Classic Computing. My Dear Pismo runs 10.1 in the closet. It does nothing but host a simple web site that only says, “Yes, I do still exist.” I love this computer. It is a great toy. I have 3 batteries for it and each one lasts about as long as the one in my Air. It is also my only laptop with firewire and was just used yesterday to do a quick disk repair on ServerOnAStick. On this computer I have installed every version of OS X and OS 9. The only system that does not officially run on it is Leopard because it seems to require the AltiVec execution engine that the G4 has. But enough on the Pismo. Just looke at this. 10.1 is lightyears different from 10.5, its even light years different from 10.3. Look at those Pinstripes. They were there to match the pinstripes we found on the sides of the colored iMacs and they look absolutely hideous. But back then this was an amazing desktop. Look at that Save button on my chat program, Fire. It is soft and lickable. It also pulsates so vigorously that it makes you wish for Leopard’s, smooth and subtle pulsating action. Puma was the version of Mac OS X I started on. It came on my 733MHz PowerMac G4. However, the first time I turned on my G4 it booted into OS 9. I rectified that very quickly to get it into OS X. That was, after all, the reason I had gotten the Mac. There is still something about Puma that I love. The semitransparent window title bars are just so wrong. When something goes into the background it might make sense to have the whole window except the title bar go semitransparent. The title bar is click-on-this focal point of the app. Making it go invisible just doesn’t make sense. When you select an icon in Puma there is no surrounding box like now, the icon just gets darker. When you open a program you get OS 9 style box lines coming out of it. The sheets and other animated portions of the UI move so slowly in Puma. Apple just wanted to show off its stuff, but by later versions of the OS people got bored with waiting for the Print dialog box. Puma is the last OS with the soft buttons, it is the last OS wth the pinstripe dock, it is the last OS with the happy mac when starting up. It is also pretty much impossible to use today. Just like OS 9, almost nothing runs on it. Every modern browser requires at least Jaguar. It took me 2 hours just to find a VNC server that works on it (now built in). Adium didn’t exist back then, just Fire. Disk Copy was a full and separate program to mount DMG’s. Now it is faked as some sort of finder extension. There is no Activity Monitor, just a Process Viewer. Puma seems so old now, it just shows you how much work Apple does on OS X. I open up Windows vista and turn off the wizbang graphics and it looks like Windows 95 and has the same innards as Windows NT. But the Mac OS has been revied twice as often and the newest version is far different from the oldest version. It’s just great. In order of massive improvemements, in 10.2 we got search built into the finder and Rendezvous (Now Bonjour). In 10.3 we got Exposé, a new look for the finder and a new look for all the windows. In 10.4 we got Spotlight and Dashboard. In 10.5 we got everything. I just can’t wait to see how well my 2.4GHz Core2Duo iMac runs with the new super quick 10.6 that Apple has announced shipment in about a years time.

Tags: pismo, osx, mac, puma, 10.1, omniweb