15 Jun
2016
15 Jun
'16
7:51 a.m.
On 14 June 2016 at 01:56, Sean Conner <spc at conman.org> wrote:
My impression is that DR-DOS would have been a bootloader, little more.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once
stated:
What do you feel is still missing from OS-X today? About the only thing I
can think of is the unique file system, where each file had a data and a
resource fork.
This is an interesting question, not directly but as a sort of meta-question.
Often, in non-retrocomputing circles, when I express nostalgia for
dead platforms, people ask "what is missing?"
It's not that anything is _missing_. It's that there are things
present that I wish were not present.
Note, this doesn't mean that it's theoretically possible to strip down
a complex system to make a more simple one.
What did I like about classic MacOS?
* Simplicity -- the Finder integration with the OS, the desktop
database, etc. Move items around, aliases still point to them. Even to
other drives, even to other machines on the same network!
* Clean conceptual model -- not merely the spatial thing, but the way
that you can never see 1 particular icon in more than one place. Open
another window to view something already being viewed, the old window
closes.
* The clean, totally CLI-less nature of it. Atari ST GEM imitated
this, but it had the DOS-like legacy baggage of drive letters etc.
* The simplicity of the self-arranging magic System folder. Drop in a
file, it automatically goes into the right folder, whatever it is --
INITs, CDEVs, etc. Move them _out_ of that folder into, say, the
"Disabled Control Panels" folder and bing, it's disabled. Clean,
visual, obvious, simple.
* Pop-up folders, drawers, etc. -- UI features never recreated on OS X.
It was a clean, simple, *elegant* system.
Not perfect, no. Snags? Poor interprocess protection, poor VM, poor
multitasking, poor stability.
System
9.x and before are
"something different" for me, a break from my mostly hardcore CLI
existence.
Yes, true. An OS I still miss, for all its instability and quirkiness.
I'd love to see a modern FOSS recreation, at least of the concept and
the style, even if it was binary-incompatible. I wish the
Star Trek project had come to some kind of fruition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
Reading that, it sounds like it would have been much like early
Windows---an application that would run on top of MS-DOS (or in this case,
DR-DOS).