The “Macintosh aesthetic” thus seems much closer to your “steampunk aesthetic” than either the “Apple aesthetic” or the “Linux aesthetic”. (It’s possibly the closest you can get to what you describe, given the technological and practical constraints of “a personal computer operating system / user interface”. Small improvements—further steps toward “steampunk”—can be made, I think, but not large ones.)
Oh, yeah. And actually, I had the surreal experience yesterday of right as I was finishing this post, seeing Julia Galef link to this Mac Plus emulator:
I clicked to poke around the games, but what hit me with a surprise kick-in-the-nostalgia was ResEdit, which I have joyful memories of using to poke around the innards of various files. Once upon a time, you could edit any of the internals of basically any program via a graphical interface, swapping out graphics and changing strings. (I think the game Escape Velocity was most designed to work well with this but it otherwise worked)
I clicked to poke around the games, but what hit me with a surprise kick-in-the-nostalgia was ResEdit, which I have joyful memories of using to poke around the innards of various files. Once upon a time, you could edit any of the internals of basically any program via a graphical interface, swapping out graphics and changing strings. (I think the game Escape Velocity was most designed to work well with this but it otherwise worked)
Quite right. The resource fork, and ResEdit, was one of the most brilliant aspects of the Mac’s design. (And yes, Escape Velocity made the most extensive well-known use of it.)
(Aside: I use several Macs that run the classic Mac OS to this day—largely because there are a number of programs and tools that were created for that system, of which there do not exist acceptable modern analogues. The point, once again, is that many of the limitations we face are not fundamentally technological; we very much have the technology to do a much greater variety of things than we currently do… it really is a matter of design, more than anything.)
Oh, yeah. And actually, I had the surreal experience yesterday of right as I was finishing this post, seeing Julia Galef link to this Mac Plus emulator:
http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/pce-js-apps/
I clicked to poke around the games, but what hit me with a surprise kick-in-the-nostalgia was ResEdit, which I have joyful memories of using to poke around the innards of various files. Once upon a time, you could edit any of the internals of basically any program via a graphical interface, swapping out graphics and changing strings. (I think the game Escape Velocity was most designed to work well with this but it otherwise worked)
Quite right. The resource fork, and ResEdit, was one of the most brilliant aspects of the Mac’s design. (And yes, Escape Velocity made the most extensive well-known use of it.)
(Aside: I use several Macs that run the classic Mac OS to this day—largely because there are a number of programs and tools that were created for that system, of which there do not exist acceptable modern analogues. The point, once again, is that many of the limitations we face are not fundamentally technological; we very much have the technology to do a much greater variety of things than we currently do… it really is a matter of design, more than anything.)