flashback, part 83 of n

Beamish stout makes me think of Turlough O’Connor.

Back in the day, Turly was the developer of FInderPop, an absolutely essential piece of shareware for Mac OS 8 or so. It provided an easy contextual-menu environment to a GUI defined by a one-button mouse. And it was “pintware” – you paid for it by sending him whatever it would cost for him to have a pint of Beamish. It was the first I ever heard of Beamish.

FinderPop wasn’t the only essential software in the old days, of course. There was Kaleidoscope, the last word in Mac customization. Greg Landweber had started with “Greg’s Buttons,” to let you do some simple tweaking of the default Macintosh GUI, and then created Aaron to mimic the look of the late, not particularly lamented Copland OS. And once he combined the two, we had Kaleidoscope, which meant all kind of easy theming for the Mac OS. It obviously broke into a million pieces with the release of OS X, but for a little while, we had Unsanity’s ShapeShifter (which lasted approximately until the Intel transition and the ground-up rewrite of the window manager in OS X).

I don’t know why theming ceased to be a thing. It’s obvious Apple didn’t want too much tampering with the look and feel of OS X, and definitely didn’t want anything introducing instability into the graphic subsystem for any reason. Hell, you couldn’t pick a wallpaper for your iPhone before iOS 4. But then, I’ve never had anything but a black backdrop on my Moto X for longer than five minutes, largely because in AMOLED, any black pixel is your friend. Theming just distracts from what you came here for – anything that takes away one pixel of resolution, one milliamp-hour of battery life or one processor cycle away from why you pulled the phone out is your enemy.

So many things we used to depend on – RAMDoubler was a drop-in replacement for Apple’s own VM service, and it worked a treat for the most part – but it caused the Geoport Telecom Adapter’s modem connection to drop and that bug was never even addressed, as far as I know. (I’d love another crack at RADAR to see.) There was a whole suite of Internet essentials: Eudora for mail, NewsWatcher for USENET, MacGopher for, well, Gopher servers. MacPPP for dialup connections. MacTCP back when the OS didn’t come with the ability to handle TCP/IP connections built-in. Hell, the Extensions Manager started life as a third-party solution that would let you load things individually to try to pare down the background processes crashing your Mac, and was itself the tool that let me spot the Autostart 9805 infection at NGS, the only time in my life I’ve ever dealt with a meaningful Mac malware outbreak. Stuffit Expander was perhaps the most crucial of all utilities, because everything was a .sit file when you downloaded it.

None of those things are around anymore. You don’t load extensions at all now. Things like VM and TCP and archive management (based on .zip files) are all part of the OS.  And if you spent the majority of your computing time on a phone, you probably don’t even have a file system to speak of, just various degrees of data sharing between apps depending on how your vendor architects your OS.  It’s smoother and simpler and easier than before. The learning curve is a lot more shallow. The barrier to entry is infinitely lower.

Have we suffered by letting the drawbridge down? Maybe. Think of the “eternal September” that basically did for USENET when AOL got access to newsgroups, or the explosion of spam from newsgroups to email to basically any sort of text exchange, or the erosion of .net culture and its norms and standards. But this was the price of bringing fire down from Olympus. Besides, where to draw the line? Facebook? Twitter? Snapchat? At what point was the Internet this unspoilt Eden, this green and pleasant land? Generally it was about 30 days after your first access, at which point the newcomers ruined everything.

Actually that goes for a lot more than the Internet, when you get right down to it. Of which…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.