How many personal computers in 1994 still had the ability to boot after the OS was trashed?
In the DOS/Windows world, you'd insert the boot floppy you made and boot from that in order to undo changes that prevented the main system from booting, but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable.
> How many personal computers in 1994 still had the ability to boot after the OS was trashed?
Every Acorn Archimedes computer, since the entire OS (not just a rescue system, a full, graphical OS) booted in a couple of seconds entirely from ROM. It's the only computer I know of with a fully featured graphical OS that was fully functional without any kind of disk.
I believe many Atari ST models had their graphical OS (TOS/GEM) on ROM. The Archimedes with RISC OS felt revolutionary at the time, however. Several of the graphical desktop programs were written in BBC Basic and you could look at the source.
The closest I saw to this was my Dads Tandy laptop in late 80s that had no hard drive - the OS (DOS) was ROM and the file system was RAM, you could boot up with no discs inserted. In retrospect it was a great computer for me to learn on since I could poke around freely and there was no chance of bricking it.
I remember a thing called menuetos, written mostly in assembly and fitting a single floppy drive while still having a decent ui and some drivers. You could probably fit that in a normal bios chip and/or boot it as a efi payload.
Imo it’s mostly about nobody having tried that yet (at least afaik).
I’ve been waiting for someone to do something more interesting with EFI. It’s extremely capable and could easily host a minimal recovery environment that would be invaluable in many situations, particularly on laptops which might be out in the field away from recovery tools when things break.
No. The equivalent to firmware was in ROM in later models, but the OS was loaded from disk.
It was unusually complete firmware, comparable to the Mac Toolbox, but you could not use the computer in any way without an OS that had to be soft-loaded.
The Archimedes was a full multitasking GUI OS, in ROM. No disk of any form needed. It could join a network and load apps and save files to a server with no local storage media even installed in the workstation.
This is why Oracle used it as the basis for the original network computer:
The Pace company, better known for modems and set-top boxes, ended up owning a fork of RISC OS for this purpose. That fork is what led to the current fully-32-bit version and then, later, to the FOSS release.
The Amiga 1000 (that came before the 500) didn't have the "kickstart" in ROM, so you needed a kickstart disk for the 1000.
The Amiga 500 and later had the kickstart in ROM and many of us would mod our Amiga 500 so that we could use a switch to select between kickstart 1.2 or 1.3.
But even on the Amiga 500, that still wasn't a UI from ROM: you had to use the "workbench" disk to get the UI.
Not from the very beginning. The earliest live boot CD I remember is "DemoLinux". Back then that was still a major hack. Now Fedora, at least, boots into live mode to run the installer from the full GUI.
Yggdrasil Plug-and-Play Linux supported running off the CD as far back as 1993, but you needed a boot floppy because computers couldn't boot from CD at that point. When you installed it to your hard drive, most of the included software stayed on the CD, meaning that you had ~500 MB of software and source code permanently available without taking up hard drive space. This was useful in an era when 200 MB and smaller hard drives were common. After installing, you could pick and choose which system components you wanted to move from the CD to the hard drive.
Ah you mean the OS is in the ROM, soldered to the motherboard, maybe not even writeable. Sure, I don't know about that, maybe your example is the only one
Booting from ROM was pretty common back in the day. A lot of machines from the "golden age of micros" (late 1970s - early 1980s) would boot right up into a BASIC prompt. A full graphical interface was something else though! That's really cool!
> but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable.
Depending on your machines, we may have looped back to that point in the form of
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40914761 - 20MB in one file is all it takes to carry around a UEFI bootable Linux system on every USB drive you own.
Why in the world am I getting downvoted for this? For the Claude summary? I also checked the repository manually, and agree with the summary. One of the prime use cases for LLMs is summarization.
It would be extremely cool if this weren't the case, but current LLMs are just very bad at summarization. As evidenced by the slop you posted being a bad summary!
Yeah the first thing I did after a fresh windows install was to create boot disk, and have 2-3 copies just in case because floppy disks were notoriously unreliable.
Oh wow yes, you made me remember I didn't much like that. Money was tight as a teenager and it always hurt a little to "spend" floppy disks on multiple copies.
A little bit earlier, but I remember dumpster diving behind a big company in the early 80's and finding a couple boxes of probably about 200 blank floppies. Couldn't believe my score! I pretty quickly found out about half of them were bad, which was probably why they were in the dumpster. But still there were plenty of discs for Apple II games copied from all my friends.
Coming back to the parent claim. You could never trash the Amiga OS because as long as you had workbenchs disks you could reboot the OS just fine and the ROMs were always safe.
Almost all 1980s computers booted the OS from floppy. If they had a hard disk at all, then if you trashed the OS on the hard disk, you could reinstall from floppy.
This was true of Amigas, Unix machines, Commodore 900 series, and all IBM PC-compatibles whatever they were running: PC DOS, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, Windows, OS/2.
You can't boot an Amiga into a full usable OS without at least 1 floppy disk, which means a floppy drive to read that disk.
Same for any PC compatible. Same for any Unix machine.
The point being that you could boot an Acorn RISC OS computer into the full unrestricted multitasking GUI, with networking, without any disks. Without even
having a floppy drive, or a hard disk, or _any disk drives of any kind_. You could physically remove the drives and configure the machine to know it had none fitted, and it would boot and run apps from its built-in ROM drive.
You can do that on an Atari ST as well, with a lot of errors you need to cancel, but there was no multitasking and no network access so the result could not do much. No way to load apps, no way to attach to a machine to load any.
On an Acorn Archimedes with no drives, you could boot, run the text editor, write a letter, open the paint or line-art apps, draw pictures, open the music editor, write a tune, save all those files onto a fileserver, print them out, and then cleanly shut down.
No hard disk. No floppies. No floppy drive. Entire OS and GUI and core apps, in ROM.
How many computers in 2025 allow you to use your external USB keyboard numpad as arrows? Not an Apple, at least not without convoluted system-level configurations or third-party software. Apple gets many things right but can still be infuriating on the simple stuff.
Why would you expect it to do that? There is nothing on the keys to suggest they should have that feature and the actual arrow keys are about 5cm away.
Not sure how it is in Mac world, but in PC world the numeric keys have arrows (8 is up, 2 is down, 4 left, 6 right), and you can activate them by pressing NumLock. It has been this way since at least 90s. Never used them myself, but I guess if you are used to them and they no longer work it can be infuriating. E.g. like VSCode removing Insert key functionality (always inserts, never overrides the text).
There are no arrow on the numeric island an Apple keyboard, nor is there a numlock key. There is a 'clear' key on the numeric island in the location where a PC would have a numlock key (it has the function of the 'AC' key on a calculator and functions as such in the calculator app).
I am typing this on a 1987 Apple keyboard on a PC and this numpad functionality works. What I don't know is, is it because of Windows, or because of the ADB to USB adapter?
The numpad keys do have their own scan codes separate from that of the main rows.
Back in 1987, Apple sold a PC compatibility card, and the Extended Keyboard was designed to work with that. So I assume it always sent the correct scan codes.
That old MacOS UI looks so appealing. I want to use it and I don't care that it's low-res, black and white. I love that they created what seems like a texture in the window titlebars, I assume to give them physical-like presence and to encourage grabbing them.
I don't want to use my computer's UI; it's just necessary and slightly annoying in its aesthetics and cognitive load.
> texture in the window titlebars, I assume to give them physical-like presence and to encourage grabbing them.
That's called a visual affordance. Once upon a time it was canon that interactive UI items had visual affordance -- you could tell that you could interact with them at a glance, just by looking at them.
In MacOS There's an accessibility setting in System Settings > Accessibility > Display called "Differentiate without colour" that adds some extra affordances like on and off icons in the switches. I forget what else, but I always have it on because it makes things even more obvious in a way that it feels like OS programmers used to take more seriously in an era before the flat design idiocy.
There’s another option for high contrast that makes things look more like old Macs. I think it looks better, regardless of accessibility considerations.
I feel the same way. I have an original iPhone that I still use as a music player, and the old UI still looks insanely great compared to the flat, gray expanse we find ourselves in today. System 7 was pretty solid design work as well. Imagine what our desktops would look like if they had gotten Copeland running.
Ah ok. I also only booted it up and checked old memories but nothing more. I did a simple network setup and wanted to know if the internet works (well with the security restrictions it has)
I'd argue it was a reaction to "rich Corinthian leather", yellow-lined notepads and green baize, which only appeared in Lion and Mountain Lion. The more subtle use of skeuomorphic elements (aqua buttons, brushed aluminum, etc.) was collateral damage.
I was on the team that implemented all those things. We hated it. We did it because Steve had an epiphany while flying back from Hawaii on his jet that the seats were like, really nice. He wrote an email that all the apps needed to be like that. And thus we spent a year doing it.
not surprised. this anecdote is some good evidence for how i felt at the time: apple took a good thing way too far and as a result now we have to suffer through the google / windows flat UIs everywhere which are just plane lazy
If you use MacOS, you can get some of that black-and-white feeling back by going into System Settings > Accessibility > Display, scroll down to Colour Filters, turn it on, change Filter type to Greyscale and set Intensity to High. I do this on my personal computer to try and make it less compulsive at weekends, to remind me that it's just a tool, and that there are other interesting things to do with my time. I'm probably getting old, but I also find this more restful to look at. Sometimes you need the colours because apps rely on it: although I can't remember how I did it now you can add an Accessibility Shortcuts item to the menubar which allows you to turn the Colour Filters on and off with a click, drag and release on Colour Filters.
I also use that filter on iOS to tone down the colours by setting the Intensity of the same filter at a much lower level - I find the standard colours really garish when I turn them back on (e.g. when looking at photos). On iOS you can set a three-click shortcut on the action button to turn that on and off.
Edit: I forgot, there's also an "Increase contrast" setting there which makes the UI even closer to the older MacOS look, but although it does give different areas more differentiation I find it a bit too harsh - I think because it's just flat black and white, whereas the older systems used more greyscale textures.
The texture in the title bars was definitely there as a visual cue, as much as to alert the user to the fact that the window beneath it was active. The title bars on inactive windows were unfilled.
I love people like this who are so dedicated to understanding things from our past. Really, it makes no difference to the world if this is every fully understood or not. But it's their passion, and it shows. And I think that's wonderful.
Every time I hear mention of Connor and Connor Peripherals Inc. I get the shivers. Not this has much to do with Apple's hidden recovery partition other than Connor drives are mentioned here.
Never have I experienced worse drives than those made by Connor Peripherals Inc. I've had them fail on many occasions—they'd fail if so much as to look at them.
I recall one instance where I'd spent hours setting up my computer and all was OK only to drop a small manual onto the table from a few inches height. The next thing that happened was the OS chucked an 'Abort, Retry or Ignore' message. Drive was completely dead.
Same here. Thirty years later, I'm still reeling from the loss of an inestimable trove of software created between the late Seventies and the early Nineties (many now-defunct operating systems, extremely rare programs and so on). All that on a 800MB Conner drive, which I had installed as a secondary (non-boot) drive in my system. The drive died on me with absolutely no warning signs, something that was unusual even for that period of time - it simply disappeared from the OS/BIOS, less that a year after I bought it.
"The drive died on me with absolutely no warning signs,…"
Except for the drive killed by the dropped manual, that's essentially what happened to the others—about a dozen or so. They just stopped working, either they wouldn't start on boot or they'd just become inaccessible during operation. I wasn't alone, others I know had the same issues. They were an unmitigated disaster, it beats me how they ever made it to market. (All were replaced under warranty with other brands.) BTW, I never lost any data as I used Tandberg QIC tape streamers for backups.
Incidentally, the drive killed by the manual was only 20MB. If I recall correctly the largest Connor drive I used was only 40MB.
Did you ever attempt to recover the data from that drive by way of a data recovery service or such?
Do you still have the drive? You might be able to recover the content. The level of difficulty might be anything from "plug it into an adapter and make an image with dd" to "find a working drive of the same type and start swapping parts other than the platters" though.
No, I don't have it anymore. I kept it around for 3 or 4 years, trying various methods to revive it, then threw it away when I took a job in New Zealand, hoping to move there for good. Well, that didn't work out and I came back after a few years, but the drive (and many other things) were lost in the process.
Also: the drive was absolutely dead, it wouldn't power up. I even tried to change its controller - I took it off another Conner drive, installed it on the deceased one - and nothing happened. On that occasion I realized that, even though they were the same model/capacity, Conner had used different electronics for different batches.
Ironically, the drive was built like a tank: never again I saw a hard-drive with a casing that thick (looked like cast iron).
That’s what that was? I noticed it while looking through the Apple HD SC Setup code and assumed it had something to do with A/UX, but had no idea. Good to know!
I remember using these CD caddy Performas in elementary school when they were relatively new and being somewhat confused by the why, as we had a tray loading audio CD player in our living room at the time.
It was a misguided idea, and was quickly abandoned because obviously a CD-ROM is just as likely to be scratched when moving it from jewel box to caddy, as when moving it from jewel box into tray.
The reason it was supposed to be more protective was that the industry expected everybody to buy a separate caddy for each CD-ROM they owned, so each CD would only ever be transferred once, and thus be scratched less. But caddies were expensive so obviously nobody ever did that (I'm not sure it even ever occurred to most people), and manufacturers quickly switched to trays.
Funny I watched a video from „this does not compute“ where he worked on a rare Apple prototype. The drive had the very same issue and he fixed it the same way.
I'm not a classic Mac OS expert, but the way it works seems extremely convoluted and un-Apple-like. Instead of copying the mini system folder to the desktop and asking the user to copy the files to the real system folder, couldn't they just automatically copy the files to the system folder?
I definitely support the author's "make an image of the hard drive as soon as you buy vintage hardware".
There have been some amazing finds that way, especially game prototypes. Often, the data has been marked deleted and every time the system is used, it's more likely to be overwritten.
It's also a good idea because old drives could stop working at any time, and unless someone else has shared an image from the same device, there may not be a good way to use it again without copying that drive image to a newer replacement.
I remember an old rackmount computer at my first job, where you had a row of switches on the front, and you'd have to clock in the boot sequence, each time.
If I were a Paul Allen-tier billionaire, I’d endow university chairs in ‘Computer Archaeology’ specifically for people doing this kind of meticulous digging. It’s fantastic work, clarifying how operating systems evolved—though arguably just a bit more practical than crawling around ancient Greek ruins searching for fragments of the past.
How many personal computers in 1994 still had the ability to boot after the OS was trashed?
In the DOS/Windows world, you'd insert the boot floppy you made and boot from that in order to undo changes that prevented the main system from booting, but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable.
> How many personal computers in 1994 still had the ability to boot after the OS was trashed?
Every Acorn Archimedes computer, since the entire OS (not just a rescue system, a full, graphical OS) booted in a couple of seconds entirely from ROM. It's the only computer I know of with a fully featured graphical OS that was fully functional without any kind of disk.
I believe many Atari ST models had their graphical OS (TOS/GEM) on ROM. The Archimedes with RISC OS felt revolutionary at the time, however. Several of the graphical desktop programs were written in BBC Basic and you could look at the source.
The Macintosh Classic (the model named that) had a System 6.0.3 image in ROM. You had to hold down Cmd-Option X-O to get it to boot from that.
The closest I saw to this was my Dads Tandy laptop in late 80s that had no hard drive - the OS (DOS) was ROM and the file system was RAM, you could boot up with no discs inserted. In retrospect it was a great computer for me to learn on since I could poke around freely and there was no chance of bricking it.
You could probably still do this.
I remember a thing called menuetos, written mostly in assembly and fitting a single floppy drive while still having a decent ui and some drivers. You could probably fit that in a normal bios chip and/or boot it as a efi payload.
Imo it’s mostly about nobody having tried that yet (at least afaik).
I’ve been waiting for someone to do something more interesting with EFI. It’s extremely capable and could easily host a minimal recovery environment that would be invaluable in many situations, particularly on laptops which might be out in the field away from recovery tools when things break.
I’ve been waiting for someone to do something more interesting with EFI
The recovery capabilities you mention have existed before EFI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splashtop_OS
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splashtop_OS :
> Splashtop can work with a 512 MB flash memory embedded on the PC motherboard.
Not really a regular bios chip though :)
The IBM PS/1 model 2011 had PC-DOS + plus a limited GUI in ROM.
Amiga was close to it, wasn’t it?
No. The equivalent to firmware was in ROM in later models, but the OS was loaded from disk.
It was unusually complete firmware, comparable to the Mac Toolbox, but you could not use the computer in any way without an OS that had to be soft-loaded.
The Archimedes was a full multitasking GUI OS, in ROM. No disk of any form needed. It could join a network and load apps and save files to a server with no local storage media even installed in the workstation.
This is why Oracle used it as the basis for the original network computer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Network_Computer
The Pace company, better known for modems and set-top boxes, ended up owning a fork of RISC OS for this purpose. That fork is what led to the current fully-32-bit version and then, later, to the FOSS release.
The Amiga 1000 (that came before the 500) didn't have the "kickstart" in ROM, so you needed a kickstart disk for the 1000.
The Amiga 500 and later had the kickstart in ROM and many of us would mod our Amiga 500 so that we could use a switch to select between kickstart 1.2 or 1.3.
But even on the Amiga 500, that still wasn't a UI from ROM: you had to use the "workbench" disk to get the UI.
Every popular OS has live boot, including Windows now. Linux has had it since the very beginning
Archimedes came out in 1987, though. And Linux has never booted a full GUI OS from ROM built into the computer. Parent is not talking about CD-ROM.
Not from the very beginning. The earliest live boot CD I remember is "DemoLinux". Back then that was still a major hack. Now Fedora, at least, boots into live mode to run the installer from the full GUI.
Yggdrasil Plug-and-Play Linux supported running off the CD as far back as 1993, but you needed a boot floppy because computers couldn't boot from CD at that point. When you installed it to your hard drive, most of the included software stayed on the CD, meaning that you had ~500 MB of software and source code permanently available without taking up hard drive space. This was useful in an era when 200 MB and smaller hard drives were common. After installing, you could pick and choose which system components you wanted to move from the CD to the hard drive.
Yes. But from a disk.
Ah you mean the OS is in the ROM, soldered to the motherboard, maybe not even writeable. Sure, I don't know about that, maybe your example is the only one
Booting from ROM was pretty common back in the day. A lot of machines from the "golden age of micros" (late 1970s - early 1980s) would boot right up into a BASIC prompt. A full graphical interface was something else though! That's really cool!
> but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable.
Depending on your machines, we may have looped back to that point in the form of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40914761 - 20MB in one file is all it takes to carry around a UEFI bootable Linux system on every USB drive you own.
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You're not providing any value in pasting output from an LLM. You're just adding noise to your signal.
Why in the world am I getting downvoted for this? For the Claude summary? I also checked the repository manually, and agree with the summary. One of the prime use cases for LLMs is summarization.
No one cares. If I wanted to know what an LLM thinks, I'd ask it myself.
Your comment should not be flagged. It is useful info. I wrote the Reg article and I submitted the link, and I didn't know about the update project.
However, I do agree with the other commenters -- do not paste LLM bot output. Your own summary was better.
Didn’t downvote you, but I don’t see any value in posting a copy/paste from Claude.
You’re not saving me any meaningful time or doing something I couldn’t. It is not worth a post IMO
The main point of the post is to say that it is getting maintained in a fork now, to some degree. It's still a very rudimentary implementation though.
This summary was much better (shorter and to the point) than Claude’s ;)
I feel the same way about people who post a link to/paragraph from Wikipedia, but people don't reflexively downvote those.
Please don't litter HN with LLM generated slop. The value of HN lies in the human discussion, everyone here is capable of asking an LLM about it.
Maybe you should ask an LLM?
It would be extremely cool if this weren't the case, but current LLMs are just very bad at summarization. As evidenced by the slop you posted being a bad summary!
Yeah the first thing I did after a fresh windows install was to create boot disk, and have 2-3 copies just in case because floppy disks were notoriously unreliable.
Oh wow yes, you made me remember I didn't much like that. Money was tight as a teenager and it always hurt a little to "spend" floppy disks on multiple copies.
A little bit earlier, but I remember dumpster diving behind a big company in the early 80's and finding a couple boxes of probably about 200 blank floppies. Couldn't believe my score! I pretty quickly found out about half of them were bad, which was probably why they were in the dumpster. But still there were plenty of discs for Apple II games copied from all my friends.
That's what all those commercial demo disks were for, or AOL disks for those in regions where that was a thing.
> in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable.
In that era, virus made all your floppies bootable for you.
> but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell)
The files still had to be in the correct sectors. Hence the use of the SYS command to perform this.
Pretty sure Packard Bell and Compaq had recovery partitions long before Apple "borrowed" the idea.
IBM too.
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You don't have to do anything on HN. It's a message board, not Nature, and he's not defending his PhD thesis.
You're right, I should just lie and insist it's the truth like most people here, then double down when questioned.
Unfortunately my time machine is out of plutonium at the moment, so I'm unable to verify these obscure, useless facts from 33 years ago.
You should really upgrade to a Mr Fusion
An equivalent feature would need to boot a hidden backup version of Windows 3.1.
The Amiga could. The OS was in ROM.
Kickstart was in ROM (except for the A1000, where you loaded it from floppy). Workbench loaded from secondary storage.
This is not true, as I explained in detail upthread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378500
It never was true. I own one of the things.
Coming back to the parent claim. You could never trash the Amiga OS because as long as you had workbenchs disks you could reboot the OS just fine and the ROMs were always safe.
You're still missing the point.
Almost all 1980s computers booted the OS from floppy. If they had a hard disk at all, then if you trashed the OS on the hard disk, you could reinstall from floppy.
This was true of Amigas, Unix machines, Commodore 900 series, and all IBM PC-compatibles whatever they were running: PC DOS, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, Windows, OS/2.
You can't boot an Amiga into a full usable OS without at least 1 floppy disk, which means a floppy drive to read that disk.
Same for any PC compatible. Same for any Unix machine.
The point being that you could boot an Acorn RISC OS computer into the full unrestricted multitasking GUI, with networking, without any disks. Without even having a floppy drive, or a hard disk, or _any disk drives of any kind_. You could physically remove the drives and configure the machine to know it had none fitted, and it would boot and run apps from its built-in ROM drive.
You can do that on an Atari ST as well, with a lot of errors you need to cancel, but there was no multitasking and no network access so the result could not do much. No way to load apps, no way to attach to a machine to load any.
On an Acorn Archimedes with no drives, you could boot, run the text editor, write a letter, open the paint or line-art apps, draw pictures, open the music editor, write a tune, save all those files onto a fileserver, print them out, and then cleanly shut down.
No hard disk. No floppies. No floppy drive. Entire OS and GUI and core apps, in ROM.
How many computers in 2025 allow you to use your external USB keyboard numpad as arrows? Not an Apple, at least not without convoluted system-level configurations or third-party software. Apple gets many things right but can still be infuriating on the simple stuff.
Why would you expect it to do that? There is nothing on the keys to suggest they should have that feature and the actual arrow keys are about 5cm away.
There are arrows on the numeric keys on most old and modern US keyboards with numpads. That's why I expect them to do that.
Not sure how it is in Mac world, but in PC world the numeric keys have arrows (8 is up, 2 is down, 4 left, 6 right), and you can activate them by pressing NumLock. It has been this way since at least 90s. Never used them myself, but I guess if you are used to them and they no longer work it can be infuriating. E.g. like VSCode removing Insert key functionality (always inserts, never overrides the text).
There are no arrow on the numeric island an Apple keyboard, nor is there a numlock key. There is a 'clear' key on the numeric island in the location where a PC would have a numlock key (it has the function of the 'AC' key on a calculator and functions as such in the calculator app).
I am typing this on a 1987 Apple keyboard on a PC and this numpad functionality works. What I don't know is, is it because of Windows, or because of the ADB to USB adapter?
The numpad keys do have their own scan codes separate from that of the main rows.
Back in 1987, Apple sold a PC compatibility card, and the Extended Keyboard was designed to work with that. So I assume it always sent the correct scan codes.
That old MacOS UI looks so appealing. I want to use it and I don't care that it's low-res, black and white. I love that they created what seems like a texture in the window titlebars, I assume to give them physical-like presence and to encourage grabbing them.
I don't want to use my computer's UI; it's just necessary and slightly annoying in its aesthetics and cognitive load.
> texture in the window titlebars, I assume to give them physical-like presence and to encourage grabbing them.
That's called a visual affordance. Once upon a time it was canon that interactive UI items had visual affordance -- you could tell that you could interact with them at a glance, just by looking at them.
In MacOS There's an accessibility setting in System Settings > Accessibility > Display called "Differentiate without colour" that adds some extra affordances like on and off icons in the switches. I forget what else, but I always have it on because it makes things even more obvious in a way that it feels like OS programmers used to take more seriously in an era before the flat design idiocy.
There’s another option for high contrast that makes things look more like old Macs. I think it looks better, regardless of accessibility considerations.
I feel the same way. I have an original iPhone that I still use as a music player, and the old UI still looks insanely great compared to the flat, gray expanse we find ourselves in today. System 7 was pretty solid design work as well. Imagine what our desktops would look like if they had gotten Copeland running.
UTM (the Virtualization and Emulation software for Mac) has a system9 image on their gallery which is easy to install. It also looks great.
But to do anything more interesting than boot up, it quickly becomes cumbersome and non functional.
I'd love to use OS9 in UTM daily, but it's really just a tech demo.
Ah ok. I also only booted it up and checked old memories but nothing more. I did a simple network setup and wanted to know if the internet works (well with the security restrictions it has)
I will forever miss skeuomorphism.
I suspect it will return as we realize newer generations of people don’t really know how to use anything? Maybe that’s more of a hope than anything :)
I suspect newer generations will instead try to change the reality so that it resembles the digital world.
It’s been happening for some time. Look at how many touchscreens get used on things that shouldn’t have them.
same. I really thought the community made a mistake entirely rejecting the concept in the past 10+ years
I'd argue it was a reaction to "rich Corinthian leather", yellow-lined notepads and green baize, which only appeared in Lion and Mountain Lion. The more subtle use of skeuomorphic elements (aqua buttons, brushed aluminum, etc.) was collateral damage.
I was on the team that implemented all those things. We hated it. We did it because Steve had an epiphany while flying back from Hawaii on his jet that the seats were like, really nice. He wrote an email that all the apps needed to be like that. And thus we spent a year doing it.
not surprised. this anecdote is some good evidence for how i felt at the time: apple took a good thing way too far and as a result now we have to suffer through the google / windows flat UIs everywhere which are just plane lazy
If you use MacOS, you can get some of that black-and-white feeling back by going into System Settings > Accessibility > Display, scroll down to Colour Filters, turn it on, change Filter type to Greyscale and set Intensity to High. I do this on my personal computer to try and make it less compulsive at weekends, to remind me that it's just a tool, and that there are other interesting things to do with my time. I'm probably getting old, but I also find this more restful to look at. Sometimes you need the colours because apps rely on it: although I can't remember how I did it now you can add an Accessibility Shortcuts item to the menubar which allows you to turn the Colour Filters on and off with a click, drag and release on Colour Filters.
I also use that filter on iOS to tone down the colours by setting the Intensity of the same filter at a much lower level - I find the standard colours really garish when I turn them back on (e.g. when looking at photos). On iOS you can set a three-click shortcut on the action button to turn that on and off.
Edit: I forgot, there's also an "Increase contrast" setting there which makes the UI even closer to the older MacOS look, but although it does give different areas more differentiation I find it a bit too harsh - I think because it's just flat black and white, whereas the older systems used more greyscale textures.
I do this with windows 10 for a tablet with a detachable keyboard to make it like an eink display.
I think the "finder" in this needs to become a fully-fledged standalone project:
https://github.com/arthurchoung/HOTDOG
The texture in the title bars was definitely there as a visual cue, as much as to alert the user to the fact that the window beneath it was active. The title bars on inactive windows were unfilled.
I love people like this who are so dedicated to understanding things from our past. Really, it makes no difference to the world if this is every fully understood or not. But it's their passion, and it shows. And I think that's wonderful.
Every time I hear mention of Connor and Connor Peripherals Inc. I get the shivers. Not this has much to do with Apple's hidden recovery partition other than Connor drives are mentioned here.
Never have I experienced worse drives than those made by Connor Peripherals Inc. I've had them fail on many occasions—they'd fail if so much as to look at them.
I recall one instance where I'd spent hours setting up my computer and all was OK only to drop a small manual onto the table from a few inches height. The next thing that happened was the OS chucked an 'Abort, Retry or Ignore' message. Drive was completely dead.
Same here. Thirty years later, I'm still reeling from the loss of an inestimable trove of software created between the late Seventies and the early Nineties (many now-defunct operating systems, extremely rare programs and so on). All that on a 800MB Conner drive, which I had installed as a secondary (non-boot) drive in my system. The drive died on me with absolutely no warning signs, something that was unusual even for that period of time - it simply disappeared from the OS/BIOS, less that a year after I bought it.
"The drive died on me with absolutely no warning signs,…"
Except for the drive killed by the dropped manual, that's essentially what happened to the others—about a dozen or so. They just stopped working, either they wouldn't start on boot or they'd just become inaccessible during operation. I wasn't alone, others I know had the same issues. They were an unmitigated disaster, it beats me how they ever made it to market. (All were replaced under warranty with other brands.) BTW, I never lost any data as I used Tandberg QIC tape streamers for backups.
Incidentally, the drive killed by the manual was only 20MB. If I recall correctly the largest Connor drive I used was only 40MB.
Did you ever attempt to recover the data from that drive by way of a data recovery service or such?
Do you still have the drive? You might be able to recover the content. The level of difficulty might be anything from "plug it into an adapter and make an image with dd" to "find a working drive of the same type and start swapping parts other than the platters" though.
No, I don't have it anymore. I kept it around for 3 or 4 years, trying various methods to revive it, then threw it away when I took a job in New Zealand, hoping to move there for good. Well, that didn't work out and I came back after a few years, but the drive (and many other things) were lost in the process.
Also: the drive was absolutely dead, it wouldn't power up. I even tried to change its controller - I took it off another Conner drive, installed it on the deceased one - and nothing happened. On that occasion I realized that, even though they were the same model/capacity, Conner had used different electronics for different batches.
Ironically, the drive was built like a tank: never again I saw a hard-drive with a casing that thick (looked like cast iron).
Conner. With an E.
https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Conner_Peripherals
You might be thinking of Terminator ...?
Yeah, thanks. I ought to know by now. It's a double problem, the editor corrects to 'or' and my work colleague is also a 'Connor'.
Right, perhaps the name ought to be Data Terminator. :-)
I remember another brand, JTS, from the 90's. While Connor was bad, JTS was the undisputed king of data loss. They didn't last long as a company.
Mac A/UX systems from that era created an 'Eschatology' partition for autorecovery. I always liked the name.
That’s what that was? I noticed it while looking through the Apple HD SC Setup code and assumed it had something to do with A/UX, but had no idea. Good to know!
Doctrine of last things.. or the last word. How apropos.
I remember using these CD caddy Performas in elementary school when they were relatively new and being somewhat confused by the why, as we had a tray loading audio CD player in our living room at the time.
It was to keep the CD-ROMS from getting scratched.
It was a misguided idea, and was quickly abandoned because obviously a CD-ROM is just as likely to be scratched when moving it from jewel box to caddy, as when moving it from jewel box into tray.
The reason it was supposed to be more protective was that the industry expected everybody to buy a separate caddy for each CD-ROM they owned, so each CD would only ever be transferred once, and thus be scratched less. But caddies were expensive so obviously nobody ever did that (I'm not sure it even ever occurred to most people), and manufacturers quickly switched to trays.
Funny I watched a video from „this does not compute“ where he worked on a rare Apple prototype. The drive had the very same issue and he fixed it the same way.
https://youtu.be/OM64l8tZSwY?si=WhEtsVPpcI21YmLn
I'm not a classic Mac OS expert, but the way it works seems extremely convoluted and un-Apple-like. Instead of copying the mini system folder to the desktop and asking the user to copy the files to the real system folder, couldn't they just automatically copy the files to the system folder?
If they did, users who customized their System file would complain that it destroyed their data.
Those users would probably refuse the recovery and boot the system from a CD/floppy to recover manually.
Absolutely incredible long read. I adore people who commit themselves to archival works like this.
I definitely support the author's "make an image of the hard drive as soon as you buy vintage hardware".
There have been some amazing finds that way, especially game prototypes. Often, the data has been marked deleted and every time the system is used, it's more likely to be overwritten.
It's also a good idea because old drives could stop working at any time, and unless someone else has shared an image from the same device, there may not be a good way to use it again without copying that drive image to a newer replacement.
I remember an old rackmount computer at my first job, where you had a row of switches on the front, and you'd have to clock in the boot sequence, each time.
It was actually before my time (but not by much).
If I were a Paul Allen-tier billionaire, I’d endow university chairs in ‘Computer Archaeology’ specifically for people doing this kind of meticulous digging. It’s fantastic work, clarifying how operating systems evolved—though arguably just a bit more practical than crawling around ancient Greek ruins searching for fragments of the past.