

The Classic OS is still supported and shipped in addition to OS X with PowerPC (but not Intel) Macs as late as early 2006.

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  • 2 months later...

i can remember there was a problem with mac os classic, because it wasnt really a multi tasking OS. i dont know if it was so only until os 8, but thats one of the reason they removed the floppy drive from macs.

 

also if you had an Apple network the wohle network got slow when you hold the mouse button on one mac...

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i can remember there was a problem with mac os classic, because it wasnt really a multi tasking OS. i dont know if it was so only until os 8, but thats one of the reason they removed the floppy drive from macs.

 

You guys really need to get MacTracker:

 

Cooperative multitasking made its Macintosh debut in March 1985 with a program called Switcher, which allowed the user to launch multiple applications and switch between them. However, many programs and features did not function correctly with Switcher, and it did not come with the operating system, so it had to be acquired from Apple separately. System Software 6 featured a much more seamless approach called MultiFinder. MultiFinder originally debuted with System Software 5 (System file 4.2 / Finder 6.0).

Multitasking under System Software 6 was optional — startup could be set to Finder or MultiFinder. If MultiFinder were selected, the Finder and its functions continued to run when an application was launched. The MultiFinder environment allowed users to see past the windows of running applications to view Finder icons such as the Trash, or the windows of other applications running in the background.

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i can remember there was a problem with mac os classic, because it wasnt really a multi tasking OS. i dont know if it was so only until os 8, but thats one of the reason they removed the floppy drive from macs.

 

also if you had an Apple network the wohle network got slow when you hold the mouse button on one mac...

 

You're either joking or remedial. None of that is true.

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Actually, the first "UNIX" flavor for Apple was A/UX which was around from 88-94 or 95 I believe. I believe it was AT&T System V and BSD4 based. The "classic" operating system (which was obviously not "classic" then) ran on a heavily modified propriety core that had many striking similarities (from a programmers point-of-view) to Pascal. And I'm not joking.

 

The first "Mac" looking GUI was actually not on a Mac though, it was GS/OS which ran on the Apple IIGS. The Apple II systems ran ProDOS, and BASIC was the main programming language, on ROM. GS/OS would boot from a floppy or later in that machine's lifespan, a 20-40MB Hard Drive (SCSI), but the "OS" needed to be launched by BASIC/ProDOS at boot.

 

Nearly everything in the current, and upcoming OS has been in a previous Apple OS at some point or another, just not properly implemented, or too far ahead of its time for the hardware to handle.

 

And yes, the Macs were not multithreaded much at all until version 7, and couldn't manage memory decently until after 8.5.

 

-t

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You're either joking or remedial. None of that is true.

 

Perhaps bliss was talking about this machine. Read the part about the left and right busses. If you were doing something with the mouse (on the ADB port), it could affect the performance of the network, since they were on the same bus, especially if you were actually doing anything else with the machine, such as playing music or accessing the hard drive.

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Perhaps bliss was talking about this machine. Read the part about the left and right busses. If you were doing something with the mouse (on the ADB port), it could affect the performance of the network, since they were on the same bus, especially if you were actually doing anything else with the machine, such as playing music or accessing the hard drive.

 

Well, playing music on a 25MHz processor might slow it down all by itself.

 

Still, even if your own network performance degraded I doubt everyone elses did, as was suggested.

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  • 1 month later...
Actually, the first "UNIX" flavor for Apple was A/UX which was around from 88-94 or 95 I believe. I believe it was AT&T System V and BSD4 based. The "classic" operating system (which was obviously not "classic" then) ran on a heavily modified propriety core that had many striking similarities (from a programmers point-of-view) to Pascal. And I'm not joking.

 

Makes sense. Many Mac applications started their life in Pascal.

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