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Comment by poisonarena | Hacker News Reader

34 year old here.. about every year I set up a whole OS 9 emulation deal because of my obsession with Mac OS 9, I dont know if I am sad and dwelling on the past, but I just loved that OS so much and keep trying to get back to it and I know I am not alone. I love to see projects like these

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Screenshots of 90s operating systems are so relaxing. I miss interfaces that looked like interfaces, and distinct from content.

BeOS is another one that comes to mind.

That BeOS didn't become a serious, long-term contender in the desktop OS market is a sure sign we're not living in the best of all possible worlds.

That Amiga never achieved any success outside of niche SFX markets is a sure sign we're not living in the best of all possible worlds. (Although that's more 80s than 90s.)

There's a timeline out there where WindowMaker/GNUStep became the dominant desktop for Linux too.

In many ways, I think the state of modern personal computing is evidence we are, in fact, in the darkest possible timeline for it.

If you have not seen it, check out the BeOS-inspired Haiku

https://www.haiku-os.org/

https://www.haiku-os.org/files/get-haiku/ported-software.png

I think the early to mid 2000s Gnome had that same focus on full functionality presented with simplicity, rarely seen in today's interfaces.

OS/2 for me.

I loved the interface dearly. I miss MacOS classic and feel OSX is a step backwards in many ways, UX wise. But I don’t miss how primitive the OS itself was. Tracking down extension conflicts? Manually allocating memory? Cooperative multitasking? I’ll pass on those.

That's why Rhapsody was absolute peak for me. Haiku might beat it, though I'm probably stuck on Linux anyway.

I'm more of a System 7 guy, but I still have two G4 towers, a G3 Powerbook, as well as some beige 68ks.

They're still useful for making music and get used for that occasionally, but I honestly love just booting them up and using the Finder. I wish I could still use them for communication somehow.

>I wish I could still use them for communication somehow.

Bitlbee + IRC client.

A lot of good stuff happened on OS 9. There wasn't a lot of extra cruft, because programmers had to use the whole machine to implement their vision.

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