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Because I miss classic MacOS.
Unix is Unix. It's boring. It's everywhere. I run it on my desktop, my laptops, my phone, my tablet, my work PC. All different versions.
I dislike it less than the other options. I grew up on CP/M and VAX/VMS, then DOS, then Windows. At home, RISC OS.
I am not a programmer. Much of the stuff in Unix is irrelevant to me. I find its shell actively hostile, its filesystem an arcane mess that hasn't made sense since about 1973, its profusion of weird little config files, all in different formats, all to be carefully amended with various disgusting 1970s abominations of editors, to be a massive pain.
That's why my computer is a Mac. It needs less maintenance than almost anything else. My laptops run Ubuntu (and Haiku and A2/Bluebottle and IBM PC DOS 7.1). I rarely open a terminal if I can avoid it.
Classic MacOS is something else entirely. It's a thing of its time, yes, but it is a thing of great beauty. *The* single cleanest, most elegant GUI of any OS ever, from any time. No trace of a command line anywhere, not a single config file on the entire OS, and yet over 15 years it grew from something that ran in 128 kB of RAM on a 400 kB floppy to a multitasking Internet-capable OS on which I surfed the web, did my email, chatted to my friends on a half a dozen systems, did my invoicing, send data to & from multiple server OSes _and_ laid out magazines.
Its kernel wasn't elegant but there's more to life than kernels. It was the best-integrated general-purpose mass-market GUI OS the world has ever seen, and nothing ever even came close to its versatility. It was smoother and cleaner than ST GEM. It had a bigger better app selection than Amiga OS. It had a simpler yet more capable GUI than RISC OS. It made Windows or OS/2 look like sick jokes for a straight decade. And all this without any nasty dirty stinky mess of config files gluing it all together in the background.
I own a number of vintage Macs, and they're lovely, but there's no point in using PowerPC Mac OS X these days, because an Intel box does the same job better -- but it's not _really_ a Mac, although mine have gorgeous mechanical keyboards from the 1980s on them, naturally, because I'm a vintage computer fan and that's why I am here.
But the last _real_ Mac was the Beige G3 for me. It looked like a Mac, it talked ADB and AAUI and SCSI to the outside world, and it was visibly the same family as a Mac Plus from 1985.
(I gave my Blue & Whites away, which I slightly regret.)
Even my G4s aren't that Mac-like any more. They use PC stuff like USB and Firewire and PCI, which makes them cheap to run, but somehow a bit soulless.
The Mac was not just a computer, it was a culture, and it's one I worked with at the time but could't afford to use myself.
And whereas the ST and Amiga were cultures too, which I respect, I wasn't part of them then. I was an Acorn user then, but Acorns were barely usable on the Internet or on LANs. That stuff came after their decline and fall, for all that I have a Raspberry Pi with RISC OS on it.
Classic MacOS came from that era, but it survived and prospered and thrived into the Internet era of the Web and USB and multimedia.
That deserves anyone's respect.
Unix is Unix. It's boring. It's everywhere. I run it on my desktop, my laptops, my phone, my tablet, my work PC. All different versions.
I dislike it less than the other options. I grew up on CP/M and VAX/VMS, then DOS, then Windows. At home, RISC OS.
I am not a programmer. Much of the stuff in Unix is irrelevant to me. I find its shell actively hostile, its filesystem an arcane mess that hasn't made sense since about 1973, its profusion of weird little config files, all in different formats, all to be carefully amended with various disgusting 1970s abominations of editors, to be a massive pain.
That's why my computer is a Mac. It needs less maintenance than almost anything else. My laptops run Ubuntu (and Haiku and A2/Bluebottle and IBM PC DOS 7.1). I rarely open a terminal if I can avoid it.
Classic MacOS is something else entirely. It's a thing of its time, yes, but it is a thing of great beauty. *The* single cleanest, most elegant GUI of any OS ever, from any time. No trace of a command line anywhere, not a single config file on the entire OS, and yet over 15 years it grew from something that ran in 128 kB of RAM on a 400 kB floppy to a multitasking Internet-capable OS on which I surfed the web, did my email, chatted to my friends on a half a dozen systems, did my invoicing, send data to & from multiple server OSes _and_ laid out magazines.
Its kernel wasn't elegant but there's more to life than kernels. It was the best-integrated general-purpose mass-market GUI OS the world has ever seen, and nothing ever even came close to its versatility. It was smoother and cleaner than ST GEM. It had a bigger better app selection than Amiga OS. It had a simpler yet more capable GUI than RISC OS. It made Windows or OS/2 look like sick jokes for a straight decade. And all this without any nasty dirty stinky mess of config files gluing it all together in the background.
I own a number of vintage Macs, and they're lovely, but there's no point in using PowerPC Mac OS X these days, because an Intel box does the same job better -- but it's not _really_ a Mac, although mine have gorgeous mechanical keyboards from the 1980s on them, naturally, because I'm a vintage computer fan and that's why I am here.
But the last _real_ Mac was the Beige G3 for me. It looked like a Mac, it talked ADB and AAUI and SCSI to the outside world, and it was visibly the same family as a Mac Plus from 1985.
(I gave my Blue & Whites away, which I slightly regret.)
Even my G4s aren't that Mac-like any more. They use PC stuff like USB and Firewire and PCI, which makes them cheap to run, but somehow a bit soulless.
The Mac was not just a computer, it was a culture, and it's one I worked with at the time but could't afford to use myself.
And whereas the ST and Amiga were cultures too, which I respect, I wasn't part of them then. I was an Acorn user then, but Acorns were barely usable on the Internet or on LANs. That stuff came after their decline and fall, for all that I have a Raspberry Pi with RISC OS on it.
Classic MacOS came from that era, but it survived and prospered and thrived into the Internet era of the Web and USB and multimedia.
That deserves anyone's respect.
