Re: chips

[Eric Smith <eric@brouhaha.com>]

Jonathyn Bet'nct wrote:
> But the software has completely changed too. It's no longer the
> elegantly designed Mac OS 9 but the bloated Mac OS X.

Mac OS X might be blated, but as any programmer can tell you, Mac OS 9
was anything but "elegantly designed".  It was the "Macintosh Mystery
House", consisting of twenty years of hacks on top of hacks, on a
foundation that was only meant for a small single-task machine with
128K or 512K of RAM.  It's a miracle that the stuff worked at all.

But it was much better implemented than the non-NT-based Windows, though
that's not saying much.  Both Apple and Microsoft ultimately had to
throw away the core of their so-called "operating systems" to put proper
1970s- to 1980s-era operating system kernels under the hood.  Apple took
the opportunity, for better or worse, to also replace their GUI with one
derived from NeXT, while Microsoft continues to make small incremental
improvements to theirs.