Quadra 660AV what's with the "PowerPC" label?

[Liam Proven]

On 14 June 2016 at 01:56, Sean Conner <spc at conman.org> wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated:
>> >  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.
>
>   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.


>> 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).

My impression is that DR-DOS would have been a bootloader, little more.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)