The Old Rotting Macintosh System 7 🍏

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I abandoned Apple when they abandoned System 7 aka Mac OS 8/9 for Mac OS X. I liked the old System 7, it was an amazing operating system from the user experience but it’s underpinnings by the mid 1990s were full of rust and groaned if didn’t crash regularly every time you used it under the weight of the then modern computing demands – the MultiFinder wirh shared memory and cooperative sharing of system resources where terribly big unstable hacks by the demands of modern computing in the mid 1990s.

I remember reading about the New World Infrastructure on the Macintosh. It was such a major hack to make the whole system work. Things like whole sections of the ROM contained legacy code never executed but quickly patched over by the boot loader but still required to initially boot the system. But the user experience when things played along and didn’t crash was amazing.

I’m still mad Apple dumped the Copeland project and System 7 after all these years for Mac OS X. I think they could have built a cleaner undercarriage under the Old System 7 without destroying all in the user space that made System 7 so amazing, especially in the earlier years before the unstable kludges became more prominent after System 7.1 or so. Shared libraries are good but System 7.5 adopted a ton of unstable, often cryptically named shared libraries that was part of system’s downfall even if modern computing demanded it.

Crane Mountain

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Crane Mountain

Except for a small cut for Ski Hi Road, most of the Crane Mountain remains free of cut and fills, dumping, and changes to the terrain they are so common on most mountains as mankind reshapes the landscape.

Orchard Street Property Values

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Not surprisingly, many of those houses along upper Orchard Street are assessed at more than a half million dollars, as shown by the pink boxes. Click on them to call up the full property record. 

First Day Of Summer At Camp

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The first three days of my working trip, I spent camping at Mason Lake, not right at the lake, but at one of the campsites down along the way.

Taken on Saturday June 20, 2020 at Mason Lake.

Survivorship Bias

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Survivorship bias is a really powerful force that colors our views of the past. Often you hear about how much better made things were in the past, how much simpler and more reliable. But the truth is often more complicated. Often old devices that didn’t hold up were quickly discarded and forgotten while only the best devices continue to be used today.