A tour of Mac OS X 10.0.3

Yes I know, Mac OS X in this blog should be out of place and off topic. But after growing so accustomed to the last incarnation of OS X, when I installed 10.0.3 on an external disk connected to my clamshell iBook SE 466 MHz (FireWire), I couldn’t help feeling ‘the vintage vibe’. Six years and four versions separate Mac OS X 10.5 from Mac OS X 10.0, and when the installation of Mac OS X 10.0.3 was over and I was looking at the desktop, I admit I didn’t remember all that aqua blue, those drop shadows behind the system font, those striped bars and gummy, pulsating buttons. I do think Mac OS X looks much more elegant now, but I can’t deny there was something playful and provocative in the look and feel of the first versions, from the Developer Previews to Mac OS X 10.1 (Puma).

My first contact with Mac OS X was with this latter version, but I had seen screenshots of what was before, and I really wanted to put my hands on some previous version. So when I saw that someone on the LEM Swap list was selling the original installation disk of Mac OS X 10.0.3, I had to have it.

So here’s a tour of Mac OS X 10.0.3, with my observations regarding what was there and what has changed over time.

First of all, reading the “READ BEFORE YOU INSTALL” PDF document, I was a bit worried I couldn’t even install Mac OS X on the partition of the external FireWire drive I had prepared for the occasion, since it was written that installation on external USB or FireWire volumes was not supported. I decided to try anyway and there was no problem — the Installer recognised both partitions of my external drive.

The installation was quick, took less than 20 minutes; quicker than more recent versions of Mac OS X, which is obvious, since there was actually less software to install. And here’s what I saw when I restarted in Mac OS X 10.0.3:

Ah, that deep blue Apple menu icon. Wasn’t it lovely? Other notable details: the keyboard layout menu was attached to the application menus, and it was not a menu extra on the right corner of the menu bar. The “Computer” icon in the Finder window toolbar was an iMac G3 (it would become an iMac G4 and then a more faithful representation of the actual Mac model in use). Then it’s interesting to see some elements in the Dock that would disappear as soon as version 10.1. They were called docklings and you can see three of them: the Displays dockling (between System Preferences and QuickTime Player), the Battery Monitor and the AirPort Signal Strength.

Apple quickly abandoned the use of docklings, but at this time it seems pretty evident that the Dock was designed to be a versatile center of operations, acting as a Launcher, a navigational tool (by putting folder aliases on the right side of it), an application switcher (taking the function of the Application menu in the Mac OS ‘classic’ Finder) but also as an evolution of the Control Strip.

By the way, the ‘dockling’ concept wasn’t that bad. With hindsight, using the Dock for status icons could have been a better idea, since the Dock is more expandable and eventually has more room for icons rather than the menu bar. The menu bar in my PowerBook G4 is quite crowded, and when an application has a lot of menus, they end up covering some of the menu extras in the upper right corner. Conversely, no matter how many icons you add to the Dock, it stretches to accommodate all of them and they’re all always visible.

I sure love that Battery monitor, by the way. Much nicer than the black & white & gray little menu extra that came afterwards…

But I digress, so on with the tour! Here’s the mandatory About this Mac screenshot:

No processor speed, just the processor type, and no direct links to System Profiler or Software Update, like now with Leopard.

Let’s see… That’s Internet Explorer. Can’t wait to get rid of it, but first let’s have a look at its interface:

Wow, Version 5.1 Preview Release! And yes, I opened the Clock application and there it is in the Dock. I miss the analogue clock a bit.

And now, System Preferences:

Sorry, I left the System Preferences application behind and grabbed a screenshot with the Signal Strength dockling in the foreground. (And did I mention I love that Battery monitor thing?). Things to note: the app name was shortened — “System Prefs” — and the various panes weren’t grouped in different categories. I haven’t dug much, but apparently there isn’t a direct way to change the desktop picture. There is a Screen Saver pane, but it’s only for the Screen Saver, and I found nothing under Displays either. Let’s click on the Internet pane…

…and here you are, iTools! For those who have been living under a rock these past seven years, iTools is the father of the .Mac (dotmac) service (so it’s MobileMe’s grandfather, then, heh). And it was free, also. I wonder what’s going to happen if I click on “Free Sign Up”. Oh wait, I can’t connect to the Internet. If you go back at the previous screenshot, you’ll notice that the AirPort dockling sees a lot of wireless networks of the neighbourhood. Mine is “AirBook Express”, but it’s a WPA Personal-encrypted wireless network and Mac OS X 10.0.3 still didn’t have the capability of connecting to such kind of networks (when I enter the network password, it says “Password incorrect”).

Let’s have a look at Mail now:

Mail 1.0 in all its glossy, striped glory.

It’s Sherlock’s turn now:

You know what? I miss Sherlock. Call me crazy, but the search method in the pre-Spotlight era was not that bad. If you consider how messed up the “Show All” Spotlight window has become under Leopard, Sherlock’s search window and search results pane was a breeze. Spotlight may be faster, but often the time you save with a Spotlight search is wasted afterwards when you try to decipher the search results. I have the feeling that Sherlock (and Finder) searches were slower but more efficient, results-wise, if you know what I mean.

Last but not least, QuickTime Player. Its Dock icon in Mac OS X 10.0.3 was ugly for sure. Let’s launch it.

QuickTime Player 5.0, ladies and gentlemen, with its peculiar mix of Aqua elements (stripes, glossy buttons) and brushed-metal inserts. Its look has definitely got better over the years.

As you can see, there was no iTunes at that time (iTunes 1.0 came a little later, with Mac OS X 10.1), and no iChat (iChat 1.0 would appear with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar). The Applications folder wasn’t very populated. I haven’t got a screenshot for that, but the list of applications with Mac OS X 10.0.3 was as follows: Address Book, Calculator, Chess, Clock, Image Capture, Internet Connect, Internet Explorer, Mail, Preview, QuickTime Player, Sherlock, Stickies, System Preferences and TextEdit, plus the Apple Script, Dock Extras and Utilities folders. In the Dock Extras folder were the aforementioned Battery Monitor, Displays and Signal Strength docklings:

If you notice, docklings have a “.dock” extension. It’s clear that the intent was to follow the Control Strip Modules model of Mac OS 9 and earlier versions. But then Dock Extras became Menu Extras, and the menu bar started getting crowded.

If you want to have an idea of how other applications looked in all this Aqua blueness, here’s a screenshot of Acrobat Reader 5.0:

But when I tried to open something newer (MacStumbler), this is what I got:

Wow, look at that exclamation mark! Dialog boxes are worse than I remember.

Two interesting things I noticed while finding my way around this old version of Mac OS X: firstly, performance. Mac OS X 10.0.3 was not yet a mature system, but felt quite fast and snappy with my 466 MHz G3 iBook. Snappier than Tiger (10.4.11), which is what I use daily. Another strange thing was the speaker volume, much louder than it is under Tiger. Don’t know why, but I’ll investigate soon.

That’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed this brief tour. Now back to System 7!

“The documentary for the rest of us”

From the Website:

“Welcome to Macintosh” is a documentary that explores the many ways Apple Computer (now Apple, Inc.) has changed the world. Whether a long time Mac fanatic or new to computers, Welcome to Macintosh takes you from the early days of the Apple I to the latest the company has to offer.

“Welcome to Macintosh” is a completely original, 100% independent production.

Here’s the trailer. The shipping date of the DVD is December 15. Thou shalt preorder. (I shall, of course.)

[Update: stupidly enough, I forgot to include a link to the Welcome To Macintosh website -- which of course is welcometomacintosh.com]

Adventures in Vintage (part 2)

The first part of the task to restructure my home network — where I put a PowerMac 9500 in place of a Quadra 950 to create a bridge between modern Macs and vintage machines — told the vicissitudes resulted from an unfortunate setback (two internal SCSI hard drives both dead on the same day). Reinstalling Mac OS 9.1 on the surviving internal hard drive of the PowerMac, as my exhausting story showed, has been far less trivial than expected, and when I finally succeeded, the first part of the story (and post) closed with a last catch:

I disconnect everything and restart the PowerMac 9500. The system loads correctly, but the Mac is suspiciously slow. Twelve minutes from the happy Mac icon to the fully loaded desktop are indeed too much. [...] Starting with extensions off everything works fine and the PowerMac is quite reactive, I’d say even more than before. The problem is obviously one or more extensions, or even a conflict amongst them. Perhaps by not installing Mac OS 9.1 directly on the PowerMac and instead using a Titanium PowerBook, some components might have been added that trigger a rejection in the PowerMac. Now starts the Hunt For The Evil Extension, in pure pre-Mac OS X style, and if the topic has entertained you so far and was fun to read, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Now, I don’t know whether the topic was entertaining and fun to read or not, but since I always like to get to the bottom of things, here’s the sequel of my adventure in vintage.

Before practicing the infamous “take away extension 1 / restart your Mac / put extension 1 back, take away extension 2 / restart your Mac / etc.” dance (long-time Mac users surely remember it as one of the most tedious and quite un-Mac-like experiences ever), I wanted to try to better understand that strange slowness of the PowerMac 9500 at startup. After a more careful analysis, the phenomenon was as follows: the whole boot process was taking place as if it were in slow-motion, with the extensions loading one at a time with a considerable pause between one and another. When the desktop was finally loaded, the entire graphical interface reacted to mouse clicks and keyboard input with great delay, in such a way as to make the Mac look frozen. (A similar scenario in Mac OS X would occur if, for whatever reason, a process could manage to suck 100% of CPU resources and to choke the CPU to the point of severely affecting the speed of the mouse pointer). In short, the Mac seemed so busy to handle something behind the scenes, that was not responding to external stimuli. I couldn’t hear any crunching or grinding activity from the hard drive (and this 500 MB unit is otherwise obscenely noisy), so I thought it could be some memory-related issue. After a few minutes in this state, however, the Mac ‘regained consciousness’ to be its old snappy self as it had always been, and everything was working smoothly. No errors, no unexpected nasty messages.

Perplexed, there wasn’t much to do but start the aforementioned ‘extension dance’, opening the Extension Manager control panel and starting to turn off unnecessary components (like FireWire Support, the numerous ATI extensions, the OpenGL related components, and so on). After every restart the situation did not change: Mac in slow-motion until the desktop was fully loaded, then a handful of minutes spent in a state of semi-dizziness, and then again back to being ’snappy Mac’. When even selecting the “Mac OS 9.1 base” extensions preset (which is proposed as a default set to use in case of conflicts with third-party extensions) the PowerMac continued to behave in this strange way after a restart, my patience was gone. (Consider a quarter of an hour for each reboot, multiply it by at least a dozen reboots and you start getting the picture of how much time you can lose with this kind of troubleshooting). It was crucial to install Mac OS 9.1 directly on the PowerMac, without workarounds and shortcuts.

So I connected the glorious SyQuest 5200C SCSI unit to the PowerMac and inserted a 200 MB cartridge with a clean installation of Mac OS 7.6; I restarted the Mac from this drive and deleted the Mac OS 9.1 System Folder on the internal volume. The idea was to try to put the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM back in the PowerMac’s optical drive and retry the installation. However — blame it on my fatigue — I forgot that the CD-ROM wouldn’t be recognised by the older drivers of Mac OS 8 and earlier versions. So I found myself back to square one once again, with a PowerMac only bootable from the SyQuest cartridge with Mac OS 7.6. I absolutely did not want to pull everything out, start disassembling the PowerMac 9500, removing the hard drive, etc., yet another time, therefore I thought about using again the PowerBook 5300 as a conduit between the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM (inserted in the Titanium PowerBook G4’s optical drive and shared from there) and some other external device where to install at least a minimum Mac OS 9.1 System Folder, in order to start the PowerMac from there later. Having the SyQuest at hand, I looked for a cartridge with enough free space, but in vain.

The situation was getting grotesque at best, but the idea of using another vintage device proved successful. In fact, I managed to install a minimum Mac OS 9.1 installation on a magneto-optical disk, resurrecting an old MaxOptix SCSI drive and a 652 MB double-sided disk (300+ MB per side). With Mac OS 9.1 installed on the magneto-optical disk, I connected the MaxOptix unit (it weighs as a Macintosh SE, by the way) to the PowerMac, restarted from there, inserted the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM in the PowerMac’s optical drive and finally performed a full installation of OS 9.1 on the internal hard drive. I then copied Vine Server for Mac OS 9 and placed it in the Startup Items folder, and at long last I managed to see the PowerMac 9500 from the 12-inch PowerBook G4 via Screen Sharing:

Since the screen resolution is set at 640×480 (it’s what the 14-inch CRT Macintosh Color Display can offer, apparently), the window is really small. I thought about some way to gain more screen estate, and I recalled an application I had tried years ago: SwitchRes. To my surprise, after a quick Web search I’ve discovered that the application is still supported, and there is a version for Mac OS X (SwitchResX) and for Mac OS 9 and earlier (SwitchRes 2). I downloaded SwitchRes 2.5.3, passed it over to the PowerMac and tried it. You have to be careful with this program, because you can easily try the wrong screen resolutions and find yourself with a black screen and the only thing you can do is a hard reboot. Fortunately, since I was controlling the PowerMac with the PowerBook G4 via VNC, I was still able to see the PowerMac’s desktop on the PowerBook even at higher resolutions (800×600 in the image below).

I registered SwitchRes 2 (I remembered well, it is a great program) and having now finished with the PowerMac 9500’s configuration, I went to see if the 4 GB external hard drive with Rhapsody Developer Release 2 was still as I left it almost a year ago. I connected it to the PowerMac but of course it wasn’t possible to restart directly in Rhapsody, since with the death of the first hard drive I had lost the Multibooter. This application/control panel can recognise Rhapsody-formatted volumes (Rhapsody doesn’t use the Mac HFS or HFS+ filesystems, but UFS, a UNIX filesystem) and you can select them as startup disks (provided, of course, there is a valid Rhapsody system installation on them). Therefore, I inserted the Rhapsody DR2 CD-ROM and copied Multibooter to the hard drive. I launched Multibooter, and the external drive with Rhapsody was immediately recognised:

The figure shows the volumes being recognised: 9500 (Mac OS) is the PowerMac internal hard drive; Rhapsody DR2 (Mac OS) and Rhapsody DR2 (Rhapsody) are the two partitions on the Rhapsody CD-ROM, so that it can be mounted by both Mac OS and Rhapsody; and finally Titan1T7 (Rhapsody) is the external 4 GB hard drive, only visible from Multibooter (it’s not mounted on the desktop — and can’t be, for the reasons above). Note how this application/control panel would become the Startup Disk preference pane in Mac OS X, with the same horizontal display of selectable boot volumes.

After selecting the external drive and restarting, I was back into Rhapsody, with the windows opened in the Workspace Manager right where I left them in late 2007. I’ll talk more about Rhapsody another time: I want to reacquaint myself with this operating system first. I guess the next adventure will be about bringing the PowerMac 9500 with Rhapsody to surf the Web by trying to reinstall OmniWeb (yes, OmniWeb has been around for a while now). If that won’t work, well, there’s always Lynx!

Adventures in Vintage (part 1)

These days I’ve been renovating my Mac home network. I wanted to make some improvements, but some incidents happened on the way, creating a ’snowball effect’, and taking me back to the classic Mac OS troubleshooting era. I love old Macs and love to maintain them, putting them to good use whenever possible — I wouldn’t have opened this very blog otherwise. But one thing should be said: in a pre-OS X environment, the process of solving problems when everything goes wrong may soon become a bit of a nightmare, and the time needed to isolate the cause and find a solution or a workaround may be unacceptably long. This to refresh the memory of those few who are still pining for those good old Mac OS 9 times.

It all started in a simple, even trivial way. In my home network the link between the more recent Macs and the vintage Macs has always been a Quadra 950. Sometimes a PowerBook 5300, but only temporarily. I wanted a machine that is versatile and expandable, and the Quadra 950 seemed the ideal choice, since you can insert up to a maximum of five hard drives in it. With the addition of an Ethernet card, the Quadra is the ideal bridge between the modern PowerBooks and the serial-based LocalTalk network populated by the Colour Classic, the PowerBook Duo 280c and occasionally a Macintosh SE.

The Quadra 950 has done its job quite well so far, but having a PowerMac 9500 with more processor power (a 133 MHz PowerPC versus a 33 MHz Motorola 68040), more RAM (272 MB versus 28 MB), and also a CD-ROM drive and a USB card, I thought about putting the PowerMac 9500 to do the Quadra’s job. The reason why I have not done this before is that the Quadra had its own ‘office space’, with its beautiful 14-inch CRT Macintosh Color Display (which weighs several tons), the keyboard and everything. Having to make room and then remove the monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.. I thought I could use the Quadra 950 in a headless setup, controlling it remotely from the PowerBook G4 with a VNC client. But for this the best candidate is the PowerMac 9500 hands-down: in addition to the aforementioned advantages, the 9500 can run Mac OS 9.1, and simply installing Vine Server for OS 9 (formerly OS9vnc) is enough to do the trick.

The migration was fast, the PowerMac configured within minutes, and everything worked at once. At boot, the PowerMac automatically turned AppleTalk on over the Ethernet port and activated Sharing. Vine Server was initiated too (just put it in System Folder > Startup Items). On the PowerBook G4 I launched Screen Sharing, manually entered the PowerMac 9500’s IP address, and in a few seconds, a window with the PowerMac desktop appeared.

Four hours later, the beginning of the end: the internal 8 GB SCSI drive with a complete Mac OS 9 system and some folders containing backup stuff stopped working, just like that, without even a farewell rattle. Any attempt to open files or folders gave me an error (element not found) and after a restart, the hard drive was no longer recognised. So I tried to reboot from the other internal 500 MB drive, but there wasn’t installed any valid System capable of running a PowerMac 9500 — only the minimum System 7.1 installation included in A/UX.

I turned off the PowerMac, disconnected everything, opened it, removed the dead drive, and while I was at it, I looked for another good one. Rummaging in my cartons filled with old hardware, I could find a 1.3 GB Quantum Fireball which in a previous life was the boot disk of a Quadra 700. I connected it and restarted the PowerMac 9500. The Mac restarted exactly from that volume, which (I had remembered well) still contained the Mac OS 8.1 installation of the old Quadra 700. At that point the idea was to insert the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM and update the existing Mac OS 8.1, but — surprise — the Mac did not see the CD. Why? Long story short, after some researching I discovered that in order to recognise that CD, the PowerMac needed the updated Apple CD-ROM extension… from Mac OS 9. It was not even possible to boot directly from the CD by holding down the C key during startup. And I was stuck in a vicious circle.

And there’s more. To further complicate things, after one of the many restarts, the recently found 1.3 GB hard drive died too (or at least was hanging in a loop and you could hear a repeated clicking noise, much similar to a car not revving up, so to speak). The Moral: No matter if you are experiencing a moment of unique shakespearian inspiration — never, ever call a pair of hard drives “Rosencrantz” and “Guildenstern.”

My work at this point gets complicated, because unfortunately the last survivor is also the less capacious disk, only 500 MB (and 180 free). The optical drive of the PowerMac does not see the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM, then one possibility is to extract the disk, insert it in an outer SCSI shell and connect it to the PowerBook 5300. This PowerBook, connected to the Titanium PowerBook G4 via Ethernet, can see and access all the volumes connected to the Titanium. So I inserted the Mac OS 9.1 CD-ROM in the TiBook, had the PowerBook 5300 mount it on its own desktop, and from there I launched the OS 9.1 Installer, specifying a base installation on the 500 MB hard drive of the PowerMac 9500, now temporarily become an external unit. At approximately 60% of the process, the installation failed because the Installer apparently couldn’t extract files from the Big System Morsels compressed archive. Also, the Ethernet connection with the TiBook fell suddenly.

I started thinking that perhaps the problem was the OS 9.1 CD itself. Plan B is soon put in place: restore the Ethernet connection between the TiBook and the PowerBook 5300, and brutally copy the System Folder on the Mac OS 9.1 CD, which is a bare-bones system setup to be able to boot the Mac from the CD. The plan is expected to proceed this way: reinsert the hard drive in the PowerMac 9500, restart the PowerMac using the minimum System Folder previously copied into it, and finally put the OS 9.1 CD in the 9500’s optical drive (which now should be recognised) and do a full installation of Mac OS 9.1.

The installation fails twice: the first time for an undefined error during copying; the second time because, near the very end of the process, there’s no more disk space left (now that we’re all spoiled by having gigabytes and gigabytes of storage, we have forgotten “Disk Full” errors). But now, thanks to the minimum OS 9.1 System Folder, the PowerMac’s Ethernet port is recognised in the AppleTalk control panel, so I can retry the installation by putting the OS 9.1 CD in the TiBook and mounting the CD on the PowerMac’s desktop. (In the previous Mac OS 8.1 installation, I had removed all Ethernet-related extensions, since the Quadra 700’s Ethernet connection was AAUI and not 10Base-T — that is why I had to remove the hard drive and link it to the TiBook via the PowerBook 5300).

I try the installation one more time and during the process the connection between the two Macs falls. The last resort before surrender is to do a full install of Mac OS 9.1 on an external FireWire drive connected to the TiBook, mount the disk on the PowerMac 9500’s desktop (the 9500 being connected to the Titanium via Ethernet), and copy that System Folder – now truly complete — from the FireWire disk to the one inside of the 9500. This time everything goes smoothly.

I disconnect everything and restart the PowerMac 9500. The system loads correctly, but the Mac is suspiciously slow. Twelve minutes from the happy Mac icon to the fully loaded desktop are indeed too much. (As an aside, I can’t help noticing how starting times with Mac OS 9 and earlier are always much faster than any version of Mac OS X. The old Quadra 950 with System 7.5.3 is ready in 40 seconds. The PowerMac 9500 before the disaster did a complete boot in just over a minute, with Mac OS 9.1). Starting with extensions off everything works fine and the PowerMac is quite reactive, I’d say even more than before. The problem is obviously one or more extensions, or even a conflict amongst them. Perhaps by not installing Mac OS 9.1 directly on the PowerMac and instead using a Titanium PowerBook, some components might have been added that trigger a rejection in the PowerMac. Now starts the Hunt For The Evil Extension, in pure pre-Mac OS X style, and if the topic has entertained you so far and was fun to read, I’ll let you know how it goes.

I know that the first reaction, after reading this adventure, is to think that I must have a lot of time in my hands, and that I must have nothing better to do. In reality I only spent a couple of mornings with this. I found myself with some free time and I just wanted to have some fun, most of all. The beauty of these undertakings is to never give up and see who succeeds. The beauty lies in succeeding and having a diversified and efficient home network, with the PowerMac 9500 mounting all the volumes of my vintage Macs, thus allowing me to access all my files from one location. But if you don’t consider the playful side of this and look at all I went through to make things work from a strictly productive point of view, then we can see how life with Mac OS X is much, much easier.

Old Macs put to good use: another example

OS9. WTF? VNC. FTW!: With this highly acronymised yet catchy title, a few days ago my friend Grant Hutchinson posted an entry on his blog detailing his most recent server configuration to control his Web server at home from elsewhere. What’s lovely about it is that:

The server itself (running the very site you’re viewing) is an 11 year old Power Macintosh 9600/200 dual processor with 256MB of memory and a pair of 4GB hard drives.

The choice of the Web server software is interesting as well: Grant is using WebStar 4.4 by Kerio (formerly 4D). Sadly, as the brief Wikipedia article informs, “On June 30, 2008, WebSTAR was officially discontinued. Technical support for the product will end as of June 30, 2009″. It’s too bad. However, don’t miss the first external link referenced in the article: The Crack A Mac Story from the TidBITS archive. You’ll understand just how good this piece of software is.

Now back to Grant:

Keeping the VNC server company alongside WebStar is an old school version of Maxum’s Rumpus for FTP and the unbeatable Summary for raw log crunching. Sophisticated Circuit’s iDo Script Scheduler keeps things tidy by firing off a series of maintenance AppleScripts, while Rebound! handles monitoring and recovery tasks for when various application or system events go kerflunky.

The lesson here is always the same: vintage Macs can still be quite useful, you just need a purpose and a good bespoke configuration — as I did with my PowerBook 5300. Nowadays finding software for pre-Mac OS X systems (sometimes even pre-Mac OS 9) may be harder than back in the olden days, but hunting is fun and the results can actually be rewarding.