Classilla, a New Port of Mozilla To Mac OS 9 170
oberondarksoul writes "Every now and then, you hear about a new port of Mozilla to one of the lesser-used platforms. Recently, a new version of Mozilla has been released for Mac OS 9 — an operating system no longer sold or supported, and with no new hardware available to buy. Dubbed Classilla, it aims to provide 'a modern web browser running again on classic Macs,' and the currently-released build seems to work well on my old PowerBook 1400 — despite being a little memory-hungry."
Does anyone even use classic anymore? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
If you have the mirrored doors edition of 9, it added LBA48 support. Now that the smallest drives on the market are about 160 gigs, being able to use the portion of your ATA drive above the first 128 binary gigs is a pretty significant benefit. That OS version only shipped with one Mac model, though (the mirrored doors G4).
Re:Does anyone even use classic anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
We do at my office (publishing)
Well, we're down to only having 3 computers that solely run OS9, and more that still run apps in classic though.
We use Quark Xpress 4.5 and a particular set of XTensions. Quark's upgrade path, to put it bluntly, sucks. Quark5 and 6 were IMHO utterly useless and Quark 7 is basically "as good as" Quark 4.5 in my book. We do use quark7 but the problem is that Quark7+the extensions we need run far SLOWER on the quadcore macs than on 800mhz g4s/g5s etc. Sad. Has nothing to do with the merits of OS9 versus OSX, it's just because the newer versions of the apps we need and use on a daily basis, well, suck.
The writing is on the wall though, we're one or two hardware failures away from being Os9/classic free.
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There's always hardware emulation to run OS9
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Yeah, wasn't there a nice port of SheepShaver or something specially for Intel Macs?
Not sure how fast it is, though - but maybe Quark running in Rosetta might be the problem. I seem to remember Office for Mac being a real dog until the last major release.
And there are still plenty of PowerPC Macs around - old PowerBooks and Mac Minis still populate eBay regularly.
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Yes, there is sheepshaver and I did give it a try awhile ago, though perhaps I should try again. Worth looking into. Thanks for the tip.
Quark7 is a universal binary, as are the XTensions. They're written in LISP actually--kinda neat. From talking to the developer, the issue lies with architectural changes within quark that makes the XT run slower (can't vouch for this). The XTension takes marked up text and creates processed pages complete with columns, images, and footnotes, etc, optimizing line spacing, c
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Not for the software my mom wants to use with her music students, there isn't. Sure, you can cobble something together that is technically capable of running the application, but unless the timing of both the sound and video is perfect, it's completely useless.
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I miss Cubase VST32 and Protools 5 on OS9. ;_;
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I'm not sure that "robust" is a word I'd use for an OS lacking memory protection.
As for only running a single app, the rest of the computing world moved away from that model in the 80s.
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I can't totally agree... I think Quark 4.5 was a really great product. Every release since then has gotten bigger and more bloated and slower and added very few (if any) new features, while keeping bugs--the basic quark XTags (their own little markup language) parser in Quark7 crashes if it hits several kinds of malformed tag for instance--Quark 4.5 handled these errors without crashing. That's the kind of sucktitude I'm talking about. In Quark8 they decided to pull a Office2k7 and redesign the UI...just wh
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InDesign is heading down the same path of suckitude. The first version was SO nice and snappy on my 500mhz G4. It's getting worse and worse--more than throwing away the hardware speed increases.
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It's either giving that to my sister or letting her use my laptop.
Just kidding. iMac G3 seems to run OSX 10.2.8 very well, so we've got that. But to run OS9 software, you need OS9, and that's it.
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OpenSuse? Why not YDL? Yeah, I know the YDL community is pretty much mostly those running it on PS3's these days, but that's pretty much the case with all the PPC Linux distros
weird (Score:2)
I think a port of the gecko rendering engine would be great, but I'm dubious about the performance of a XUL-based browser on such an old platform.
Maybe someone could port gecko to my System 6-based Apple IIGS?
IIIGS (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe someone could port gecko to my System 6-based Apple IIGS?
No, but Apple ported Safari to the IIIGS.
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Maybe someone could port gecko to my System 6-based Apple IIGS?
Not going to happen without some sort of C++ compiler and decent graphics. Even then one would likely need a Transwarp GS/Zip GS card for a page to render faster then a weekend. After all, it takes the machine a couple of minutes just to decompress a small JPEG image!
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> Maybe someone could port gecko to my System 6-based Apple IIGS?
Not going to happen without some sort of C++ compiler and decent graphics. Even then one would likely need a Transwarp GS/Zip GS card for a page to render faster then a weekend. After all, it takes the machine a couple of minutes just to decompress a small JPEG image!
Well, good thing I found a TransWarp GS a couple of weeks ago! :)
I'd imagine the amount of RAM would be a pretty huge hurdle, too. I've got a ROM 03 machine with a 4Meg memory
Old Mozilla not Firefox (Score:3)
It is old code. From the FAQ:
the decision was made to split Gecko off at 1.3.1
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AFAIK, the last version of Firefox for OS 9 was 1.2.1.
First OS9 story in 7 years (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow. This is the first OS9 story [slashdot.org] on Slashdot since this one [slashdot.org] from February 2002. Incidentally, that one is the *only* other one.
Well, either that, or the Firehose is broken.
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Might well be that it is the only other one! I was pleased to have good reason (at least, I thought it was good) to use that icon ;)
timothy
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Mac OS Classic was always under-reported on this site in the "olden days" (i.e. when it was relevant to everybody else.) I have no idea why, since it was the most successful non-Microsoft operating system for, what, 15 years?
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In the olden days, this place was much more of a free software place, ISTR. Now it's just general computery stuff. Also, Mac OS X is in some ways the continuation of Mac OS, but in other ways it's very much not; the userbase nowadays is a lot more diverse. Mac OSwas used relatively little by the target audience of this place, that changed when Apple appeared to "get it" by putting Unix underneath a sparkly gui (but the command line's never been the reason Iuse GNU/Linux on my computers, except for about eig
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Its GUI has much in common. Aside form the obvious things like the (silly) global menubar, conflating the systray and the menubar, the (silly) close-button-in-the-left-corner, or putting disk drives on the desktop, the way you interract with the system seems very similar to me. It's very different from other well-known operating systems of 2001. And for most classic Mac users, the GUI was all that mattered: who gives a rats where the kernel comes from, as long as it doesn't hang up?
(None of the things I've
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If most Classic users are like me, they couldn't stand the shitty OS X UI. Once it became apparent that Apple has absolutely no interest in retaking their previous position of UI leadership, I moved to Windows. If I have to use a crummy UI, I might as well use the one with the most software. And, unlike Apple, Microsoft is actually interested in evolving the UI.
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Have you ever used a Mac OS X machine as your main machine for an extended period of time?
Yeah, I dual-booted between 10.2 and Classic, and then ran 10.3 and 10.4 with no Classic (or Classic emulator) at all. I've had more experience with OS X than I'd like to. I love the insinuation that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, though, that's nice.
How do you feel Mac OS X's let you down, ui-wise?
The main thing that bothers me, and that only Apple can get away with: version 10 of a product shouldn't ha
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The Answer Lies In Your Web Server Log Files (Score:5, Interesting)
There are lots of reasons for this. Some people cannot afford the new hardware required for Mac OS X. Some of those who could buy the hardware have a big investment in software that uses Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) dongles that wouldn't work on OS X even if the newer Macs were equipped with ADB - they haven't been for years.
Some software has been discontinued, with the vendors out of business, and so will never be ported to OS X-native. If the software is useful enough to the end user, then they'll keep running Mac OS 9.
Finally, some people simply don't know how to upgrade. Until very recently a relative of mine was running Internet Explorer 5.0 on Mac OS X 10.2 - no doubt riddled with well-known security holes, but she simply didn't know better. I bought her Mac OS X Tiger for Christmas (Leopard won't run on her G3), then visited soon after and installed it for her, then downloaded and installed all the updates.
All of these are reasons that I plan for Ogg Frog [oggfrog.com] to support the Classic Mac OS.
(And there are many Macs out there that are too old to run Mac OS 9; they'll be running 8.6 or some such.)
Re:The Answer Lies In Your Web Server Log Files (Score:5, Interesting)
Out of 2.9 million hits from IE browsers on our most active site since the beginning of the month, roughly 5200 are from versions of IE older than 6. That's about 0.1% of our IE users, and 0.05% of our total users.
Also, I've caught obvious UA spoofing in our logs -- one script reported a different, random UA with every request -- many of which were browsers you'll never actually see in the wild -- like "Lotus Notes web client"
What's more, even the biggest sites don't offer an A-grade experience for older browsers. Hell; I remember not being able to access microsoft.com using IE 3 in 1998! If microsoft dropped IE 3 support a decade ago, surely most of the web can as well. Even Yahoo offers a limited experience [yahoo.com] to users using old browsers, and facebook throws "get a better browser" messages up if you visit with IE6.
In the end, it's just not economically feasible, in many cases, for developers to spend time supporting 0.05% of browsers, especially when those browsers are so old that they support only a fraction of modern standards. I salute your efforts to make your properties accessible to _absolutely_ everyone, and I'd love to do the same, but we just can't justify the development cost, for the sites we run. We'd be spending thousands of dollars to support a number of users we can count on one hand, to the detriment of our tens of thousands of users on modern platforms. Frankly, if any of our frequent contributors are on older platforms, it's almost more cost effective for us to buy those few stragglers modern netbooks.
This is true of all software. Sure, we could write everything to run on DOS and Mac OS 7, but it'd be expensive to develop and test on so many platforms; there'd be minimal, if any gain in adoption; and we wouldn't be able to take advantage of more recent technology. In the end, taking the "support absolutely everything" philosophy just isn't a sound business decision.
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Honestly, I think there are a few people out there who simply overestimate the cost of upgrading.
They don't realize that you can pick up a solid netbook, or refurb desktop for $300.
It is not as up to date as Firefox 3.5 (Score:5, Informative)
and not supported by the Mozilla Foundation, but it is a Mozilla 1.3.1 based web browser.
Too bad it does not support the 68K MacOS 7.5.X environment, there are a lot of people running Mac 68K emulators and that is the version of Mac System that Apple allows to be downloaded legally for free.Usually the Basilisk II [online.fr] Mac 68K emulator, which seems to be popular.
At least they try for PowerMac Mac OS 8.6 compatibility, which is good for those PowerMac users who cannot upgrade to Mac OS9.
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I jumped on as a tester fairly early in the pro
Look and Feel (Score:4, Insightful)
One reason might be that the people who can still run Mac OS 9 like the look and feel better than Mac OS X. I certainly do - the new "shiny" / hyper-animated look and feel is one of the primary reasons why I have little current interest in getting a Mac. I feel the same way about Vista, but at least there I can turn it off.
User interfaces should not be "exciting" - they should be functional, and minimize eye strain and unnecessary distractions, especially for the people that have to use them eight or more hours a day.
Of course few things are quite as bad as trying to read an online article when an animated ad is flashing away in the next column...
Re:Look and Feel (Score:4, Insightful)
Boring does not equal functional. I'd say that the improvements made in OS X were all worthwhile. Easier to use and easier on the eye. It's like having air conditioning in your car. It's not absolutely necessary but at the end of the day you feel so much less tired.
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Shiny and hyper animated? I take it you haven't used Leopard or know where the preferences are? Currently, OS X is more neutral and minimalistic that OS 9, IMHO. And the animation is more informative than flashy (perhaps we can exclude the dock). The only really shiny parts left are the buttons and the dock (once again). But even so, it's been toned down a lot since the candy and pin-stripe days of 10.0.
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What's old is new again - or maybe not (Score:4, Funny)
the currently-released build seems to work well on my old PowerBook 1400 -- despite being a little memory-hungry.
Some things never change.
To the "Just Install Linux" Crowd... (Score:2, Informative)
Great - when is the Atari 1040ste port? (Score:4, Funny)
RS
Hallelujah! (Score:2)
Awesome! I know no one cares, but when you use Mac OS 8/9 (which is otherwise a great OS), the biggest problem you meet is an utter lack of a decent browser that can display a normal modern website normally.
OT:1680x1050 etc. from PowerMac 8500 (Score:5, Informative)
Roadmap missing Tracemonkey (Score:2)
I'm surprised their roadmap doesn't mention upgrading the javascript engine ahead of the other browser components.
Tracemonkey had, and I'm sure will have again, a JIT to emit native PPC code. That will be a MAJOR performance increase across the whole browser (recall, Mozilla is held together with bailing wire and JavaScript). The embedder-facing JS API has only had one incompatible change that I know of in the last bajillion years, and I'd be willing to bet the "JS_FRIEND"ly stuff wouldn't be too bad eith
How about a new port of Mozilla for Mac OS X? (Score:2)
Firefox doesn't work the same as Mozilla did. Some people miss Netscape and Mozilla. I can't even find a place to download the last version of Mozilla for Mac OS X.
If they're porting to old platforms (Score:2)
I'm looking forward to the port to DOS 5.0.
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Indeed. Maybe next there'll be an Amiga port.
(Well actually, I've always loved the Amiga - but the point is I'm not expecting to see a story on Slashdot about it these days, and if there was, you can bet there'd be all the "whocares/letitdie/deadhorse" comments. Why should an old OS like MacOS be any different, especially when Apple themselves moved on years ago?)
I see that the mods-who-can't-stand-any-criticism of Apple have already got to you (although I'm not sure why even they would defend MacOS - come
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
There is a team working on Amizilla [sourceforge.net] which is the AmigaOS version of Mozilla web browser. But it was last updated in 2006.
The other project is AMozillaX [amiga-news.de] which was announced but no code or web browser was released and it seems to have vanished off the Internet.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
If indeed he was mod'ded down then perhaps it was because he didn't contribute anything rather than it was that he criticized something Apple. Any idiot can respond to anything with "who cares?" or "WTF?" or similar, but that's just a lazy dismissal. It's even more lazy and less helpful than a good troll or flamebait. How are you supposed to even respond to that -- "I do!" - ? It's a totally useless comment.
A more insightful response might have been along the lines of, "I had no idea there was still a market for new browsers/applications for what I assumed was a dead or near dead operating system. Could someone enlighten me on the value proposition of MacOS 9 in today's world?"
Now I'd give such a response 2 mod ups for interesting or something.
Re:I do???! (Score:2)
Heavens no, that would be accepting a marriage proposal.
California can't handle that yet.
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Finally! ;-)
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Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, seriously, who cares?
Somebody will. Most of the projects I work on at home come under the category of "because I want to". I am currently building a digital clock which has been in the planning process for twenty years.
The software I work on in my day job is much older than MacOS 9. A lot of my work involves shoehorning modern stuff into it so this type of project is of interest to me.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would've cared.
I picked up a free G3 iMac awhile back, just because I've never had an Apple computer, nor does anyone that I know near here.
All I wanted to do with it was turn it into a handy Internet browsing machine. But I couldn't find a decent browser for it. I thought about upgrading to OS X, especially since I found some more RAM for it, but the process (involving a strange shamanistic incantation of multiple serialized firmware and OS updates) was scary.
Right. So, I put Ubuntu on it. Works fine, of course, but it's really not very much of an Apple anymore. A newer Firefox would've helped that.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
Have you heard of iCab [www.icab.de]? It's the only Acid2-compliant browser that runs on Mac OS 9, and is much more standards compliant than Gecko 1.3 (the version used in Classilla).
Although iCab is no longer maintained for Mac OS 9, its last release for Mac OS 9 was in 2008, far more recently than Gecko 1.3 (2002), and the Mac OS 9 version is still a full-featured modern browser with tabbed browsing, built-in AdBlock, excellent standards compliance (iCab was the first browser with an Acid2-compliant public build) - the only thing it's really missing is CSS3 opacity, and all that good stuff.
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No. I never heard of iCab.
But I don't have install media for this computer, either, and the usual sources [thepiratebay.com] don't really have a clean or easy way for me to turn this back into a Mac.
So it is, unfortunately for me, just another Ubuntu machine. Not that such a thing is bad in any particular way, but it's not a Macintosh. :-/ Maybe if the hard drive barfs at some point, I'll revisit it.
I implore the mods to up your score for your reference of iCab, though -- MODS! Pay attention. Someone has offered somethin
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I would've cared.
I picked up a free G3 iMac awhile back, just because I've never had an Apple computer, nor does anyone that I know near here.
All I wanted to do with it was turn it into a handy Internet browsing machine. But I couldn't find a decent browser for it.
Dude! I did the exact same thing... I wanted to get a feel for how the classic Mac OS worked (both from a user standpoint and a developer standpoint)... But it really didn't seem like a terribly friendly environment for someone who didn't want to put a bunch of money into the machine. I had an old Mozilla on there for a while, but eventually it was just wasting space and collecting dust, so I sold it at a flea market for $20.
It's actually a bit of a drag that I didn't make it work out. It's frustrating
Re:Who cares? (you insensitive clod) (Score:3, Informative)
i've upgraded many many old G3 iMacs to run OSX - and they run OSX just fine (so long as you update the firmware first). you need at least 128-256Mb RAM - but you should be able to get at least OSX 10.3 on ANY old G3 iMac.
once you got OSX installed on your old imac, its a piece of cake to install Firefox -- now the caveat is -- if you only have only OSX 10.3, then you can only run up to Firefox v2 -- to get Firefox v3 or later, you will have to have Tiger (OSX 10.4) installed.
now, unless you got one of the
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I won't be able to use IT's web pages - but that's okay, they don't do it that way (proprietary system interfacing w
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
schools ... you would be surprised at the number of elementary school class rooms that still have OS 9 apps and machines that run them ...
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
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IE 5.2 for Mac. As I remember it, it was a decent browser for the time. It used a different layout engine than IE for Windows (Tasman instead of Trident), and had really robust PNG support -- including full transparency in 24 bit PNGs. It also had a small memory footprint. It was superior to Netscape 4 in every way (apart from being from Microsoft).
I still fire it up every now and again to see how it copes with the modern web. It's not brilliant, but it's definitely usable.
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Then, 3rd world countries usually get them. So they would care about Classilla.
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Sadly, schools run all this 10+ year old hardware because no one bothers to give them better old hardware.
My school just got thirty used 2005-vintage iMacs from a local business that upgraded their machines to the latest and greatest. Businesses swap out old hardware frequently, and we have a local volunteer that prepares the old machines for new uses.
They clean up the old hardware, test it, and install stock software (OS X, FireFox, Office, etc).
It's a hell of a lot better to spend money on teaching instea
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everybody can afford to throw away old computers and buy new hardware. If you're a teacher at an elementary school in Mexico, and all you have in your classroom is an old mac, then this could be very important to you. It turns that mac from something that can't surf the web (or can't do so securely) to something that can.
No, I'm not an Apple fanboy. I run linux.
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Or just put one of the Linux or BSD distributions on there. They're certainly more usable and more stable than Mac OS 9 ever was.
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No kidding. Then you could get some modern software on these machines as opposed to waiting around for someone to compile something on top of an old version of Gecko.
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I will not feed the troll, I will not feed the troll, I . . .
Are you out of your mind? The point other commenters are making is that a non-trivial number of folks, with an emphasis on schools and other educational institutions, have old hardware that runs Mac OS 9. It might be that, in some abstract, general sense, Linux or BSD is more usable and stable than OS 9 (although I d
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I did some temp work in a (fairly well-off) district in Northern NJ 2 years ago.
Some of the teachers there wanted machines at their desks to check e-mails and perform other basic tasks with, and were given the OS9 iMacs that were formerly used in labs and classrooms. They fulfilled their (very simple) purpose quite well, and I believe are still in use.
I also still administer an old Xenix system that drives a series of B&W serial terminals and line printers via a DigiBoard. 'Administer' is a rather loo
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to side with the GP here. I love linux just as much as any other slashdotter, but the knee-jerk reaction to ANY problem around here is "JUST INSTALL LINUX."
There are a gazillion reasons that it's not as simple as that in all of these cases, first and foremost is COST. Who is going to pay for these installs, who is going to do the research to find someone able and willing to do these installs, who is going to pay for that? What about legacy software you CAN'T run on Linux, what about dongles, what about the network, etc etc etc. What about the cost of training the unionized teachers to use something completely new and unfamiliar as opposed to the same old "window thingy" they used to access their email?Does anyone around here even realize how much of a bureaucratic process it is to something "simple" as installing a new operating system in publicly-funded schools??
Undoubtedly, I'll get modded down as troll of flamebait for pointing out that a solution to a technical problem is not "just install linux" because there are other non-technical factors to consider in each scenario.
By the way, I think it's very cool that there is still active development going on for a legacy system, and that it has an active community, and I am in no way, shape or form trying to take away from that with this post.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
Name me one school that still uses old Macs
Does a fairly affluent school that is two blocks north of a prominent Canadian university count? Some teachers love making computers available to the children that they teach. Unfortunately, when board policies only allocate two per classroom and place the rest in computer labs, teachers often have to scrounge for what's cheap or free.
While on the note of obsolete technology in the classroom, I recently donated a Pentium 90 to another school in an affluent neighbourhood. In their case, the teacher actually wanted that extraordinarily old computer because many of the good educational games were designed to run on 486's or early Pentiums.
Mac OS 9 did not have memory protection or preemptive multitasking. It crashed a lot.
Just a note here: cooperative multitaking may cause a system to become unresponsive, but it won't cause a system to crash. In both the case of cooperative multitasking and the lack of memory protection, the stability issues were caused by applications rather than the operating system (in virtually every case). As such, it was quite possible to choose applications that did not affect the responsiveness or stability of the system as a whole. Granted, that was virtually impossible to do for web browsers in the case of the classic Mac OS.
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But the crashes are few and far- between with PPC- native apps.
Okay, I'm not sure if Adobe apps were PPC native, but I assume they were. OS 9 crashed on me several times a day using Illustrator and Photoshop (usually with nothing else running). Complete freeze, requiring hard reboot. This was the case with several installs on several computers, so it wasn't just one rig.
OS 9 was about 100x (no exaggeration) less stable that the first OS X on the same computer. It was just fucking awful on the stability front.
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Then you obviously suck at installing free unixes on these machines.
OS 9 is much faster on that hardware than you'd ever be able to make Linux run. Cooperatively multitasking and unprotected memory suck for stability but are great for the performance of desktop apps. Don't believe me? Look back further to Mac OS and AmigaOS on late-'80s machines with sub-10MHz CPUs and half a meg of RAM. You could do fullscreen animation and sound editing on those systems. Could you truly get Linux to run that nicely on them?
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I would definitely agree that MacOS 9 was a bad OS. It was by far the worst computer operating system I ever used -- much worse than earlier versions like MacOS 6 or 7, much worse than MacOS X, and much worse than Linux or FreeBSD.
The problem is that installing, say, Linux on an old mac is not something that a lot of people (e.g., my made-up Mexican elementary school teacher)
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The latest version of OS9 was 9.2. It was pretty terrible. Supposedly an update to make it more compatible with running in a box alongside OSX.
BUT, if you stuck with 9.1, it was the most solid of all of the early Mac OS's. I dont think OSX approached its stability until the later versions of 10.3. And I ran lots of extensions and oddball programs on it.
And yes, you can drag out all the technical reasons why OSX architecture is so much better but the reality is, where the rubber met the road, OS9.
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I completely disagree. My experience of 9.1 was complete freezes several times day (on different computers, so it wasn't just the one machine). OS X 10.0 crashed just *once* in the first month I used it as my main OS -- on the same computer OS 9.1 had taken to crashing several times a day.
Old Edu software and games (Score:2)
Or just put one of the Linux or BSD distributions on there. They're certainly more usable and more stable than Mac OS 9 ever was.
There's a lot of really good old educational software and simple games that run under the Classic OS. I'm thinking mostly of old Broderbund titles (half of it was crap, but half of it was, well, classic) but there is a huge old library of abandonware in schools. Much of it was never ported to OS X, to say nothing of Linux. Some of it was never even ported to Windows. (For that matter, lots of old Apple II programs never had Windows or Mac equivalents, so lots of schools kept their Apple IIes and IIgs's long
Re:Who cares? (you insensitive clod) (Score:2)
schools are poor dude - the $1000 that it takes to buy a new CPU for a student or a teacher comes out of the budget for the teacher's salary - i was in a school this spring (2009) - they're still getting by with ancient 486 PCs running windows 98 and the 'new' machine was running windows 2000. yes - this was in southern ontario - which is a lot better off than schools in mexico (or many other parts of the world) -
so - yes - this makes a lot of old machines more useful for those that can afford to update the
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're a teacher in Mexico using an old Mac, this is of no interest to you. You don't have Internet access anyway. Nice try though.
Nice try indeed. Harking back approximately two decades, Mexico became the first country in the American continent to begin installing fiber-optic telephone wiring for widespread use, even before the United States. FYI, this happened in Baja California.
Nowadays, the majority of Mexicans hooked up to the Internet do so through the telephone monopoly Telmex, Telnor in the Northwestern states (both owned by one of the ten richest men in the world, Carlos Slim). A minority hook up through TV cable services, fewer still via satellite (Starband), usually in remote rural areas where Telmex or Telnor have not arrived yet.
Nationwide, junior high schools in rural areas have adopted a teaching system via satellite known as telesecundaria, which can easily be adapted for Internet access and may have already done so.
Now, if you go to any urban area in Mexico and peruse the secondhand stores with electronics, chances are that you'll bump into an early generation iMac in working condition, and be able to purchase it dirt cheap, as the casual Mexican computer user has only used Windows in his/her entire life, so these things may sit on the shelves for awhile. As anecdotal evidence, a friend with a graphic design business once found and bought three iMac Graphite models in one swoop, a five hundred dollar deal, at one of these stores.
Therefore, if you're a savvy teacher in Mexico, or just plain a Mac user with a penny to pinch and a little luck, Classilla could potentially be a godsend.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
I care.
My daughter is getting old enough now to use a computer, and I've dug out an old iMac G3 DV that was given to us by a friend, and loaded several older pre-school games my mom had lying around from when my brothers were little.
Now, not only can it be a great little preschool computer for her, but it can also be used online in a pinch.
Or perhaps letting her have access to several of the show based sites that have content for the kids
(Sid the Science Kid, Sesame Street, and several other PBS, Disney and Nick JR. shows)
I could now let her go to those, without having to worry about what she could get into on my computer.
(she decided to rename a good chunk of my songs last time she sat on my computer)
Bottom line:
Is it state of the art, the next big thing? of course not.
but it did just make some older equipment just that much more useful.
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I tried pressing a tangerine iMac G3 (450MHz, I think) into service and found that those PBS sites - frankly: any Flash stuff - would bring it to its knees. I had tried a fresh install of 10.3 (debated 10.4) and even tried a Ubuntu installation, but Gnash wasn't quite up to their Flash version detection tricks.
But: even
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Why didn't you give her her own user account?
Not with that computer (Score:3, Informative)
Those sites use Flash extensively and it runs like a dog on my daughter's hand-me-down iBook G4. I don't think you'll be happy with the results on a G3. Flash isn't written well or at least with the same optimizations as the Windows version.
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> Now, not only can it be a great little preschool computer for her, but it can also be used
> online in a pinch.
I wouldn't use Gecko 1.3.x (which is what this is) online unless you're ok with the machine being exploited. Oh, and unless you're ok with a somewhat crappy user experience. Just for comparison, Firefox 1 shipped on top of Gecko 1.7....
On the other hand, the chance of exploits actually targeting Mac OS Classic is pretty low, I guess.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Pretty sure you can install Mac OS X in that thing. Not saying you have to, or if those games are compatible with it, but if you wanted to...
In my experience, "old" versions of Mac OS X (like from five years ago) are very nearly as much of a pain in the ass to deal with, in terms of getting reasonably modern software on the thing, as Mac OS 8 was when I tried it several years back. OS 10.3, for instance, is now old enough that most new software doesn't support it. OS 10.4 is very nearly at that point as well.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
I could have really used this... (Score:2)
about 4 years ago.
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I have a friend who's primary computer (over 10 years old) still runs OS9 . Not only that - he's hooked via a 128 (or was it 256) kbps line that costs him more than a 30Mbps cable that's available in his area. He works in graphics and every time I hear "it works for me", I'm crying a little.
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I do, since I have an original 233MHz Bondi Blue iMac with 64MB RAM.
Ever thought of getting rid of it? I mean, the computer's like 11 years old at this point... People regularly throw away computers no less than five times more powerful than that thing... And these days it costs money to dispose of a computer unless you can get somebody to take it from you... I had one and I decided it was just taking up too much space - and not getting used, since I had other, more powerful machines I used instead (including a five year old Mac laptop - which itself is at the ass end o
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The SE/30 had colour - you just needed an extra video card and external monitor to see it. That's how I used mine...