Mac OS Back-Compatibility [Was Re: [LINK] Microsoft]

Kim Holburn kim at holburn.net
Sun Aug 6 15:13:12 AEST 2006


On 2006 Aug 06, at 2:15 PM, Roger Clarke wrote:
> At 13:29 +1000 6/8/06, Howard Lowndes wrote:
>> I wonder how Apple went when they switched from OS9 to OSX.  Can  
>> any of the Apple aficionados shed some light on the backward  
>> compat of these two.
>
> Patchily, and on the whole somewhat poorly.
>
> I continue to use OS9 for MS Word 5.1a (1992 - straightforward and  
> clean, but no revision-marking capability),

There's your mistake.  I really liked Word 5.1a , hey I lived in it,  
it was my emacs ;-) and it's been a downhill slide with Word ever  
since.  Intelligent Word processors Grrrr...  But Word 5.1a - it's  
dead, it's an ex word processor, it's joined the choir invisible etc.

> MS Word 98 (a dreadful product, but at least it's pre-MS-spyware- 
> phase), MS Excel 98 (fine, and nothing more is needed), PowerPoints  
> 92 and 98 (ditto), RTF2HTML 2.7.5 (it's time to move on, but if  
> Dreamweaver was meant to be the future, it failed dismally).
>
> The OS9 emulator creaks, and falls over a lot more frequently than  
> OS9 did (which was reasonably often).

And OS 7 and 8.  OS not shielded from the bugs of Applications.  I  
just got sick of OS 7 and moved away.

> OSX is a serious disappointment as a whole.  I was going back to  
> *nix after a break of well over a decade.  (Anyone want to read my  
> 1986 paper on 'why Unix isn't ready for prime time'?).

Yeah send the URL.

> I assumed that *nix had been cleaned up and buried beneath sensible  
> user-interfaces, and that Apple had further improved the user- 
> interfaces and done some tinkering under the bonnet to make it (a)  
> better and (b) theirs.

I've worked with *nix for a long time.  I was rapt to get a nice gui  
system that had unix under the hood.  I could program and script, run  
photoshop, gimp, imagemagick and even run word when forced to,  
christmas.

> Not so.  The services went backwards, and it's seriously unstable -  
> of the order of 3-8 crashes per week.

I run Mac systems for weeks (and usually only have to reboot for  
security patches) without problems - including a laptop that I put to  
sleep and wake up at least three times a day, I think OSX is rock  
solid.  Try doing that with anything else, even VxWorks.

> They come in all shapes and sizes, and I've yet to find anything to  
> associate them with (apart from maybe the language I use when  
> talking to the device).  Later versions since the original release  
> seem to be no better than earlier ones.  The Spotlight (own- 
> directories search) is simply useless - full of errors and with an  
> incomprehensible user-interface, and not a patch on the beta of  
> Sherlock.

have to agree with you there.  I could reliably crash the finder and  
gave up using spotlight.  I tried rebuilding the database - took 20  
hours - still isn't great.  Still it's a unix system and has locate  
and find under the hood;-)

> I abandoned it, and reverted to a limited but effective freebie  
> called EasyFind.
>
> No, I'm not a happy Appler any more (and I'm a user since the  
> second shipment of Macs to Australia in April 1984, and prior to  
> that an occasional Apple II, IIe and Lisa user).

What do you use now?  There's always ubuntu.

--
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
Ph: +61 2 61258620 M: +61 417820641  F: +61 2 6230 6121
mailto:kim at holburn.net  aim://kimholburn
skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request
Cacert Root Cert: http://www.cacert.org/cacert.crt
Aust. Spam Act: To stop receiving mail from me: reply and let me know.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD] http://www.saqqara.demon.co.uk/ 
datefmt.htm

Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.
                           -- Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Analog, Apr 1961






More information about the Link mailing list