Classic

This week’s episode of Upgrade (which I listened to on a longish drive yesterday) has a preview of Jason Snell and Myke Hurley’s upcoming Designed in California podcast. No, not the “Road to the Apple II” series they’ve been squeezing into the Upgrade feed these past few weeks. This sneak preview—with special guest John Siracusa—is about the state of the classic Mac OS in the late 90s. In a word, the state was sorry. This was largely due to some expedient decisions made in the early 80s that were necessary to get the Mac out the door. Unfortunately, those decisions made the Mac a less and less stable computing environment as the years went on. The instability had to do with memory and multitasking. Jason and John cover it well in the podcast, so there’s no need for me to get into it. I will say, though, that if you listen to the podcast and think Jason is exaggerating when he says that he would often have to reboot his Mac a dozen or so times per day, I can assure you that’s no…