Where to find Birdie?

[Karlos]

CLI's a way more potent than GUI's for a large range of everyday tasks.

[Karlos]

How does a question about birdie end up being a flamewar?

"Classic" versions of MacOS were composed amlost entirely of fail. From using the upper 8-bits of address registers to hold data in old m68k releases, to using exception traps for system calls, to releasing the OS on PPC in which most m68k apps ran much slower than on the machines they were supposed to replace. In the end, even Apple realised what a festering pile it was and decided to start all over agian with a real kernel. So, users should be in no doubt.

However, all of the above isn't the topic. Birdie and/or suitable replacements such as AfA, are.

[Karlos]

This was a problem with applications (and extension) not the system itself. Even the Amiga wasn't immune to this sort of bad behavior (Amiga Basic anyone?)

Shush, we don't talk about that Anyway, I recall quite clearly that you had to make sure you used the correct ROM images with various emulators that were 32-bit clean, since earlier ROM's were not above abusing the upper 8-bits of the address registers.

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This isn't completely unreasonable. On the 68000 the extra overhead doesn't buy you very much, but on later machines with MMUs such a mechanism is necessary to provide proper memory protection (not that classic Mac OS took advantage of that...).

This is the same mechanism that utterly cripples floating point software using unimplemented 6888x instruction calls and invoking an exception trap. To say the overhead isn't that bad is being economical with the truth, really.
Now, if you need to go supervisor, that's fine. However, as you say, classic MacOS didn't actually bother making use of the extended control over the system that doing so would afford, so in fact, you've basically got a cripplingly slow system call that you could have implemented fine in user mode.

The biggest problems were the hackish way multitasking was implemented and that file access was handled by an application (the Finder) rather than having proper layering.

They tried quite a while to make a next-gen Mac OS that would fix the problems, but they couldn't make it work so they gave up and bought NeXT instead.


For one, command line programs are easier to script and I say this having used a number of automation tools for classic Mac OS. Certain bulk operations are much faster to do via a CLI as well. Deleting all the files that end with a certain string is trivial via a CLI with wildcards, but requires a fair amount of manual work in a GUI. This not to say that it's superior for everything, but it is handy to have around.

OSX was the best thing to happen to Macs, ever, IMO.

[Karlos]

I like how me becoming extremely annoyed at a lack of user friendlyness when attempting a basic task (That I can do ten times easier in a text editor in say, linux) is perceived as "trolling" (and not even the correct use of the word trolling). Because when a flaw is found, it is the users fault, the user doesn't deserve to use it and should sell it to somebody "worthy".

Birdie is a hack, at the end of the day, but not complex to install. But if you are still struggling, I'm pretty sure I can dig out the config I was using when I last used birdie and tell you exactly where in the startup sequence to insert the relevant text. The task you are trying to do is exactly what you just described, adding a few lines to a text file.

I also particularly like how an operating system that was designed with an actually decent UI (and indeed, everything else a none-programmer sees was designed better too) was characterized as "composed almost entirely of fail", yet the one that ties the end user up and beats them with electric stun batons is praised because the hardware it shipped on had a nice chipset, and the magic it was powered by was blue and not red or something.

I did point out that this was not on topic but if you ever tried writing any code for it, you'd understand. The people that developed it understood too. Which is why they abandoned it totally in favour of Darwin.

[Karlos]

FFS guys, knock it off.

There are bound to be people out there that loved MacOS classic.

@Hell Labs

For a piece of software you might have a lot of fun with, look out for ShapeShifter or Fusion. You can relive the good old days then. I don't think either of them will run OS9, but 8 is certainly doable.

[Karlos]

Oh I know about those. The guy that started shapeshifter eventually went all out and rewrote it into basilisk II for pc, then sheepshaver which is pretty much the same thing but does PPC. And I don't think I'll be "reliving the good old days" when I can just turn on my other computer.:roflmao:

Suit yourself