A program can’t ever really die, but it can get old. Very old. This is a paradox millions of computer users are living with. Almost four years after the release of Windows XP and Mac OS X, they boot their machines into more senior versions of Windows or the Mac OS.
Creaky Operating Systems Show Their Age
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
MacOs 8.5 supported USB. The first Imac was the fisrt computer to have USB ports on the markets and was running with MacOs 8.5. So MacOs 8.5 definetely supported USB!!!!!
maybe it’s useless though because it’s an old stack and it doesn’t have drivers for it
I had one of those and I am abolutely positive about that.
It was 8.1 which I upgraded as soon as 8.5 came out.
There was a lot of fussing around with drivers for the first
“how so useful” usb floppy drive.
Why on earth did I bother, I’ll never know.
Phil
My first desktop PC had 2 USB ports, I got it in December ’97. There was limited USB support in Windows 95 OSR2. The first iMac didn’t come out till August ’98.
Maybe the iMac made USB peripherals popular, but it wasn’t the first computer to support them.
The iMac may not have been the first home computer to have USB ports, but it was certainly the first that used them exclusively. There were no other ports worth speaking of, and no way to add new internal devices, so anything you added to your iMac pretty much had to be USB. I hadn’t even seen a USB device on a PC until 2001.
Whats very old is going to start looking very good when product activated, timed-out, DRM’ed apps/music/codecs tied to the latest (we jerk your chain) platform stop working because the patent/copyright holder decides tomorrow to change the terms of use. Win-95R2 still works and makes a good off-line PC. Win-ME/2k combined on a P3 box pretty much run everything including firewire/USB-2. I don’t worry about adverts or pop-ups. I’ve got Proxomitron and thousands of filters to choose from to make a personal config, plus I can easily make my own. And since I use Vorbis, I don’t need an iPod which can’t play my files. I buy CD’s instead of downloading because I prefer hi-fi sound and own decent equipment, not the tin-ears junk that Steve Jobs thinks I own.
I found the article lacking, is some mention of the really old dogs, Win 3.1 (and 3.11) which are still useful and used, as well as perhaps System 7.x.
It’s not that hard to sum up things that you want an OS in 2005 to do, that the older versions don’t do. Much like blaming a steam locomotive that it can’t run on electricity or diesel.
I’m actually tempted to write the antithesis to this article: surprising and actually useful things you can accomplish with software and machines from the previous century.
Nothing new or surprising in there, for me, but still a nice writeup.
I’m still using BeOS 5 for my audio work and for DJing. Works like a charm.
And I’m just getting ready to put Mac OS 9 on my old UMAX s900 dp180 to give to my in-laws… the upgrades necessary to make that thing run OS X would cost more than a Mac Mini.
– chrish
I think people still use creaky operating systems for at least two reasons : their hardware isn’t beefy enough for new OS versions; they don’t know better.
1. In the first case, people buy new versions of an OS. When they try to install them, they’re told that they don’t have sufficient RAM, hard disk space or the CPU isn’t fast enough. Therefore, they get a refund (if possible) and stick to whatever they were using.
2. In the second case, many still believe that only Windows can run on a PC or MacOS on a Mac. Unfortunately, they’ve never heard of other choices. Obviously, they’ve never paid a visit to OS News or Slashdot. The author of the article is one of those. Here’s why :
“Second, you can look past Microsoft or Apple for your upgrades. Using Win 98, ME or 2000? Ditch Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, essentially abandoned on pre-XP versions, for the free Firefox browser.”
Why not go one step further and get rid of Windows altogether ?
I have a Studio DC10Plus video capture card. In order to make it work under XP I need to BUY an updated driver.
My scanner (non-usb) doesn’t work under XP, need to buy a new scanner.
Especially the dirty trick of Pinnacle (buy their new driver to make it work) made me think: NO (what will they force me to buy next). So I stayed with the old OS, skipped XP and started with Linux and take a lot more care when buying hardware.
That article reads like a combined ad push for operating system upgrades. If it meets your needs, that’s all that counts. There are tons of Pentium-ii 233 machines with 64 MB of RAM that will not run WinXP properly, but will run Windows 98SE.
Particularly, if you are not connected to the net, and not everyone is, it is a perfectly acceptable solution. Or you could always turn an old pc like that into your network file server with a bigger HD or into a gateway/firewall running Linux.
I’m wondering where the heck the author of the article got that idea? People as a whole surfed the ‘Net, got their e-mail, scanned in photos (maybe even edited the photos), did their documents/spreadsheets, balanced check books and played games. If memory serves people might have just started to get CD Burners so they can make their own mix CDs. Other than the more mainstream use of digital cameras vs conventional and digital music I can’t see a major difference in the masses.
I also have to wonder what criteria they used to make their points about older OS’s? For instance: “Media software is a big exception: If you want to make MP3 copies of your CDs, Win 98 offers few options.” I’m sorry, but there were MP3’s available on the ‘Net in the mid 1990’s. In 2000 a buddy of mine dropped $200 on a portable CD/MP3 player and spent a night ripping songs using Music Match (if I’m not mistaken). As for DVD authoring software, the liklihood of a common Windows 98 SE owner having a machine capable of doing DVD authoring may be dwindling but there still is software available (like Roxio Easy CD and DVD version 6) that will make that OS burn with little or no problems.
Then there’s “built in support” for wi-fi. I guess the author didn’t spend a lot of time looking away from the OS to see third party options (except for the CD/DVD burning situation). For example, Belkin has a USB adapter that gives your PC Bluetooth capability and it works on OS’s as old as Windows 98. I’ve got a 802.11b Wi-Fi card that works great in Windows 98 SE.
To me, this is basically a “well, duh” article on the decision to upgrade. For experienced users/techies there isn’t any real info we don’t really know (except maybe for me the Mac info as I’ve never owned a machine) and for the common computer owner “windows” and “pc” are usually one in the same so the article would probably mean nothing to them.
pass on this article.
I have a unique situation here recently that requires the use of older OSes. I normally run a KT400-based motherboard with a 1GHz Duron CPU and DDR RAM. As of yesterday, I had to replace my only 512MB stick of RAM, and the local vendors all want twice what I can get for it online. Because of my part-time consulting work, I can’t go even a day without access to my files and the Internet, so I’ve fallen back to an old PII system I’ve had kicking around since ’98 until the new memory arrives.
Now, my main OS is Ubuntu 4.10, although I do occasionally fire up Slackware for anything I have to build from source. Both of these distros run fairly smoothly on my KT400 system. As I have all of my hard drives in removeable enclosures, it was a snap to switch to the older computer. However, Ubuntu slows to a crawl on the old PII, and Slackware, while faster than Ubuntu, is still a chore to use. I have a copy of Win98SE I bought back in early 2000, as well as BeOS 5.0 Pro I bought in mid-2000. I haven’t used either since shelving this old PC, but I remembered how fast both were on it so I decided to mess around with them. If either OS was fast enough and stable enough, it would get me by for Internet access until next week when my shipment arrives from newegg.com.
The video card in this machine is a Matrox G200, fully supported by BeOS, with drivers readily available for Windows. I’d actually replaced the sound card and ethernet card on this machine since running Win98 and BeOS on it, so I was a bit worried about compatibility there. The old sound card was a Windows Sound System card scavenged from my old 486/Win3.1 machine, which was fully supported in Win98 and BeOS. The new sound card is a Hercules Muse 5.1 DVD, which uses a CMI8738 chip. This card is supported in Win98 by Hercules, and in BeOS by a driver I found on BeBits. The old network card was an Intel EtherExpress, again fully supported in both BeOS and Windows. The new network card is an OEM pulled from an old HP Pavilion. It has a Realtek 8139 chipset, but the card itself is not made by Realtek. Strangely, the generic Realtek drivers for Win98 don’t work on it, but the 8139 drivers from BeBits work fine.
So now I have an Internet-capable machine that, under BeOS, feels a bit faster than my KT400 does under Ubuntu. If I’d kept my EtherExpress card in there I’d have nearly the same speed, albeit questionable stability, under Win98. It seems that it’s always a good idea to keep those “outdated” OSes around; you may never need them, but they are a blessing when you do.
I for one support micrsofts wanting to dump support for its older OS’es Especially Win98 and ME. It time for the people that run these OS’es to upgrade or buy new. I feel the same about windows server OS’es and Ancient versions of Unix like HP-UX 9-10.20 and Solaris 2.5.1…spend the money people and upgrade it will save you alot of money in the long run.
As a proof of concept, I still maintain a DOS box here at home. It can surf, play MP3s, watch vids, DVDs, mail, etc. Far a lot of people, you don’t NEED to upgrade. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Sure pages aren’t as “media rich” but they sure load fast not having to grab those flash banners and such. Of course my main 2 OSes are BeOs and OS/2. I have Ubuntu and XP around as well.
A couple of points I’d like to mention:
Something the writer barely touches on, an old computer, no matter how old, will always be able to do everything it could do when it was new. Many users simply don’t need the latest technology, or can’t afford it. Office97 prints professional reports as well as any newer version. Command and Conquer is as entertaining now as it was in 1995. And e-mail technology hasn’t changed at all.
A point he skips altogether, most people don’t buy operating systems stand-alone; they use the one that came with their computer. There’s no sense in trying to upgrade to WindowsXP on a Pentium II running 64MB of RAM. When that particular user is ready to ‘invest’ in a new computer, it’ll come with a new OS.
Personally, I’m running Windows98SE on a five-year-old machine that’s been minimally upgraded. It can do every task I’ve ever asked of it. High-speed internet, scanner, camera, USB drives, calculator/cell phone/PDA/GPS interaction, 3D games (all but the very latest), Office, etc.
Overall, it wasn’t much of an article. Mostly fluff for casual computer-interest readers. The stats were good though.
Best Wishes,
Bob
The Macsters like to claim that Macs last longer, this article puts that claim to rest. They do not last as long AND they are more expensive.
My PPro/200 boxes running OS/2 and Windows 95 OSR2 don’t seem to have issues with my PDA, my digital camera, digital music, USB support, or most of the other things he mentions.
Maybe he just needs to learn how to use his computing resources wisely?
Maybe the iMac made USB peripherals popular, but it wasn’t the first computer to support them.
Bingo! I can remember a friend of mine having a hell of a time getting WinNT to work with USB back then.
The Macsters like to claim that Macs last longer, this article puts that claim to rest. They do not last as long AND they are more expensive.
I have my current Mac going on 6 years and its running 10.3.8 flawlessly. At work, I help about 1 Mac user a month who is still using some variant of 7 on ancient hardware. (Normally to get Open Transport installed so that they can get on the network).
Most 3rd party productivity still works on aging versions of Windows – check out Mozilla, OpenOffice, Directory Opus, Nero, etc.
Damien
I still run an LC 3. Its boots debian linux, gets on the network, then acts as a proxy server.
12 years old, iirc.
I turned an old laptop that barely ran MS 2000 into a great laptop for sitting around surfing the internet and checking email by installing a FREE version of linux, Slax distro. It’s a “Live” distro, meaning you can burn it to a cd and boot directly from it without installing, this way you can test your machine and see how well it runs before going through the hassle of installation. There are plenty Live distros out there so you can test them to find one you like. The nice thing about linux is there isn’t as many viruses and security holes to worry about.
There are still a lot of people using old macs, they just don’t die. You can still do some pretty heavey dtp on a 10 year old powermac, and thats not going to run mac os x.
My iMac DV 400mhz (1999) runs panther pretty well.
but if it aint broke… (i suppose some people consider mac os <9 to be broke (poor multitasking + memory), and win 95 is definatly broke)
sam
I’m not a mac user but my uncle is. He does guitar (Sp?) teaching for a living and had been using some old all in one mac that had a 25mhz m68k cpu in it iirc. He only just upgraded to a 1ghz g4 mac last year. He still uses his older one for some things.
>25mhz m68k
Wow that is old! Probably from around 93-94?
Yeah, something like that. It might have had a 33mhz 68lc040 in it. I really don’t remember. I believe he had upgraded it to os8 though
He uses it for internet and everything. You can imagine my surprise when I found out just how old his computer was when he upgraded.
<quote>
MacOs 8.5 supported USB. The first Imac was the fisrt computer to have USB ports on the markets and was running with MacOs 8.5. So MacOs 8.5 definetely supported USB!!!!!
</quote>
I haven’t read all the replys, but 8.5.1 was the first with USB. 8.6 the first official USB release.
i have a 68040 here running system 7.x [5 i think]
very useful for email, light browsing, irc and writing
The article (and no one here) seems to touch on the biggest issue – the majority of these people using these older operating systems, more so the Windows variety are still using the net. They don’t patch their systems, and with Microsoft deliberately flushing support for older systems (rightly so I think), they’ll have a lack of patches. There are flaws in these older operating systems, major flaws.
If a Windows XP SP1 machine can be infected and zombied by blackhats within 18 minutes, then these older systems are even more of targets. I’d like a breakdown of compromised machines on the net and what the host operating systems are. What’s worse is that these people are generally non technically, non computer literate and they are just problems waiting to happen.
Sure, Win98 supported usb, and I remember my first computer back in early 97 had a usb port on it. One, sole usb port, which I didn’t use. There were no peripherals for it. FireWire on Win98/98se will also work, providing you have 3rd party drivers etc to make it talk to the kernel.
Personally, I won’t support any of these older systems – my first advice to any customer in this scenario is “sorry maam/sir, this machine is getting over the hill, you’d be best to purchase a new system, along with a new operating system”. If they say no, my reply is “sorry maam/sir, I don’t support these older operating systems, they are a security risk to the user when used with Internet connections”. Then I walk away.
Dave
I friend bought a new machine when the hard drive on a Celeron 600 died. It had 128 meg. of RAM, and ran Windows 98. On a lark, I replaced the hard drive, put in a Libranet disk, did a minimal install, updated to Debian Sid, installed the latest 2.4 Debian kernel, and tossed in a few packages like Abiword, Rox-Filer, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Libranet’s default desktop is IceWM.
I simplified the menus, changed to a Windows theme, and found I had created a fast booting, very responsive system for browsing and writing. What Linux gave it was stability and security. What it lost was a full desktop environment. It’s a good trade-off. My friend will gain a good backuup machine.
Someone posted above that this article showed that Macs do not last as long as PC’s. I was prepared to flame him, after all everyone knows that Macs last longer.
Then I re-read the article to see what he was talking about. I guess he refers to the end of the article, where it states that Win 98 is the minimum requirement for most modern Windows software while OS X 10.2 is the minimum for most modern Apple software.
From re-reading I get that Apple hardware lasts longer, but its software lasts less. Is this true? Does Apple OS X 10.1 really have less support than Windows 2000? And Windows 2000 is twice as old? What gives?
Certainly the original PII mobos had USB ports back in Dec ’97, I know because I got one then, but how well 95 OSR2 supported USB is another matter. I personally never tried using OSR2 with USB, but I have heard rumors that the USB stack was far from problem free.
As for whether macs stand the test of time better is another matter. Certainly some of the macs tend to have slightly better hardware which allows them to use modern hardware much longer than many cheap wintel boxes. A lot of wintel users buy a cheap box every 2-3 years whenever they get tired of all of the problems. You can tell that mac users are either a lot less likely to buy upgrades to their OS or replace their computers by the large number of individuals whom are still using a pre OSX OS. Since OSX is older than XP it tells you that mac users must have lower expectations of their computers or perhaps they simply aren’t as easily fooled into believing that they need a new computer to do new things with their computer. Since the average mac user is more educated I tend to give a little bit of recognition that mac users may just not be as easily fooled.
If you don’t need USB, install NT 4, Firewall it, and use Firefox. My main system and laptop are running Win2000, and any incompatibility issues are purely commercial, NOT technological. Most of the apps that I do run can be run on Linux [Firefox, XMMS (Winamp’s twin), Open Office, Audacity, etc.]. I need to reinstall Gentoo and get the graphics card acceleration figured out, and then retire Win2000 to gaming system status.
I do have a Mac G4 running Panther, but it doesn’t get much use.
I guess he refers to the end of the article, where it states that Win 98 is the minimum requirement for most modern Windows software while OS X 10.2 is the minimum for most modern Apple software.
…Is this true? Does Apple OS X 10.1 really have less support than Windows 2000? And Windows 2000 is twice as old? What gives?
With each OS X major update (10.x -> 10.x+1), Apple introduces new API candy, with tons of new functionality behind it. These simplify the programming of a LOT of very difficult tasks, so programmers are very much inclined to use them. But since the API’s don’t get back-ported to the previous versions of Mac OS X, any program using them won’t be able to run on the older OS X versions.
In all fairness, Apple would have to bend over backward and waste a TON of money to backport those APIs, and in the end, the patches would be equivalent to free major OS upgrades.
I don’t really think this is a matter of blame, because these APIs really let 3rd-party programmers focus on providing innovative software rather than jumping through hoops, but the choice to leave older versions out is by the programmer’s decision, not Apple’s.
Funny stuff about which computer lasts longer… For that matter, I have an IBM 5150 (4.77mhz, 64k ram, all original) from 1981 that still runs like a champ.
But what practical are you going to do with it, other than one or two specialty programs that may be old favorites?
Same with the really old hardware on both the PC and Mac sides, why mess with it when you can get much newer stuff for free or nearly free?
This is not to say that I don’t like old software, as I’ve got most every MS OS, BeOS, Warp 3 & 4, and Linux back to MDK 7.0 (for non pentium) on hard drives at home. They do what they are designed for, and for the most part run really well on somewhat newer hardware. And you can find some great software that came out much later than these OS’s to give them good functionality.
BTW – DOS/WFWG/Calmira is an absolute joy to use again after so many years. Especially on a 500mhz+ machine!
So I may skip the latest in OS’s and the sometimes dubious “improvements” they bring, but I don’t have to suffer with 25mhz hardware to run it on…
what the heck do we do when microsoft stops supporting xp… and they stop doing their license verification. I am quite sure they aren’t going to give as a keygen so we can reload our xp when it crashes.
I’m sorry but xp is as far as I’ll go, I will never again buy another windows product, but since I paid for this one, I should be able to use it whenever I want whether it be now or 20 years from now.
Well, i suppose that’s what you get buying into Apples Beta OS. Apple released OS-X relatively early in its development. As a result, as they added to the OS they made some substancial core changes which were needed. This at least gave them a decent release schedule but compatability suffered.
MS tries the opposite method, they will hammer the OS development in house for as long as they can (leading to substancial delays) but they will have tried to tie in thorough backwards compatability. This is one of the few things going for MS but it comes at some considerable expense. The OS releases seem to slip beyond their initial dates, and the OS overhead for the compatability slows things down and exposes the newly released OS to security flaws. They might have to the same as Apple here and bit the bullet but it will piss a lot of people off. They can’t win.
Linux, and what it has going for it is that it will constantly break compatability but with a good package management system and the fact everything is a download away (free), people don’t mind as much. Something that I think MS will not be able to compete with in the long term. Look at how much Apple charges for their updates compaed to Linux, the majority will go with free.
The key to remember in Technology, the day it is
thought of and invented it is yesterdays news.
It is a vicsous cycle of throwing out the old
with the new just like a new car. One day
you are the greatest, the next day ‘who
are you’……
MS Windows will do fine, Apple has its following
and Linux will always have its users.
Computers are so cheap today that staying with an old one is seldom worth the hassle.
Lets assume that a computer with monitor etc costs $900 and lasts at least (with warranty) for 3 years.
The cost per year is then $300, or per month $25. That is peanut money for a tool as powerful as computers are today.
Old computers can be fun though, for nostalgic reasons. Sometimes I’ll start up my Amiga 500, play a game of Pirates and remember the good ol’ days. 🙂
It really doesn’t matter either way. 99% of the people realize that the name is the name of the person that posted the news.. nothing more, nothing less. How dense do you have to be the assume that person wrote the thing when its almost always the same person posting it and they link to other sites?
Maybe he just needs to learn how to use his computing resources wisely?
Amen! Just for the record, I was running a 486 box until the end of 2001, with Win 3.11! (Long story short – no money, but internet access)
It was kept alive with a combination of Calmari, decent firewall, anti-virus, and anti-spyware software. Plus with help of dozens, if not hundreds of hobbyists out there (STILL!) writing drivers and enhancements to keep up with the latest hardware.
It was possible to keep the old gal going long past the time it should have been put out to pasture, and doing a lot more than it was originally designed to do.
(Guess the point of this rant is that even after being orphaned, any OS or old computer can be kept up to grade with decent care and an active community of users… just look at Amiga!)
I think a lot of the issue is that Microsoft tend to worry more about compatibility than Apple – witness the (comparatively) smooth upgrade from DOS > Win9x > WinNT, vs the total lack of compatibility between OS9 and OSX.
I suspect this is due to the different user bases; Microsoft know that if they put their customers in a position where they have to change every piece of software on their machine they’re very likely to go elsewhere, it being a perfect opportunity to do so.
Whereas the remaining Apple users are by nature a lot keener on the product than most Windows users, so they’ll suffer through a total upgrade if they have to.
Personally I think any claim of one type of computer lasting longer is bogus; taking what used to be the upshot of Moore’s law, computers were doubling in speed every 18 months or so. Hence after three years any computer should be roughly a quarter the speed of the newer models – regardless of whether it’s a Mac or not (unless Macs are advancing in speed slower, in which case they’d be about 500MHz now).
The only way for Macs to last longer would be for their software to be advancing more slowly in terms of system requirements than other software; which isn’t the case – OSX has much the same requirements as Windows or Linux.
I know it’s more complex than that little example, but this is a generalisation, as was the original statement.
This is were Linux does pretty well – old hardware, if you can live with the slow speed of the hardware. For example you can use that digital camera of yours on that old P100 with some form of Linux. But really, I wouldn’t really inflict it on anyone. If someone was reasonably hard up for cash, you can buy a beige box complete for around AU$400 and use an existing monitor with Linux. The problem here is effort V’s cost. Linux V’s Windows. Otherwise a MiniMac for around AU$800 with OSX + Openoffice/Firefox is a pretty good deal.
For kicks I decided to load an OS that was never ever meant to be running on the hardware I have it running on.. With a bit of work windows XP Home (I can’t find my pro cd
) can be made to run unbelievably well on a pentium 75mhz with 64mb of 60ns edo.. 
I’m in fact using it to type this up with opera. It took about 4 hours to compltely install it last night.. I let it run over night. I’ve tweaked the registry a lot, disabled almost every service and disabled everything I could think of GUIwise that would use of resources and its zipping along once it gets booted up ( about 2 minutes till no hdd activity) it runs about like windows98se would on a ~166 or so.. no really, it does. I could use this as my main system if I absolutely had to 
Gotta finish tweaking it some more tomorrow and it’ll be a decent little system to screw around with..
If XP has ram itll run on pretty much anything.. I bet if this system had 256mb of ram it would screem.. that seems to be the main thing slowing it down. it thrashes a bit when loading up stuff.
yeah, anyways.. you can call me crazy now.
there’s always nero, deepburner, or Adaptec Easycd creator (my favourite because it’s unbloated and simple to use).
you need ram + good video drivers. the ones that come with xp are outdated and crappy. So the first thing I always do is visit ati.com
I see a lot of hand-me-down computers these days. The question isn’t so much that of upgrades, new drivers, new hardware, etc, it’s getting the new users of these hand-me-down machines confident that the machine won’t blow up in their face.
And consequently the software’s not the latest shiny new XP, it’s good old Win9x, still reliable as long as you don’t actually try anything too stressful – like connecting to the ‘Net and expecting that it won’t get infected. (You quickly learn the worth of the anti-virus sites, personal firewalls, etc.)
But most of the users of these hand-me-down machines are not interested in doing too much with them anyway – surf the ‘Net for this-and-that occasionally, send and get emails, type a letter or a bit of a book, etc.
I for one would be immeasurably grateful if Bill Gates could use his personal fortune to buy the MS Win9x source tree and donate it to charity under for example the Common Public License – that way I could be reasonably certain of being able to maintain the examples I come across. (It can’t be worth more than 5 million dollars, if that, nowadays. It’d take a lot more than that to maintain it – unless you opened it and let the hobbyists loose on it. The hobbyists got the Personal/Microcomputer “Revolution” under way in the ’70s – whaddya think, Bill Gates?)
WOW!! impressive lets all run the same computer too,
any come to mine?
I use my 486 until I get a new P4 in 2002. Funny thing is that I don’t need any firewall or antivirus or antispyware for my 486 because all malware for it is basically dead. Who in their right mind wants to write a Win3.1 virus anymore?
I agree about the lack of viruses for win3.1, except if there is something on an old floppy you might still have lying around.
In my case, I have kept all the old software from the 3.11 era, so now I’ve got tons of good apps plus bunches of programs that have gone freeware. And the best thing is that a 2gb hard drive is enough to hold hundreds of programs.
I always hated having to pick which one to uninstall so that I could install others on my “big” old 420mb drive…
Heh, just finished downloading Opera 3.62 16 bit… Think I’ll give her a whirl… Maybe after a quick game of Duke3d (using the Penthouse addon)! LOL
RE: Re: I thought Macs lasted longer…
> the total lack of compatibility between OS9 and OSX.
In Mac OS X’s Classic environment you can use almost every Mac OS 9 application. And there’s Carbon – with a few adjustments to application it runs natively in X (and also in 8/9 if you want). So your comment is dead wrong.
RE: A couple of points…
That’s true that you can do everything now with an old machine and/or OS that you did earlier, that’s why many people (also many pros) still use Mac OS 9. And unlike older Windows, there’s no security dangers.
And for a second (or fifth) computer, a 80´s Mac or Amiga or whatever is still also as good as ever for example gaming – you don’t have to do everythig on it.
IMHO the main reason why Macs last longer is that even the first Mac has a GUI, so you could use it, like for writing easily, compared to horrible DOS. And old Macs are quality products that also literally last longer.
“I haven’t read all the replys, but 8.5.1 was the first with USB. 8.6 the first official USB release.”
To set the record straight, my revision A iMac came with 8.0 installed and a required update to 8.1 on CD. It definitely supported USB, I think Apple did that by means of a System Enabler or something, if I remember correctly.
So you’re right, 8.5.1 may have been the first to provide USB support for the entire Mac range at that time. But specifically for the iMac, 8.1 also had (limited) USB support.
>And old Macs are quality products
You almost killed me with that.
Many old Macs are full of shit:
http://www.lowendmac.com/roadapples/index.shtml
Sounds like SuSE9.2.
They realy fucked up this time.Normally distributions obviously don’t include libdvdcss.It’s not hard to live with that.SuSE thought let’s go a little step further and make xine completely useless by stopping all dvd capabillities,as if it’s a crime to watch your *own* dvd’s with a app that came with your bought for 90 euro’s sh.t box.Another example: kradio ,only SuSE strips the record capabillity ,so you can’t record cable audio anymore.Well,i only do some serious programming one might say,nothing wrong with that.Try to compile mozilla-firefox from source on SuSE 9.2 and you will be suprised to spend more time with solving errors as maintaining and closing windows holes (no offence).
Many old Macs are full of shit:
I wouldn’t know.What i do know is SuSE Linux is full of shit as of version 9.2,I have been using it from 7.0,time to run away from it.
From the article:
Microsoft last released a Win 95 version of its Internet Explorer browser five years ago
Well that’s not saying much! It’s been almost 4 years since they released a new IE for any version of Windows.
use BeOS for the Media creation ,compressing the mp3’s etc,and win98se or/and linux for the usb stuff(loading the mp3plasyer and getting pix off the camera) and you can go a long way on creaky old OS’s
Heh. That Mac is so old that I can emulate it full speed on my old box. That the processor that Executor/DOS uses in its software Macintosh emulation. 🙂
I have a Mac IIci myself at home that I don’t use anymore, but I do use its ROM in Fusion from time to time. That runs pretty fast too on a PPro. Won’t work in a VDM, tho. 🙁
Funny I have a version of mepis installed where Xine crashes X completely,O watch my DVD’s in BeOS MAX with VLC screw the fancy power dvd gui,vlc just works in max right out of the box.
Actually, with a bit of tweaking.. BeOS has ‘decent’ usb support. well its getting there. Mass storage devices work great and I think it has support for a few cameras now. USB mice work.. I can’t think of anything else. but I know other stuff works
Heard of VLC and figgled with the app/suite for a short time.It’s a nice one,i like especially it’s streaming capabillities.Solved the SuSE prob,i ripped everything sabotaged SuSE and substituted them with x86_64 packaged compiled from source.Funny though,they forgot? to block the possibillity of watching a dvd from another PC in a samba network.
BeOS?,heard positive remarks.Is it still alive?
BeOS is dead but it’s the liveliest dead OS out there,BeOSMAX is updated frequently,the commercial BeOS Zeta is now shipping in it’s finished form,and there are also some other versions of BeOS PE that come out from time to time,plus therrre is also a version of dano out there called PhOS(which even has a multi-user interface) that’s very similar to zeta but free(although the legality of it is debatable)plus there is the Haiku project to ressurect BeOS from scratch as open source.there are lots of linux apps that have been ported to BeOS besides the native BeOs APPSwhich in many cases are superior to the linux ones,especially in the multimedia dept.So even though the kernel is no longer being developed and Be Inc. is long gone ,it’s still a pretty viable alternative to Linux
funny I tried that usb mass storage driver and it sent me down the path to KDL,maybe you are running one of the dano versions ,or maybe it just doesnt like my hardware
It probably doesnt like your hardware. I’m running r5.0.4(bone) with the replacement usb stack and the latest mass storage drivers and they work fine with my usb key and cf reader. They wouldnt work on another tower of mine. so its probably your hardware.
btw, did you try installing the drivers and thats it? you need to get the replacement usb stack, you can find it on beshare, before using thoe drivers. if you havent updated then thats probably the problem.
Most people just don’t get it:
Most people will not upgrade. They plan on using their computers as long as they can run. They hate learning new systems. Win98 is more than enough for most people -you can do pictures, word processing, Internet. 1998 software is fine if you need it.
Its only when they realize they can’t do the lastest things that they buy a new one.
The basics have not changed.