Just a heads up that this site has an animated SVG favicon. I had added it to my Firefox bookmarks bar and the favicon kept animating its color changes. Looked pretty neat, but then realised after a day or so that Firefox was chewing up 50-60% CPU on my MacBook Air. Turns out it was down to this bookmark, after I removed it, the CPU levels were much much lower.
I'm not sure if it's the same deal if I were to put the bookmark in a folder (so it's not in view all the time) but just something to note.
While what you said is true (MacOS was really unstable in these tumultuous years), this link specifically celebrates the user interface of the later versions of non-OSX MacOS. This doesn't really have a relation to the stability of the OS.
> this link specifically celebrates the user interface of the later versions of non-OSX MacOS. This doesn't really have a relation to the stability of the OS.
"Very pretty but can't do much" was a general take on the Mac OS cube of the day.
The lack of a fan or any decent cooling, the "lack of a floppy disk" (for those of us who didn't use Zip drives), it was pretty to look at but hard to work with.
We had one to run FrameMaker on, but beyond type-setting (& fonts), it was a shiny thing which was treated like a sunday sports car.
Where I was, the Tex user group is what eventually materialized into a Linux User group and there was simultaneously love for the screen, rendering and fonts for the Mac, but near hatred at having to use it to professionally typeset things.
Math publications quickly jumped ship out of Adobe due to OS 9, but very few came back to the OS X versions until years later when Apple started making really good laptops with fast hardware.
> The lack of a fan or any decent cooling, the "lack of a floppy disk" (for those of us who didn't use Zip drives), it was pretty to look at but hard to work with.
The G4 Cube had an (empty) standard mount and power connector for an optional fan.
I worked at a company that decided to do a new design because the chips for the old one had been out of production for decades and a solid percentage of what was still available on eBay was sitting in the warehouse to be scavenged for new production.
Pentium 2s aren't the only retro computers out there. There's many different computers, especially in the 1980s, that have components that are just simply not made anymore -- break one of those components, and you'll have a hard time repairing / replacing them.
That's true, but in many cases, it's not the integrated circuits (ICs) that fail, because they tend to be quite reliable. It's more often the capacitors, resistors, storage devices and power supply components that degrade over time. Capacitors, in particular, can fail due to heat, aging, or voltage surges, which can lead to failure in devices even if the ICs are still in good condition. Power sources can also fail due to wear on these exact components.
I've seen enough electronics repair videos that it seems the default for troubleshooting absent other conspicuous damage is to start checking the electrolytic capacitors.
There was a time when Gigabyte started selling more robust motherboards with quality capacitors that would last much longer. After seeing so many old motherboards dying from blown capacitors I was very happy to get one. Those motherboards so far held the full length of their meaningfull life until the CPU just got too slow to use for anything. Still try to look for that type of capacitors when I build new stuff for friends and family.
The Gigabyte line is called "Ultra Durable" and have solid capacitors instead of the electrolyte ones.
And the electrolyte can and will start to leak and foul the ICs around them, if not by ruining the traces/pads, then they can also foul the legs and/or find their way into the chip package itself, so the ICs will fail as a secondary issue.
So better to turn it on sometimes, without power cycling so much, to keep the electrolyte fluids wet, to extend the equipment life. Let it rot and dry and it will.
Electrolytics which have not had voltage applied in a long time (decades) may need gradual reforming, but if they aren't hermetically sealed they will dry out no matter what --- and heat will accelerate that process.
I learnt HTML purely because I was sick of waiting for Netscape Composer to launch on my 80386 PC back in the mid nineties. It had an 85MB WD HDD and 4MB of ram, running Windows 3.1. Double-clicking on the Netscape Composer icon in Program Manager would cause my hard drive to thrash for a solid 5 minutes, before the screen would update with _some_ resemblance of a Netscape window.
There's gotta be a better way to create web pages -- so I learnt HTML and was using notepad.exe to hand-craft my HTML pages. I would then copy them to disk (usually using ARJ.EXE to compress everything), and then go to school to use their internet connection to upload my pages to Geocities.
> Netscape Composer to launch on my 80386 PC back in the mid nineties. It had an 85MB WD HDD and 4MB of ram, running Windows 3.1.
Bleedin' Nora: that's certainly an optimistic system configuration for that application. I'm not surprised you lost patience with it.
I remember using a real mixed bag of tools to create HTML in the late 90s/early 2000s. Started off with Notepad but stayed away from Communicator until I had a PC powerful enough to run it easily (early y2k).
I also briefly tried exporting Word documents as HTML, which I think might have been new in Office 2000. This was a bad idea: the markup was hugely bloated, and images were primarily embedded as ActiveX objects that only looked good in IE, with heavily downscaled/coloured versions available for other browsers. Similar issues with Frontpage.
But I found the markup generated by Composer to be pretty clean by the standards of the time, so developed a hybrid workflow where I'd rough out pages, along with their content, in composer, and then tweak the markup manually.
I also remember finding a really nice text editor for working with web pages. It came free on a magazine cover CD and I wish I could remember what it was called [EDIT: it might have been HoTMetaL]. For editing raw HTML and JavaScript nothing could better it. It wasn't as good as VSCode + the right extensions today but, for the time, it was literally streets ahead. So I ended up using that + Composer for at least a couple of years, up until maybe 2002.
Word 97 has sensible export to basic HTML. No specific web page editing tools, but allows conversion of text content of existing documents in bulk. Search for
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97">
Later versions of Office use HTML as some kind of complete document serialization format. The website
Thanks, I stand corrected. The export from Word 2000 was anything but basic. And it did, as far as possible, seem to try to serialize most aspects of the document. Which, of course, is not really what you want from a 1999/2000 web page that most people would view over dial-up.
I suspect their target market with this was enterprise intranets where everybody would be forced to use IE, and therefore all the ActiveX garbage would render just fine... and given LAN bandwidth most people probably wouldn't notice the ridiculously large payload sizes (for the era) of these pages.
I didn't know about the HTML filter though because I only experimented with the export once or twice, during the evenings after lectures, which was enough to convince me I was heading down a dead-end path.
That's basically the system I had in the mid nineties, though it had 8MB of RAM and was running OS/2 (2.1 to 3). I edited HTML on it in Emacs, mainly. Eight Megs And Continually Swapping was very accurate at that time.
I remember my mate's dad bought a 233MHz Pentium II system with 32MB of RAM some time in 1997, and our minds were all absolutely blown by the incomprehensible power of this system.
I want to say before that, back in 94, he'd had some sort of 486 variant (might have been a 486SX 33 or something along those lines - fairly run of the mill for mid-'94) with 4MB of RAM back in '94, and I want to say it got upgraded to 8MB, that we played a lot of DOOM and DOOM II on, and I think there'd maybe been a stop at a Pentium system somewhere in the middle because I remember we played Quake round at his place, and I'm sure that was earlier than '97. I'm not sure the 486 lasted that long - maybe only a year or 18 months - before it was replaced with a Pentium I system, but my memory is hazy.
I do remember the Pentium II though because, for the time, it was such a beast of a system. I do remember it seeming completely ridiculous and like you'd never need that much computing power. Oh sweet summer child, etc.
Sure, it was very ambitious to run something like a 16-bit version of Composer on such a low spec machine, but I still gave it a go :D
This was around 1995. I didn’t suffer too long with Composer on my 386, I got sick of the swapping pretty quickly and stuck with Notepad for a long time afterwards.
I didn’t upgrade my 386 PC until 1998 (couldn’t afford to), when I got a Cyrus 6x86, which is another story altogether. If you know about Quake and FPU performance with the 6x86, then you already know the story.
XD may be good to use from a UX engineer perspective, but from a web developer perspective, it's not so great.
I occasionally get XD files from designers that I then have to cut up / develop for in HTML/CSS/JS, and XD does not do this well. Figma on the other hand, seems like it is designed really well with considerations for both designers (creating the designs) and developers (turning the designs into a product / project) alike.
I'm not sure if it's the same deal if I were to put the bookmark in a folder (so it's not in view all the time) but just something to note.