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What software and functions do you miss in pre-OSX?
- Thread starter Knez
- Start date
Yeah, I know.
But I'm going to diverge from the topic for a little bit.
The first release of Dropbox was in September 2008, almost a year after the release of Leopard, and two years after any PowerPC systems had been sold.
Most people who have been crying the loudest about Dropbox seem not to remember that at the time, there were no server or network-based solutions for that task on the Mac, at all. Dropbox is a new thing that was invented well into the Intel era, and sync-based cloud storage has essentially become the standard since then. iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and I'm pretty sure Amazon's new consumer-focused cloud storage solution all use desktop sync clients rather than doing something akin to mapping a drive or using a specialized client to transfer files to and from the storage location. (Unrelatedly, I actually wish there were a few storage solutions that did allow you to just map an AFP, SMB, webdav, etc drive, but that's another issue.)
So, it's really interesting to see one of the more active PowerPC-focused areas to be almost completely up in arms about something that literally didn't exist yet when their machines were built and sold. You'd think somebody issued a software patch that disables all word processors, and suddenly nobody can do any writing on PowerPC Macs.
The official reason from Dropbox for the change in support is because the development workflow needed to support 10.4 through 10.10, which is what they currently "support," if I remember correctly, is totally insane, and they may want to make changes to the application and the architecture of the whole system that make a "present but unsupported" dropbox client unsuitable.
Despite the fact that I personally believe G4s and G5s were horrible, even when they were new, I do think it's a shame these machines are starting to miss out on things. Of course, they wouldn't if they were running Linux or BSD, and Windows PCs from the era can all typically run Windows 7 and will as such have support for this kind of thing for the forseeable future, which is one of the unfortunate things about, well, any platform that's not linux or Windows. It'll be interesting to see how long Mac OS X 10.10 supports things that get introduced in the future, or how long today's Macs are supported by new releases of Mac OS X. The "Late 2007" MacBook Pro is still receiving new software, at least as of this wriitng.
But I'm going to diverge from the topic for a little bit.
You know, it's actually really interesting. Before dropbox, there was no automatic, continuous, multi-endpoint syncing for consumers. There was rsync, but it wasn't really continuous, nor does rsync really use a single repository. There are code management solutions, but those aren't meant for the same thing dropbox does. There was Microsoft Groove, SharePoint Workspace, OneDrive for Business, but that all required that you have a SharePoint server. Even Apple's online storage, whatever it was called at the time, was just a folder you mounted on the desktop using AFP, and stored files directly online, instead of syncing them.
The first release of Dropbox was in September 2008, almost a year after the release of Leopard, and two years after any PowerPC systems had been sold.
Most people who have been crying the loudest about Dropbox seem not to remember that at the time, there were no server or network-based solutions for that task on the Mac, at all. Dropbox is a new thing that was invented well into the Intel era, and sync-based cloud storage has essentially become the standard since then. iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and I'm pretty sure Amazon's new consumer-focused cloud storage solution all use desktop sync clients rather than doing something akin to mapping a drive or using a specialized client to transfer files to and from the storage location. (Unrelatedly, I actually wish there were a few storage solutions that did allow you to just map an AFP, SMB, webdav, etc drive, but that's another issue.)
So, it's really interesting to see one of the more active PowerPC-focused areas to be almost completely up in arms about something that literally didn't exist yet when their machines were built and sold. You'd think somebody issued a software patch that disables all word processors, and suddenly nobody can do any writing on PowerPC Macs.
The official reason from Dropbox for the change in support is because the development workflow needed to support 10.4 through 10.10, which is what they currently "support," if I remember correctly, is totally insane, and they may want to make changes to the application and the architecture of the whole system that make a "present but unsupported" dropbox client unsuitable.
Despite the fact that I personally believe G4s and G5s were horrible, even when they were new, I do think it's a shame these machines are starting to miss out on things. Of course, they wouldn't if they were running Linux or BSD, and Windows PCs from the era can all typically run Windows 7 and will as such have support for this kind of thing for the forseeable future, which is one of the unfortunate things about, well, any platform that's not linux or Windows. It'll be interesting to see how long Mac OS X 10.10 supports things that get introduced in the future, or how long today's Macs are supported by new releases of Mac OS X. The "Late 2007" MacBook Pro is still receiving new software, at least as of this wriitng.
Charlieman
Well-known member
"Development workflow" and "architecture" and waffle about 'the whole system that make a "present but unsupported" dropbox client unsuitable'. This is painful English language, explains nothing and creates grumpy customers. If a supplier proposes to dump excrement on my head, I'd like to read it in English.
Apologies to people who do not use English as first language.
English is my first language; attempts in other tongues are laughable.
IPalindromeI
Well-known member
Dropbox probably has a bunch of #ifdefs and if(version < 10.something) then DO_HACK() hanging about, which hamper maintainability. They likely want to kill everything pre-Yosemite soon because Yosemite adds an elegant (no memory injections into Finder) way to support third-party sync services.
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@ Cory5412 Yeah I know, and it's all the fun of it. it was non-existant at the time these machines came out.
Be able to run Dropbox on a Pismo running Tiger makes you (and the machine) feel young , appart from being convenient.
Removing it is painfull , like when you get older and find that you can't run 1Km any more without being exhausted ... You're p***off.
;p
@ IPalindromel - So Extensions Manager is back then ! yes I saw that Extensions tab in the system preferences...
Maybe we'll see "Extensions Overload 2". That's one thing that always bothered me in OS classic, the extensions system can be very convenient and simple , but it can also be a curse when one ext put the system in a mess and you have to find which one.
Be able to run Dropbox on a Pismo running Tiger makes you (and the machine) feel young , appart from being convenient.
Removing it is painfull , like when you get older and find that you can't run 1Km any more without being exhausted ... You're p***off.
;p
@ IPalindromel - So Extensions Manager is back then ! yes I saw that Extensions tab in the system preferences...
Maybe we'll see "Extensions Overload 2". That's one thing that always bothered me in OS classic, the extensions system can be very convenient and simple , but it can also be a curse when one ext put the system in a mess and you have to find which one.
IPalindromeI
Well-known member
Except OS X has things like "preemptive multitasking," "memory protection, "interprocess communication" and my favourite, "file system permissions." The extensions have limited hook points and run in their own separate memory space, so the can't bring down the whole system.
That's all my paraphrasing of Dropbox' announcement. Dropbox has tried as hard as they could to be nice about it. It would be interesting to know the proportion of PPC Mac users who are and aren't paying for the service. Somebody who wanted to develop a replacement service might be able to make hundreds of dollars doing so, and I suspect Dropbox just saw that it wasn't worth the effort.
If you want my version: Stop using a ten-year-old computer that hasn't gotten security patches for seven years as your main computer. Stop using it as your second computer. Take it off the Internet altogether.
To be honest, given the number of people using PPC Macs as their main computers who are so mistrustful of the cloud, I was surprised to see the particular backlash that I did, over on macrumors.
Not to be that guy who does the "Why are you even using a Mac?" thing, but, well. Since that's my schtick, here it goes.
If you don't trust Apple, and you aren't willing to run modern hardware, why would you use a Mac? It's one thing to have such a machine as a hobby computer (heck, I want to pick up a late G4 or a G5 of some kind as a local-only 10.5 box to run some apps I still have from that time period) but I'd say that it's pretty unreasonable to try to use such a machine as your only or main computer. The myth from the late '80s and '90s that Macs had a lower and TCO and a longer lifespan has been proven incorrect over and over again, and it's well known that Apple will happily increase the system requirements for the OS and prevent the use of dozens of models at the drop of a hat.
I'm not using machines from my collection as main computer. Who said so ?
It's just fun to be able to use some modern services on these old PowerBooks, exchanging files, browsing, playing… etc … non-sensitive datas.
What should I be afraid of doing so ? if I get a virus, or a trojan, so what ? The hypothetical hacker would see what ? the small browsing i do on it going to 68kmla with Ten4fox or Classilla … My icons collection… , well, what an exploit. And anyway , if i get hacked, that's my problem.
"If you want my version: Stop using a ten-year-old computer that hasn't gotten security patches for seven years as your main computer. Stop using it as your second computer. Take it off the Internet altogether. "
Wow… I find this a bit radical. You know, it's also part of the fun to be able to go on the www with these machines. If you remove that possibility, you remove a great part of the fun. I'm really happy and glad that there are still peoples doing things like Ten4fox, Classilla and others...
I mean, all this is just for fun. I'm not going to use my credit card to pay things on the bay on these machines.
"To be honest, given the number of people using PPC Macs as their main computers who are so mistrustful of the cloud, I was surprised to see the particular backlash that I did, over on macrumors.
Not to be that guy who does the "Why are you even using a Mac?" thing, but, well. Since that's my schtick, here it goes.
If you don't trust Apple, and you aren't willing to run modern hardware, why would you use a Mac? It's one thing to have such a machine as a hobby computer (heck, I want to pick up a late G4 or a G5 of some kind as a local-only 10.5 box to run some apps I still have from that time period) but I'd say that it's pretty unreasonable to try to use such a machine as your only or main computer. The myth from the late '80s and '90s that Macs had a lower and TCO and a longer lifespan has been proven incorrect over and over again, and it's well known that Apple will happily increase the system requirements for the OS and prevent the use of dozens of models at the drop of a hat."
Sorry… You're an admin of a Macintosh vintage computing forum, right ? Ok… just to be sure
It's just fun to be able to use some modern services on these old PowerBooks, exchanging files, browsing, playing… etc … non-sensitive datas.
What should I be afraid of doing so ? if I get a virus, or a trojan, so what ? The hypothetical hacker would see what ? the small browsing i do on it going to 68kmla with Ten4fox or Classilla … My icons collection… , well, what an exploit. And anyway , if i get hacked, that's my problem.
"If you want my version: Stop using a ten-year-old computer that hasn't gotten security patches for seven years as your main computer. Stop using it as your second computer. Take it off the Internet altogether. "
Wow… I find this a bit radical. You know, it's also part of the fun to be able to go on the www with these machines. If you remove that possibility, you remove a great part of the fun. I'm really happy and glad that there are still peoples doing things like Ten4fox, Classilla and others...
I mean, all this is just for fun. I'm not going to use my credit card to pay things on the bay on these machines.
"To be honest, given the number of people using PPC Macs as their main computers who are so mistrustful of the cloud, I was surprised to see the particular backlash that I did, over on macrumors.
Not to be that guy who does the "Why are you even using a Mac?" thing, but, well. Since that's my schtick, here it goes.
If you don't trust Apple, and you aren't willing to run modern hardware, why would you use a Mac? It's one thing to have such a machine as a hobby computer (heck, I want to pick up a late G4 or a G5 of some kind as a local-only 10.5 box to run some apps I still have from that time period) but I'd say that it's pretty unreasonable to try to use such a machine as your only or main computer. The myth from the late '80s and '90s that Macs had a lower and TCO and a longer lifespan has been proven incorrect over and over again, and it's well known that Apple will happily increase the system requirements for the OS and prevent the use of dozens of models at the drop of a hat."
Sorry… You're an admin of a Macintosh vintage computing forum, right ? Ok… just to be sure
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commodorejohn
Well-known member
Oh joy, another Cory5412-brand Why Nobody Should Use Vintage Macs As Anything Other Than Museum Pieces discussion.
I don't understand that way of thinking… Again, being admin of a Mac vintage computer board, you discourage users from doing any web connection at all ??
I have hard time realizing… It's funny.
It's almost like a vintage cars club staff would say to his members "Don't go on the road with your Jaguar Mk2, you could get killed ! Just drive here on the parking…".
Completely discouraging...
I have hard time realizing… It's funny.
It's almost like a vintage cars club staff would say to his members "Don't go on the road with your Jaguar Mk2, you could get killed ! Just drive here on the parking…".
Completely discouraging...
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CC_333
Well-known member
Agreed. For me, it almost completely eliminates all the fun when one says not to use a computer online if it's not running the latest and greatest OS. For example, I'm presently using a 2008 MacBook with Snow Leopard, which, based on the fact that it's a discontinued OS that saw its last security updates in 2011 or 2012, would be very unwise. With this in mind, I have enabled the firewall to block all incoming connections, so, while it's not totally immune to attack, it's not wide open, either.
Ideally, I'd run at least Mavericks (though, for some bizarre reason, it's looking like it's no longer supported either), but this MacBook can't run it, and my new MacBook Pro is somewhere in the world waiting to be repaired.
Oh, well. I see Cory's point, but sometimes reality can be boring.
c
Ideally, I'd run at least Mavericks (though, for some bizarre reason, it's looking like it's no longer supported either), but this MacBook can't run it, and my new MacBook Pro is somewhere in the world waiting to be repaired.
Oh, well. I see Cory's point, but sometimes reality can be boring.
c
TheWhiteFalcon
Well-known member
I'm exclusively Lion and SL with my online machines. Just have to be careful. I don't run Flash, so that eliminates like 99% of attack vectors. :lol:
If we didn't have updated browsers it would be more cause for concern.
If we didn't have updated browsers it would be more cause for concern.
My apologies for the confusion. I was talking to "the scene" as a whole, including the PPC subforum on Low End Mac. Most of the regular posters in that subforum are explicit in that they do all of their work, and put their credit card numbers into their old Macs.
Though, there are plenty (enough for concern, anyway) of people here on 68kMLA.org doing the same thing, not to mention the vocal Windows XP contingent (surprising, given that as you say, this is a Mac forum). We even had a member here in late 2013 and early 2014 who had an unpatched installation of Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10 as their main operating environment. They used the late beta release of Firefox 3.0 as their main web browser. This was before a huge number of exploits was found in legacy code like "bash" and the NTP and DHCP services, among other things. Have you seen the news lately? Security researchers are doing a lot of good work these days.
Most of the time when I talk about security issues surrounding vintage computers, I'm not talking about your personal security. I'm talking about the impact you have on the rest of the world when you run an old machine on a public network. Reflection attacks, open mail relays, mail relays opened by force, privilege escalation to get access to all of these things. Issues like shellshock even (on some systems, admittedly not Mac OS X) could be used to just reset the root password on a machine, no questions asked, using (of all things) DHCP flags.
With more ISPs in the US and elsewhere providing branded networking equipment with known security flaws, that could be a huge issue and it (and the move toward IPv6, which Mac OS X has supported for a very long time and is on by default) is yet another reason why trusting a network border to keep old, unpatched machines safe is such a bad idea.
Enabling the Mac OS X firewall is helpful, but it's not the only solution, and most of the not-really-very-technical users either buying used PPC Macs to use as their main machines, or clinging to something built ten years ago as their main computer.
I get why from an economic standpoint, but it is a cause for concern. Unfortunately, the concern tends to fall upon deaf ears, which is why you've heard a lot less of it in 2015 than in previous years. (Also, my interest in security from that particular standpoint is actually relatively new in the grand scheme of things, I'd say it started in 2013, 2012 at earliest.
Mmmh. I think the phrasing you're looking for is this:Sorry… You're an admin of a Macintosh vintage computing forum, right ? Ok… just to be sure
It's surprising the administrator of a 68k Macintosh web site isn't interested in middle-aged versions of Mac OS X.
Interest is a bad way to put it. I actually liked Mac OS X 10.5 when it was new. It had its fair share of problems, many of which Mac OS X 10.10 has to this day, making it uninsteresting for me as a daily driver.
That said:
- I was probably actually using 68k Macs as a daily productivity computer for a lot longer than most. I have an 840 on my desk as my e-mail/chat/IRC and forum-browsing computer through mid-to-late 2006, while I was still using some G3s (a Pismo and a Yosemite/Blue-And-White) as my main computers for photo processing.
- It's not uncommon at all for retro computing community members to have modern computers that are of a different platform.
You're intentionally misreading things, and/or just aren't on the forum often.
Mac OS X has loads of security holes, and problems and vulnerabilities that affect old versions (often all the way back to 10.3, as in the case of shellshock) come up all the time. Mac OS X, being a completely different OS from OS 9, has different issues, and one of its issues is that it's a complete UNIX system. On any given Mac OS X system, there's lots of stuff to exploit. Not only is most of it on the disk (and it has been by default since 10.3 or 10.4) but a lot of it's active at any given point in time.
Mac OS 9 on the other hand has almost nothing. Anything you don't trust, you can physically pull off the disk. Mac OS 9 didn't even have a system-wide remote control method built in, the only thing there was was network AppleScripts or Events, and you had to be exceedingly specific about enabling it. (Compare with Mac OS X that has three system-wide remote control apparatus built in and has plenty of ways to get privileged code escalation.)
Anyway, point being, you can happily run a Mac OS 9 system online all day long with no consequences. On most of the "old" Apple hardware I have any personal interest in, Mac OS 9 runs better anyway. (For example, when I get my beige and blue-and-white G3s set up in my new home, both are going to be running some variety of Mac OS 8.1-9.2.2 because there's really no good reason for me to run OS X on hardware that old.)
In terms of being uninterested in old OS X: I have been relatively up-to-date on Mac hardware for years. I'd argue from 2003 when I got my PowerBook G4 to today. I keep Macs longer than what I think Apple would prefer, but I generally have something "pretty modern." Maybe it's just because I've rarely gone without, but to me, Mac OS X 10.5 doesn't really feel much different than 10.10. There are the wildly obvious appearance and compatibility differences, but at the core, it's the same operating system with the same design goals, most of the same features, and the same overall concepts.
For me, the only thing to be had by running Mac OS X 10.5 somewhere (Intel, PPC, native, or virtualized/emulated) would be to use older versions of the apps I use today. That's of questionable value, since for the past ten to fifteen or years, most of the creative and pro apps you can get have been really good about being able to bring documents to newer file formats without making any change to the actual content. (It doesn't always work easily or well in reverse though, in my experience.)
This is pretty tangential both to "Let's all misunderstand Cory!" time and to a software thread, but I'll admit that I just can't get into most 2000s Apple hardware. It's during this period that Apple built most of the least reliable systems it has ever built, with just an extremely slim few of them being more reliable than the Apple ///, and where all efforts to increase performance were thwarted by the fact that none of the platforms they were using and designing really had any life left in them, and when they did get their hands on what was essentially a scaled down supercomputer platform, their extreme NIH syndrome made sure that its native USB support was broken and that any other design guidelines IBM may have had for it (for example, a lot of cache) were not followed.
How many of you were Mac users in 2005 and 2006?
I was. The Intel-based Macs were definitely cause for trepidation, but once you had your hand on one, statistically, it was almost certainly faster than what you were already using. If your apps weren't faster, they weren't much slower than they were on your PowerBook G4 (if you had a 1.6GHz PowerBook, it may have felt like using a 1.2 or 1.3GHz model, really) and once your apps did become native, they got a huge speed boost.
Also, a few years after the switch to the Intel platform, Apple gave their professional notebooks a much needed re-design and by the time the late 2008 models shipped with Penryn processors and the unibody design, not only was Apple building some of the most physically reliable computers they ever had, but they were quite performant at the time.
In late 2008 and early 2009, I was using my 2007 iMac and a similarly aged ThinkPad and wanted to condense down to one smaller system. A MacBook Pro was on the table and sometimes I regret not having gone that way, but I just couldn't do it.
That said, I never stopped liking Mac system 7. It's just not practical to use it every day at this point. I could connect to SSH with it and I could generate text documents with it, but doing those things would make my time harder. I do it from time to time, but it's definitely not a day-to-day thing any longer, as it was up through 2006.
Though, I am in a new physical space, maybe I'll get some kind of awesomely huge desk and have the 6100 and/or pb180 on and running all the time.
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If you need to feel young, there are products whose entire purpose in life is making you feel young.
https://www.harley-davidson.com
http://www.chevrolet.com/corvette-sports-cars.html
The best part is, unlike with old versions of OS X, you won't endanger everyone around you just by using it properly.
TheWhiteFalcon
Well-known member
I think I would notice if my Mac was being used as a botnet or mail server.
tsundoku
教授か何か洗練された者
I'm going to respond here in two parts.
First I'll go after the OP and describe what I can accomplish on a classic Mac OS machine (more specifically a 68K running System 7) and what I can't. I am probably about as good a candidate as any for this exercise because I don't use streaming media services (Spotify, Pandora, etc.) or cloud storage services (Dropbox etc.). I run my own email accounts (both personal and work), which are completely standard-fare setups that should not pose a challenge for an old machine. Breaking things down further:
Text editing, email, and IRC all happen via ssh to my Unix shell server, which works almost as well on the classic Mac OS as it does on any modern non-Unix platform (see: PuTTY on Windows). This also conveniently lines up with how many people accessed networked services on the machines when they were new, just through telnet or rsh or some other precursor to SSH instead. The only problem connecting to modern machines here is character encodings - the PowerPC version of MacSSH supports legacy Japanese character encoding translation (ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP and Shift-JIS), but the 68K version doesn't, so non-Roman system locales on the remote Unix machine are a problem. This means most application strings and content are illegible when I connect from a 68K machine, and are also illegible from a PowerPC machine unless I change the environment to a legacy encoding, although I can issue commands and do some other basic tasks. If we are willing to assume a PowerPC machine, then this issue becomes less severe, but it's still not very practical. I could switch my shell environment from UTF-8 to EUC-JP to allow MacSSH/PPC to display localized messages, but text files and emails I try to view in UTF-8 would still be illegible without conversion.
Music is a bit more complicated, and I probably wouldn't be happy with any classic Mac OS solution. My primary computers today are Unix machines running mpd clients on a FLAC collection, and even Mac OS X is not so great at this. I only know of one dedicated music player for OS X that does FLAC, which was written by a friend and is very much a proof of concept, although I would probably get by on it if I suddenly found myself with only OS X machines. I'm not aware of any classic Mac OS players that handle FLAC, and the disk space required to store the collection is is pushing the limits of hard disks that tend to be available for machines that run it, so I don't think I would ever attempt to use the platform for playing music in the present day.
Network resource access isn't bad - I run netatalk on my Solaris desktop at home and my 7.6.1 machines have no trouble with it. Not needing to use an FTP client or similar to move files between the old Macs and modern machines certainly goes a long way in this thought exercise.
The only thing I use a word processor for at all is my resume, which doesn't get updated often and actually does exist as a Nisus Writer document on my 840AV that I turn into a PDF when I need to send it somewhere. Any other significant text generation for me happens in an editor, which is usually vim and easily done over SSH, but I've been warming up to MPW lately as I hammer away at some hobby projects.
Web browsing is a very sore spot. Classilla and the old Mozilla releases it's based on are okay in a pinch, but Mac OS is really just not very good at handling the gigantic pile of scripts and content that comprise a modern website, and the rendering for many pages is way off. It's adequate for when I am doing something related to old computers and need to look up some online reference material, but I wouldn't suffer through my regular news sites on it, for example.
Where does this leave us? If the question is "would you use a classic Mac OS machine as a primary computer," the answer is an immediate "no," even if that computer were the fastest, most heavily-upgraded OS 9 machine possible. Browsing the web does not work very well unless you're very choosy about which sites you visit, I am not aware of any music player that would do what I need, and video playback is right out because the machines are not powerful enough to play HD video files regardless of OS or player, which is most of my collection by now. I could get a fair amount of work done in MacSSH on a PowerPC machine, but I would have to give up most if not all entertainment, doing research on the web would be a challenge, and I would have to convert many of my emails and other communication from UTF-8 to a legacy encoding before reading it, and then back to UTF-8 to reply. If you change the question to "would you use a classic Mac OS machine as a sidekick for a modern machine," the answer is yes. I like them and they're good at a subset of still-relevant tasks. For the past few weekends I've spent afternoons in my local coffee shop programming on a PowerBook 1400, and that was the only machine I had on me while there. When I get home, though, I might want to play some music or watch a movie, or read some news on a website, and that needs to happen on something newer and running a different OS.
Changing gears - some other issues were brought up regarding the nature of this community and the irresponsibility of having old OS X machines on the internet. The scope of the "old Mac" hobby varies from person to person, and I have seen some people make an unspoken assumption that any community focused on some kind of Apple product is inherently going to champion all other Apple products, or at least all other discontinued ones. For me personally, an "old Mac" hobby means machines that run the classic Mac OS, not OS X, and the appropriate scope of a place with a name like "68kMLA" is about that range - early PowerPC machines get a pass because they're running the same software platform. Old OS X machines to me are a different platform, and simply aren't different enough from a new Mac you can buy today to be interesting as an object of hobby interest. If someone else does think they're worthy of that interest, I'm in no position to criticize (although if someone is trying to get by on an old Mac because they can't or don't want to spend money on a new one, they've chosen the wrong platform). That being said, expecting a community officially centered around 68K Macs to embrace older OS X machines to me is about as absurd as expecting participants in an Apple II hobby community to be into 68K Macs. Some of them might be, but it's not part of the mission statement and one can't assume that they are. Ultimately 68kMLA is about a platform (classic Macintosh), not a brand (Apple). It's also not LowEndMac, whose mission statement has always been "we want to help you be a Mac user on the cheap by getting the most out of your old/used machine." People can talk about G4s and G5s running OS X all they want in the appropriate subforums, but don't ever expect the site admin or any regular user to be into those machines just because of their affiliation with 68kMLA. Some people are, but it's a degree removed from the stated focus of the community and it can't be expected.
The peculiar characteristics of the classic Mac OS that Cory5412 mentioned earlier - not being modern multiuser networked operating systems with a host of exploitable services - have actually helped bring me full circle with my obscure platform interest back to the 68K Macs that I started from. For a while I was more into SGI IRIX machines, but patch support for them ended in December 2013 and I prompty retired them all because it's simply not responsible to have unpatched Unix machines hanging out on the internet. 68K Macs don't have this problem, though, and I appreciate how I can get my old computer fix without having to quarantine them. It's the reason why I have no reservations about letting my Quadra 840AV see the internet, but I don't feel comfortable doing the same with my NeXTstation.
EDIT: Fixed factual error about MacSSH's Japanese character encoding support. I originally said that the PowerPC version can encode/decode Unicode, but actually the PowerPC version only supports legacy encodings, and the 68K version doesn't support any at all.
First I'll go after the OP and describe what I can accomplish on a classic Mac OS machine (more specifically a 68K running System 7) and what I can't. I am probably about as good a candidate as any for this exercise because I don't use streaming media services (Spotify, Pandora, etc.) or cloud storage services (Dropbox etc.). I run my own email accounts (both personal and work), which are completely standard-fare setups that should not pose a challenge for an old machine. Breaking things down further:
Text editing, email, and IRC all happen via ssh to my Unix shell server, which works almost as well on the classic Mac OS as it does on any modern non-Unix platform (see: PuTTY on Windows). This also conveniently lines up with how many people accessed networked services on the machines when they were new, just through telnet or rsh or some other precursor to SSH instead. The only problem connecting to modern machines here is character encodings - the PowerPC version of MacSSH supports legacy Japanese character encoding translation (ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP and Shift-JIS), but the 68K version doesn't, so non-Roman system locales on the remote Unix machine are a problem. This means most application strings and content are illegible when I connect from a 68K machine, and are also illegible from a PowerPC machine unless I change the environment to a legacy encoding, although I can issue commands and do some other basic tasks. If we are willing to assume a PowerPC machine, then this issue becomes less severe, but it's still not very practical. I could switch my shell environment from UTF-8 to EUC-JP to allow MacSSH/PPC to display localized messages, but text files and emails I try to view in UTF-8 would still be illegible without conversion.
Music is a bit more complicated, and I probably wouldn't be happy with any classic Mac OS solution. My primary computers today are Unix machines running mpd clients on a FLAC collection, and even Mac OS X is not so great at this. I only know of one dedicated music player for OS X that does FLAC, which was written by a friend and is very much a proof of concept, although I would probably get by on it if I suddenly found myself with only OS X machines. I'm not aware of any classic Mac OS players that handle FLAC, and the disk space required to store the collection is is pushing the limits of hard disks that tend to be available for machines that run it, so I don't think I would ever attempt to use the platform for playing music in the present day.
Network resource access isn't bad - I run netatalk on my Solaris desktop at home and my 7.6.1 machines have no trouble with it. Not needing to use an FTP client or similar to move files between the old Macs and modern machines certainly goes a long way in this thought exercise.
The only thing I use a word processor for at all is my resume, which doesn't get updated often and actually does exist as a Nisus Writer document on my 840AV that I turn into a PDF when I need to send it somewhere. Any other significant text generation for me happens in an editor, which is usually vim and easily done over SSH, but I've been warming up to MPW lately as I hammer away at some hobby projects.
Web browsing is a very sore spot. Classilla and the old Mozilla releases it's based on are okay in a pinch, but Mac OS is really just not very good at handling the gigantic pile of scripts and content that comprise a modern website, and the rendering for many pages is way off. It's adequate for when I am doing something related to old computers and need to look up some online reference material, but I wouldn't suffer through my regular news sites on it, for example.
Where does this leave us? If the question is "would you use a classic Mac OS machine as a primary computer," the answer is an immediate "no," even if that computer were the fastest, most heavily-upgraded OS 9 machine possible. Browsing the web does not work very well unless you're very choosy about which sites you visit, I am not aware of any music player that would do what I need, and video playback is right out because the machines are not powerful enough to play HD video files regardless of OS or player, which is most of my collection by now. I could get a fair amount of work done in MacSSH on a PowerPC machine, but I would have to give up most if not all entertainment, doing research on the web would be a challenge, and I would have to convert many of my emails and other communication from UTF-8 to a legacy encoding before reading it, and then back to UTF-8 to reply. If you change the question to "would you use a classic Mac OS machine as a sidekick for a modern machine," the answer is yes. I like them and they're good at a subset of still-relevant tasks. For the past few weekends I've spent afternoons in my local coffee shop programming on a PowerBook 1400, and that was the only machine I had on me while there. When I get home, though, I might want to play some music or watch a movie, or read some news on a website, and that needs to happen on something newer and running a different OS.
Changing gears - some other issues were brought up regarding the nature of this community and the irresponsibility of having old OS X machines on the internet. The scope of the "old Mac" hobby varies from person to person, and I have seen some people make an unspoken assumption that any community focused on some kind of Apple product is inherently going to champion all other Apple products, or at least all other discontinued ones. For me personally, an "old Mac" hobby means machines that run the classic Mac OS, not OS X, and the appropriate scope of a place with a name like "68kMLA" is about that range - early PowerPC machines get a pass because they're running the same software platform. Old OS X machines to me are a different platform, and simply aren't different enough from a new Mac you can buy today to be interesting as an object of hobby interest. If someone else does think they're worthy of that interest, I'm in no position to criticize (although if someone is trying to get by on an old Mac because they can't or don't want to spend money on a new one, they've chosen the wrong platform). That being said, expecting a community officially centered around 68K Macs to embrace older OS X machines to me is about as absurd as expecting participants in an Apple II hobby community to be into 68K Macs. Some of them might be, but it's not part of the mission statement and one can't assume that they are. Ultimately 68kMLA is about a platform (classic Macintosh), not a brand (Apple). It's also not LowEndMac, whose mission statement has always been "we want to help you be a Mac user on the cheap by getting the most out of your old/used machine." People can talk about G4s and G5s running OS X all they want in the appropriate subforums, but don't ever expect the site admin or any regular user to be into those machines just because of their affiliation with 68kMLA. Some people are, but it's a degree removed from the stated focus of the community and it can't be expected.
The peculiar characteristics of the classic Mac OS that Cory5412 mentioned earlier - not being modern multiuser networked operating systems with a host of exploitable services - have actually helped bring me full circle with my obscure platform interest back to the 68K Macs that I started from. For a while I was more into SGI IRIX machines, but patch support for them ended in December 2013 and I prompty retired them all because it's simply not responsible to have unpatched Unix machines hanging out on the internet. 68K Macs don't have this problem, though, and I appreciate how I can get my old computer fix without having to quarantine them. It's the reason why I have no reservations about letting my Quadra 840AV see the internet, but I don't feel comfortable doing the same with my NeXTstation.
EDIT: Fixed factual error about MacSSH's Japanese character encoding support. I originally said that the PowerPC version can encode/decode Unicode, but actually the PowerPC version only supports legacy encodings, and the 68K version doesn't support any at all.
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I think I would too… But I suppose he suggested I wasn't using old OSXs "properly".
He must know much more than me anyway
maybe he's even hacking my OSX tiger right now...
tsundoku
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Modern computers (even going back as far as G4s) are powerful enough that you very likely will not notice unless you are on the watch for it, and even then you still may not find it. We're well past the point where the CPU load of sending out a bunch of bulk email is going to make your desktop environment unresponsive.
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