Beamish stout makes me think of Turlough O\u2019Connor.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cpintware” – 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.<\/p>\n
FinderPop wasn\u2019t the only essential software in the old days, of course. There was Kaleidoscope, the last word in Mac customization. Greg Landweber had started with \u201cGreg\u2019s Buttons,\u201d 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\u2019s ShapeShifter (which lasted approximately until the Intel transition and the ground-up rewrite of the window manager in OS X).<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know why theming ceased to be a thing. It\u2019s obvious Apple didn\u2019t want too much tampering with the look and feel of OS X, and definitely didn\u2019t want anything introducing instability into the graphic subsystem for any reason. Hell, you couldn\u2019t pick a wallpaper for your iPhone before iOS 4. But then, I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
So many things we used to depend on – RAMDoubler was a drop-in replacement for Apple\u2019s own VM service, and it worked a treat for the most part – but it caused the Geoport Telecom Adapter\u2019s modem connection to drop and that bug was never even addressed, as far as I know. (I\u2019d 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\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
None of those things are around anymore. You don\u2019t load extensions at all now. Things like VM and TCP and archive management (based on .zip files) are all part of the OS. \u00a0And if you spent the majority of your computing time on a phone, you probably don\u2019t even have a file system to speak of, just various degrees of data sharing between apps depending on how your vendor architects your OS. \u00a0It\u2019s smoother and simpler and easier than before. The learning curve is a lot more shallow. The barrier to entry is infinitely lower.<\/p>\n
Have we suffered by letting the drawbridge down? Maybe. Think of the \u201ceternal September\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Actually that goes for a lot more than the Internet, when you get right down to it. Of which…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beamish stout makes me think of Turlough O\u2019Connor. 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 \u201cpintware” – you paid for it by sending … <\/p>\n