pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



I enjoy using classic Mac OS, not because it's nostalgic to me in any way - I'm too young to remember anything before a white eMac running 10.2 or something like that - but for the exact opposite reason. It's completely foreign to me in how it functions. It does everything totally differently to what you expect from modern operating systems.

File extensions basically don't matter. They're irrelevant. What matters is the metadata encoded into your file, and if it aligns with the metadata certain programs expect.

Dragging a file from a removable medium like a floppy disk onto your Desktop does not actually move the file off the removable medium. It simply makes it look that way, if you eject the medium then the files disappear from your Desktop, and if you reinsert the Medium, your files reappear. This worked for the hard-drive-lacking original Macintosh, but it's absolutely wild they stretched this metaphor into the OS 9 era.

There is no visible default location on the system hard drive for user created data. No folders for "Documents, Photos, Videos, Music" none of that. You can create your own, of course, but it feels Wrong, in a certain way, like you're forcing your own ideas onto it. Where else are you supposed to store your files, anyway? Not here. The Macintosh HD doesn't want your files. Keep them away. This is for programs only.


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in reply to @pendell's post:

typed a comment that was originally longer than your post and then I was like "hoo boy"

anyway -- this managed to make me feel odl, but yeah, classic mac os ultimately lets or makes you freestyle a lot. You very much could make HD:Users:Pendell:Documents

(And in fact Mac OS 9 sets up that structure for you, it's either Documents or Users:yourname:Documents if you set up its multiple users tooling)

Among people I knew, it seemed like different people had/have different strategies for things.

this was also The Removable Media era and the whole thing was spatial, so basically prior to the mid-2000s using a desktop computer really did mostly consist of remembering, spatially, where you put a thing, similar to how you might remember what folder in what drawer in what filing cabinet in what room in what building you left that one piece of paper.

There is an underlying structure for how the desktop works, basically every volume has a :Desktop: folder that you can't really see (sometimes on appleshare you see this manifest as "Desktop Folder" IIRC) and you sure as heck can save a bunch of stuff to a removable media and then move it all to the desktop folder on that piece of media.

Due to constraints in how navigation works, if you save on the desktop it'll start on your boot disk, so you have to save inside a volume and then move it. admittedly leaving a bunch of stuff on the desktop on removable media was never a strategy of mien but I can 100% imagine people relying on it

(oops it's longer now)

it's all such an intensely different time. DOS6/windows3.1 is mostly the same too -- no default "your stuff here" presumption.

The last point about how the lack of organization was similar to DOS/Win3 made me realize - I suppose the culture shock for me of classic mac os comes from how it has so many elements that are superficially similar to what we have in modern OS's (because it's a direct influence) while being steeped in mechanics that date back to the mid-80s, when using a computer was a completely different process. I never view the barren nature of DOS or Windows 3.1 as out of place or odd, mainly because they feel appropriately simple and basic in retrospect. Where classic mac os could easily be mistaken for a linux distro, so my brain expects it to work like one haha.

And yes. Removable media. I may or may not have spent half of this week getting my PowerBook G3 to play nice with the Zip 100 drive I have for its expansion bay lol.