Fri 08 August 2025

Background and disclaimer

I was a Mac kid. I was lucky to have my own Mac at home (a relatively low-end one, but still) for most of my high school. And like most people, I do look at the past (particularly the retrocomputing past) with pretty strongly rose-tinted glasses.

But I have no rosy tint for Apple today. "Friends, Nerds, Unixmen, I have not come to hagiographize Apple, but to bury them." Apple is a fetid luxury brand, selling $15 earbuds for $150 and $200 laptops for $2,000. More importantly than their naked profiteering, they're a force for evil in the world, staunchly resisting right-to-repair efforts until very recently, and now being a part of fascist, racist, rapist Donald Trump's sycophantic corporate circus. I'm not cool with any of that, and I'm not cool with them.

Nevertheless, I did daily-drive a Macintosh from the late 80s until early 1994, and from early 2008 until 2019. Looking at it from a purely technical viewpoint, I'd like to talk about what I do, and don't miss from those experiences.

Things I Miss: The Classic Era

The versions of the Macintosh OS I used in this era were 6.0.4 to 7.0.1. I probably used earlier versions as well, but I can only remember the versions I had on my own, personal, full-time computer at home, a Macintosh SE with 1 (later expanded to 4) MiB RAM and a 20 MiB hard disk (later expanded with a 105 MiB external SCSI disk). Other than a vague feeling of nostalgia, there isn't a great deal I miss from this relatively primitive era, except...

Monochrome Graphics

The one thing I hated about my computer back then is that it had no color. I got to look at, and play with $6,000 color computers at the University computer store, and I drooled at their 24-bit color. I also drooled at one friend's Amiga, that was (using some impressive hardware hacks) able to display 4096 colors.

But now that 24-bit color is old hat, and 30-bit (commonly called "10-bit*" or "HDR") graphics are on the horizon, I must say that I miss the era of monochrome.

"But you can just convert any picture you want to monochrome in GIMP or whatever!"

This is true, and I have, many times. I'll even occasionally post images in monochrome with Floyd-Steinburg or even Atkinson Dithering, as it both reduces file sizes greatly, and provides a very aesthetic and enjoyable view of the subject. But my point isn't about aesthetics, it's actually about usability and accessibility.

You see, modern designers have gotten very... complacent? I'm not sure that's the right word. They design for themselves, often not taking into consideration the wide gamut of the visual acuity of their users. I often see gray-on-gray text that is very hard to read.

Even if you were Richie Rich with a Mac IIfx and huge 32-bit color monitor in 1989, the software you were using was designed to look good both in color and in monochrome. Text was crisp and readable, and everything was distinguished without the use of color, or shades of gray.

Now, UI is a soup of grays and colors that are all too often very hard to read and distinguish without painstaking eye fatigue.
It need not be so.

* If you're confused at why 10-bits is greater than 24, the reason is that "8-bit," "24-bit," and "32-bit" color refers to the total number of bits per pixel, whereas the modern parlance of "10-bit" refers to the number of bits per channel. Therefore, what we call 10-bit color today would have been called 30, or 40-bit (don't forget the alpha channel!) color back then.

Function/Usability over Form/Aesthetics

I won't belabor this point, because UI Design is a very specialized field, and I'm not qualified to argue the specifics. But in brief, using older software, I get the impression that a lot of decisions were made with deep introspection and debate about the nature and purpose of human-machine interfaces, and modern UIs are... not... as much.

Selah.

Things I Miss: The OS X Era

I used Mac OS X Leopard through High Sierra from early 2008 until 2019. I bought a MacBook 4,1 (classic white plastic version) in 2008, and got a new MacBook Air in 2014. I also daily-drove a 2011 model iMac (aluminum before they got rid of the DVD burner) for a few years until 2019.

Universal Menu Search

This is an oft-overlooked feature of Mac OS X and modern MacOS, and I must say I miss it on Linux: Every single item on the menu bar can be reached through a search box in the Help menu, and it will not only let you find menu items, but it will actually draw a blue arrow to where those items are located. In complex programs like LibreOffice, this is an absolute godsend.

The only desktop I've seen even attempt this feature is Mate, where it seems a bit half-baked. But they are trying. KDE doesn't have it at all. Gnome's answer is to basically not have a menu, or features in general. 😅

Things I Don't Miss: The Classic Era

Instability

The Macintosh System (we didn't generally call it MacOS in the olden days, IIRC) had no memory protection until Mac OS X. Crashes came hard and fast, and 99% of the time, the only solution was a complete reboot. The more system-extending software you used (INITs/Extensions and Control Panels/CDEVs), the more unstable your system became, but even a basic application crash would take down the entire system.

Slow Boot Times

Speaking of reboots, rebooting computers in the 1990s was very slow. Again, depending on how many extensions and such you had, it could take several minutes, or just a handful of seconds.

Mechanical Mice

Ohhhh, man. Ball mice. I do NOT miss those boogers. Speaking of boogers, scraping off the dust-boogers from the rollers of mice at the university is a memory I'd really like to lose. It seemed that nobody knew how to take care of those things, so nearly every time I went to a computer lab, the very first thing I'd have to do was open up the mouse and clean off the rollers. Even the early optical mice that came with the Sun workstations got kinda gummy on the cork pads. I don't remember the last time I had to clean the pads on an optical mouse. Mice are just kinda perfect, now.

The File Metaphor

People may not realize that the classic Macintosh system did not have an application-centric interface like modern OSes. It was completely file-centric. As a matter of fact, if you wanted to open an application, you literally had to find the file and open it.

As in, you double-clicked on your hard disk icon, then probably a folder called something like "Apps" or "Productivity," then something like "Microsoft Word 𝑓" (a folder), then you'd see a few icons, one of which would be an application icon (a sheet of paper with someone holding a pen above it) that said "Microsoft Word." You double clicked on the Microsoft Word application icon, and Microsoft Word would launch.

There was NO application launcher. Not until later versions, in which case you had a super-simplified launcher called AtEase (IIRC), or a very small icon-oriented dock that lived in the corner of the screen.

While I celebrate the non-application-centric past, the purely file-manger-oriented metaphor was really a drag.

Things I Don't Miss: The OS X Era

For this segment, I'm not talking about things I hated about Mac SO X so much as popular things I actually didn't like, or don't like so much anymore.

The Dock

Mac users generally love the dock, especially that incredibly smooth, swoopy magnification mode. It's an incredible tech demo, and looks amazing. When I was a Mac user, I made rigorous use of the dock, and liked it a lot.

When I moved back to Linux full time, I was initially on Gnome, and used the "Dash to Dock" extension, like many other Gnome users. Now that I'm on KDE Plasma (when I'm using a desktop, that is), the default panel is set up to generally resemble and function like a dock.

But I don't use it that way. At the very most, it's a visual indicator to show what application windows are on the current desktop/virtual screen. Why?

Using tiling/tabbed window managers like i3wm and Sway changed the way I work, and I grew to really love launchers like dmenu, rofi, fuzzel, and even KRunner. I find a keyboard-centric workflow (even within KDE Plasma) to be much more productive than the icon-centric system I grew up with.

Universal Menubar

Lots of people love the Universal Menubar (as in, there is a single menubar at the top of the primary screen, rather than a menubar within each window). Some Linux desktops even allow you to replicate it (MATE and KDE Plasma, IIRC). I'm not so enamored with the idea.

In the early days of low-resolution screens, it made a lot of sense to just have one menubar, to save screen space by not repeating the same menu for each window. Now, mouse travel is more of an annoyance than screen space, and I think it makes sense to just put a menu on each window.

Desktop Icons

Desktop Icons are another feature that some people miss on Linux (although some desktops, like Mate and Plasma, have it). I never liked having a desktop littered with icons, but having the desktop icons was a staple of using a GUI for me from the early days until recently.

Like the dock, the desktop icons are something I just gradually grew out of, and now don't use or miss them at all.

Overly Mouse-Driven Interfaces

The first three Macintosh models (128K, 512K/Ke, Plus) didn't even have cursor keys. All insertion carat placement was handled by the mouse. Many things didn't have keyboard shortcuts, and most applications didn't let you customize the ones that they did have (although some, like Microsoft Word, were impressively flexible).

I don't miss that. The mouse was a great innovation in 1968, but I think the Macintosh went too far in requiring it for too many things. One of the things I liked about Windows 3.1 was that you could theoretically use it without a mouse at all.

While Mac OS X isn't as mouse-dominant as classic Macs were, it's still not as keyboard-friendly as most Linux desktops.

Crazy Keyboard Shortcuts

The first three Macintosh models had three modifier keys: Command, Option, and Shift. Starting with the next machines (the SE and II in 1987), the Macintosh also got a Control key, but it was exclusively used for MS-DOS emulation and terminal emulation, and almost no native Macintosh application used the control key.

In MacOS X, you have four modifiers: Command, Option, Control, and Shift, and many keyboard shortcuts use both Command and Control. I found it overly confusing to remember those, and I wish they had avoided Control altogether.

100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 49

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Amiga Computing Humor Non-religious post Polemic Retrocomputing