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
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