Re: Name change

Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip]

You probably wouldn't like my little Toshiba Libretto then; 7" screen,
1280x768.

That resolution on a 7' screen? Ye gods. How do you *see* anything?
Or is that why you've got trifocals? ;-)

It took a little while adjusting font sizes and so on, but it actually
works rather well. In use, the screen is roughly at 'book-reading
distance' rather than 'desktop monitor distance' so the details can afford
to be a little smaller.

Ah! Yes - that'd work.

[snip interesting stuff about the small computer]

It actually sounds rather nice in a way.

Even though I've heard that people have managed to get MacOS
(up to version 8, I think) running on it via 'Basilisk II'.

MacOS 8 is a good deal less screen-efficient than System 6[1], but it
should be fine on a screen with that many pixels available.

Rowland.

[1] Okay - System 6.0.8 is the highest version number of the original
Macintosh OS: up until that point, the updates had been free and while
the OS had been improved hugely, it was still basically exactly the same
as the original Macintosh OS - but with a decent disc format and most of
the odd quirks ironed out and so on.

Then came System 7 which was a good deal fancier, if almost exactly the
same from the user's point of view, except that it had co-operative
multitasking and some extra bells and whistles (many of which actually
made life a lot easier and tidier, thus proving that *some* new features
are a Good Thing). MacOS 7.6 threw out the dead wood and 7.6.1 was the
first OS that could run PPC Macs properly. MacOS 8 - well, that was
supposed to be the next step towards the new generation OS. That
attempt died horribly. And MacOS 9 was the last gasp of the old line of
the MacOS.

Interesting.

To fill in some gaps: although colour was supported prior to System 7,
everything up to System 6 was a basically black and white (no greyscale)
setup. Oh, you could display the UI in colour and use colour - but the
OS support for colour wasn't great and there were various incompatible
3rd party 24 bit `colour solutions'. System 7 came along with Apple's
pukka 24 bit colour built in (not to mention 16 monitors all at once, if
you could afford the graphics cards), and all the 3rd party stuff
vanished.

The original Macintosh OS was very odd (btw, it did support colour, sort
of - RGB, CMY, B+W, fully saturated only, and the only way you were
going to get to see it was to print out on an ImageWriter I or II with a
colour ribbon). 400K single sided discs, and a non-hierarchical disc
format (MFS - Macintosh filing system)- you could put files in folders,
but they were just an illusion: all files actually appeared at the top
level of a disc if you looked with an `open' or `save' dialogue box.
HFS came along not too long after (hierarchical fs) and two sided 800K
discs, then hfs+ (support for lots more disc blocks, and I forget what
else), and now hfs-x (extended), which supports arbitrary file metadata
and who knows what else?

System 7 went to 7.1, 7.5, MacOS 7.6, and then we got v8.

System 7.1.blah was a nasty hack to run the PPC Macs. System 7.5 was
basically 7.1 with some bug fixes and extra bolt-on goodies - pretty
much all of which you could bolt on to 7.1, so I stuck with 7.1 and
never did get 7.5 at home.

MacOS 7.6 dropped support for 24 bit addressing (what 68000s use), and
required `32 bit clean' (i.e., 32 bit addressing) code in ROM if you
wanted to use it. As a result, they could throw out a lot of the old
crud, make some assumptions about the amount of RAM you'd have being a
bit more than in the past, and generally make it run a lot quicker for
all that it didn't half chew up the RAM.

(60000s are 16 bit CPUs with a 32 bit API and a 24 bit address bus - so
Macs were using 32 bit code from the start, but with 24 bit
addressing...)

MacOS 7.6.1 finally got round the problem that any error that cropped up
while executing PPC code required a reboot - so PowerMac owners could
now use their computers for a whole day or more without having to reboot
the bloody things.

MacOS 8 got a `bulkier' UI, some `3D' ish UI elements, and - well, other
things which were meant to lead us to the strange new world of Copland,
but the project folded although quite a lot of the Copland technologies
made it into to the OS anyway. MacOS 9 was the last gasp of the old
line - and it really shows.

MacOS X 10.0 should have been designated the final beta. 10.1 was
suitable for early adopters only. 10.2 was the first version of MacOS X
that worked for a useful value of `work'. 10.3 was rather nice and a
lot less inclined to give trouble. 10.4 - well, there have been some
steps backwards in the UI, but the underlying OS is more efficient and
less buggy, so it seems.

Rowland.

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