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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

I managed to get over most of the nostalgia in my life. After a certain age, I feel it’s a bit counterproductive and not a net positive.

But old Macs hit me hard and it’s something I can’t seem to build an immunity to. The aesthetics, the simplicity, the cohesion of the metaphors… so good.

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That's because it's never just nostalgia. Sometimes things were better in the past. Take Google search for example. Everyone on HN knows it used to be better and that it's been getting worse every year. Of course, a lot of that was not (originally) Google's fault because spammers get more sophisticated every year, but I think Google deserves a share of the blame because they have a conflict of interest by running the ad network so many spammers use.

I still believe Classic Mac OS (culminating with OS 9) was way easier and more pleasant to use. Everyone knows the story though: it didn't keep up on the back-end. Application crashes would frequently bring down the entire operating system. Multi-user security was non-existent (you were basically always running as "root").

But when Mac OS X came along they abandoned the dedication to ease-of-use and focused on power user features to go along with a more modern (UNIX-based) kernel and userland. That led to the computers we have today: for more complicated, mixed metaphors, and borderline unusable by grandma.

Can’t grandma still use the old computer while we all use our new computers with new software that’s enriching our lives? I have countless instruments at my disposal in VST form, 3D software like blender, DAW to write music in, stable diffusion to help with the creative process.

Sure, grandma can still use the old computer. That's not the point. I see people constantly make this conflation here on HN. It's the idea that you can't have new technology while keeping the benefits of old. It's rubbish! What made the Classic MacOS great and easy to use were its solid, fundamental principles. We have abandoned those principles for convenience's sake.

>Can’t grandma still use the old computer while we all use our new computers with new software that’s enriching our lives?

Sure! And so can Uncle Joe and Aunt Mable! But why should they have to?

We used to have this thing called 'sane defaults' and configuration options, which allowed people to set things to their preferred level. Why is it now suddenly that everything is hardcoded to behave one way? Nothing is allowed to be configurable?

So much of this is about configurations and not about the age of the software being used.

Consider how little testing most software apparently has before release. If that's not going to happen, why would they put the effort in to making it configurable?

No, she can't. For the simple reason that it'll risk getting hacked the moment it's connected to the Internet.

I don't share any of the nostalgia about old Macs most of HN seems to have. They weren't around me in my childhood, and even trying to get anything meaningful done on classic MacOS in the modern times on an emulator is an exercise in frustration because of how poor the support for Cyrillic characters is.

But! I do have a similar feeling about old Windows versions. The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser (not yet ruined by the existence of touchscreens) and much more thought out. They actually felt like extensions of your mind, not something you have to fight all the damn time.

Two things frustrate me immensely about modern computers: the dumbing down of everything, and the insistence on using touchscreen-inspired UI controls and patterns where they don't belong. The third thing, that kinda encompasses the second one, is the erosion of affordances. Is it a label? Is it a button? Is it a text input? You never know!

It has more to do with what you were brought up with than any intrinsic merit, I'm sure.

Being a Mac die hard I despised DOS and Windows 3.11. But I remember seeing Windows 95 and being as impressed as my young self would allow itself to be while still exhaling my Mac superiority fumes.

The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser

I’m not so sure about that. The pixel density was lower so apparent size was the same for the “denser” UI. A 14 inch vga monitor in the late 90’s would run 800x600, where a modern 14 inch laptop runs 1920x1080.

Doesn't a "14-inch" CRT monitor have a smaller viewable area? I remember LGR saying that at least. So, 800x600 at 13" yields 76.92 dpi.

The once extremely common 1280x1024 19" monitors are 86.27 dpi.

My modern 14" laptop has a resolution of 3024x1964@2x. That's an effective resolution of 1512x982. And it's 128.78 dpi, ignoring the retina thing. But then the thing to keep in mind is that you usually sit closer to a laptop screen than to a monitor. I have no trouble reading 11px font on that screen from my usual viewing distance.

And yes there is an issue with some Windows laptop manufacturers shipping their laptops without the correct DPI set in the system, thus everything becoming way too small with default settings, and thus designers designing those gigantic UIs to compensate for that.

Me too. I think it's because Macs were around when I was a child, and they seemed to represent all the possibility of the future. At the turn of the 90s I connected to bulletin boards before I'd heard of the internet, and it seemed like whatever sci-fi future was ahead of me, these machines were pointing the way.

Same. And, for me, it's the little happy Mac icon at startup... seeing him takes me back to such specific moments in my childhood. Playing Oregon Trail in my friend's basement... damn.

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