case sensitive filenames

[Tom Anderson]

At least, you seem to agree (by saying "unfortunately") to that it was bad
in that particular aspect (namely entries of the context menu).

I would certainly say that the classic MacOS didn't make enough use of
contextual menus in general. That was one of my long-standing gripes
against it based on my parallel experience with Windows.

PS: dragging icons with a touchpad sucks hard.

Really? I use one every day, and haven't had much trouble with it.

tom

 

[Andreas Leitgeb]

Maybe he meant with respect to OS 9 (or earlier).

Indeed, the talk was about classic MacOS. In my case some 8.*
(I've still got some old MacPowerbook with MacOS 8.* on it.)

Lifting the finger wasn't the problem there. Because tapping on
the touchpad never resulted in a click. You really had to click
that button under the pad for clicks. After that you either needed
both hands, or to do fine finger acrobatics, holding the button while
stroking the pad.

We only got into it, because Tom praised exactly that feature
of classic Mac that I consider the unique leader of the sh*tlist
of old MacOS' features, namely the "data fork".

 

[Tom Anderson]

Indeed, the talk was about classic MacOS. In my case some 8.*
(I've still got some old MacPowerbook with MacOS 8.* on it.)

Lifting the finger wasn't the problem there. Because tapping on
the touchpad never resulted in a click. You really had to click
that button under the pad for clicks. After that you either needed
both hands, or to do fine finger acrobatics, holding the button while
stroking the pad.

I confess to never having had a Mac laptop before a G4 powerbook, on which
is pretty straightforward to hold the button down with your thumb while
pushing around on the trackpad with your forefinger. And i abhor
tap-to-click. Was it harder on older machines?

We only got into it, because Tom praised exactly that feature of classic
Mac that I consider the unique leader of the sh*tlist of old MacOS'
features, namely the "data fork".

Firstly, you mean the resource fork, and secondly, the file type and
creator didn't live in the resource fork, they lived in the filesystem
metadata.

But yes, the two-fork structure became a huge headache as soon as you
wanted to interoperate with PCs. I think a better solution would have been
to say that files had one fork, and that this could be data or resource -
ie, to have two types of file, normal ones and structured ones. Works on
the 390, right? As long as there's a standard serialisation format for the
resource forks (which there would be, trivially), interoperation is pretty
much transparent. This wouldn't address mapping file types between Mac and
PC, but i think that was done pretty well by looking at file extensions
when copying from PC to Mac, or synthesising them when going the other
way.

tom