2000 – It’s been a couple years since Scott Barber posted information on running Mac OS 8.1 on a Macintosh IIsi. It was a fairly convoluted method that only worked with a few Macs and required first booting from an older OS, then from an OS 8.1 hard drive – but it was possible.
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Apple said that Mac OS 8.0 and 8.1 required a 68040 or PowerPC CPU and 12 MB of physical memory. Unless you’re very creative, they were right.
MacOS is a fun operating system, and any guide you read should be an equally fun read. Each chapter starts with bullet points on what will be covered, so if it’s something you already know, you can skip right ahead; if you only need to know how to use new features, the book is also formatted in a way that these stand out. Support for Mac OS X 10.8.3 has been introduced for product: ESXi 5.1 For more information about software and hardware support, please check the VMware Compatibility Guide. On Friday, April 15th, 2005, Apple released Mac OS X 10.3.9 and Mac OS X Server 10.3.9 to Software Update, and as a series of standalone Web downloads: Mac OS X 10.3.9 Combined 117 MB Mac OS X. Aimed at consumers and professionals alike, Mac OS X aimed to combine the stability, reliability and security of Unix. On May 19, 2001, Apple opened the first official Apple Retail Stores in Virginia and California.Later on July 9 they bought Spruce Technologies, a DVD authoring company. The $10,000 computer, on the other hand, featured advanced preemptive multitasking—which wasn't seen on the Mac until OS X in 2000—and dual built-in floppy disk drives.
But where Scott Barber led, others have followed. The latest is Born Again from Brochner Software, which is a far more elegant solution – and one that supports more models.
To run Mac OS 8.1 on most 68030-based Macs, you need at least 12 MB of physical memory, 120 MB of free space on an external hard drive (or possibly a separate partition – I haven’t tried that), a Mac OS 8.1 CD-ROM, and a CD-ROM drive.
Born Again and the Mac IIfx
My guinea pig was my trustworthy old Macintosh IIfx, the $10,000 computer I picked up for $200 a few years back. I’d upgraded it to 32 MB of memory, installed an 8-24GC video card, and even had an ethernet card in it. This machine was once my email and web server, but I retired it when I discovered that it couldn’t restart itself after a power outage.
For several months, the IIfx has been connected to a MoniSwitch ADB and supporting my monitor. It’s the perfect height for use as a monitor stand. I’d even use the IIfx now and then to look at Low End Mac on older browsers and at reduced color levels that Power Macs don’t support.
I connected an old 2 GB external SCSI drive, my son’s external 24x CD-ROM, and booted the IIfx. I formatted the external drive with FWB Hard Disk Toolkit. Then I ran Born Again, which is pretty much a very sophisticated, very powerful installer script.
One key to running Mac OS 8.1 on older Macs is not updating the hard disk drivers. If you do that, you’re out of luck. After installing Mac OS 8.1 on the external drive, I also discovered it wouldn’t work with the version of FWB I had used.
Back to the drawing board?
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Not quite. First, I copied everything from the external drive to my internal hard drive by dragging the drive icon onto my main drive’s icon. This would give me multiple system folders temporarily, but it shouldn’t be a problem in this case, since I had no intention of restarting the computer.
Then I rummaged about and located Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5 and a hacked universal version on my Quadra 650 file server. Apple’s stock version wouldn’t work with the third-party drive, but the hacked one did.
Time to copy the folder where I stored the contents of the external drive back to the external drive. Then open that folder on the 2 GB drive and move all the contents (except Desktop Items) to the root level. Then copy the Desktop Items to the desktop.
Time to test it. Open the Startup Disk control panel, select the external drive, and reboot.
It worked!
I was weird and cool seeing Mac OS 8.1 load and run on my Mac IIfx. The system was pretty responsive, thanks to a 40 MHz CPU and system bus. My particular setup leaves garbage pixels on the screen. I suspect that’s due to the 8-24GC card.
Of course, that wasn’t enough for me. I had to test one more thing: could I boot other 68030-based Macs from this drive or was it set up specifically for the Mac IIfx?
Born Again on Other Macs
My first test was an LC III with 12 MB of memory. It ran flawlessly, although Mac OS 8.1 ate up over 10 MB of RAM. I reduced the drive cache and got the OS down to about 8 MB. Having 4 MB free RAM isn’t a lot of space, but the point is Mac OS 8.1 was running. Besides, you can boost the LC III as high as 36 MB if memory is an issue.
My next test was a Mac IIci with a Sonnet Presto 040 accelerator. I knew the Sonnet card supported Mac OS 8.1 with its own software drivers, so the first thing I did was remove the Presto card. Set the external drive as my startup disk and boot. Bingo.
Of course, that wasn’t good enough. I had to put the Presto back in and see if it worked that way. It didn’t even break a sweat.
I also tested it on a 9 MB Mac IIsi. With a minimum disk cache, it used 7.6 MB of RAM. That doesn’t leave enough room for any real work, but it does boot. More memory would make it useful.
Two Failures
Crossing my fingers, I connected my Classic II to the hard drive. No luck, even though I have 10 MB of memory. With the Classic II, I get the message, This startup disk will not work on this Macintosh model. Use the latest Installer to update this disk for this model.
On to my son’s Color Classic. Darn, same message.
Future Plans
I’m planning further tests on my wife’s old PowerBook 150. I may even try it on an SE/30, but that will be a bit more work. The SE/30 doesn’t have 32-bit clean ROMs, and the computer must be in 32-bit mode before you can boot from Mac OS 8.1.
What I’m planning on doing, and I’ve heard it works, is pull the ROMs from a IIsi (which is 32-bit clean) and install them in the SE/30. If all goes according to plan, this will allow me to run Mac OS 8.1 on an SE/30, which remains my favorite b&w compact Mac of all time. Unfortunately, while my SE/30 has ROMs on a SIMM, I don’t have a single IIsi (or IIci) configured that way. Until and unless I can locate one, I won’t be able to try 8.1 on my SE/30.
Why Do It?
The big question is, Why run Mac OS 8.1 on pre-68040 Macs?
The first answer: Because you can. There’s something bizarrely awesome about running an OS on a computer that isn’t supposed to work with it. I’m sure a lot of people who download and use Born Again will do it for that reason alone.
Scott Barber likes to set up small, inexpensive old Macs as unobtrusive file servers. One of his favorites is the IIsi, which isn’t much larger than many external drive cases. Drop in a 2, 4.5, or 9 GB SCSI drive, make sure you’ve got ethernet, install Mac OS 8.1, and you’ve got a very stable server with a fairly recent implementation of Open Transport networking.
And if you do find yourself using Mac OS 8.1 on your vintage Mac, don’t forget to pay your shareware fee.
Field Reports
Mark Looper reports using Born Again on his Duo 230 with Duo Dock II. Like me, he had problems with hard disk drivers at first, but he succeeded after he copied the installed files to another drive.
I benchmarked an LC III with both System 7.5.5 and Mac OS 8.1. Hard drive performance was one-third better under OS 8.1. Test with an accelerated Mac IIci were less compelling.
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Interviewing
Sometime in the summer of 2000, I interviewed with the Mail team.
I never intended to work in software engineering but I desperately wanted to work on Mac OS X, which was working on releasing the Public Beta within a few months. So a bunch of interviews with the Mail team.
The short summary is I sweated and laughed a lot. I alternated between being certain I was getting the job to being sure I wasn’t.
My most intimidating interview was with Scott Forstall, who was then was the head of applications and frameworks and the manager of the Mail team reported to him. This is what the entire interview was like:
Scott: It’s your first day in your new job, what are you going to do?
Me: Uh, let me make up some stuff on the fly while I sweat and write things on the whiteboard
Scott (expressionless and not acknowledging what I said): Ok, then what would you do?
Me: See above
Scott: See above
Me: Uh, let me make up some stuff on the fly while I sweat and write things on the whiteboard
Scott (expressionless and not acknowledging what I said): Ok, then what would you do?
Me: See above
Scott: See above
What made it extra fun was that the job description was fairly generic and I’d never held a position like this before in my life. I seem to recall this was my first interview so I was not feeling great out of the gate!
Another uncomfortable interview was with Julie Zelenski, who, like Scott, was a master of the expressionless face. Although Julie was even harder to read and had an almost bored expression on her face. I don’t remember what she asked.
An interview with Ben Haller also made me sweat. His expression always seemed to be communicating that what I was saying was not exactly what he was looking for.
My interview with Paul Marcos was a blast and I recall it stretched out for more than an hour. We were in his office and he was actively working on the preferences panel for Mail that they were redoing. Since I was peering over at it, he talked about it a bit and then started asking for my opinions on things.
I was also interviewed by Kwok Lau, head of Software Engineering Operations and thought she was a wonderful person (and she was!). Finally, I was interviewed by Bertrand Serlet, head of the Mac OS X engineering team. His French accent was quite tricky even though I knew French. I liked his energy and enthusiasm for the technology. I don’t remember much other than he didn’t make me sweat too much. ?
How do you think this should be worded? Should we have a preference for this? How does this look visually? Could this be organized better?
I was not expecting that I could ever contribute to a software product in such a way. That I could propose things or criticize things and effect change on a product. Amazing. My whole career up to that point had been in technical support style positions where you are basically cleaning up the mess after a product ships and no one ever asks for your input.
After the interviews, I was definitely interested but felt that more of them went poorly than went well. As an aside, I was also interviewing for another position in a newly created group called Customer Seeding.
Amazingly, I was offered both positions. The Mail team was exciting to me, but intimidating and I worried I was in over my head. The Customer Seeding team was more support-like and so it was more in my comfort zone. Plus, being only the second hire on the team after the manager was an opportunity to shape things.
Scott Forstall was relentless in trying to convince me. He would contact me often and I visited the Mail team a couple times as I was deciding. He would see me there and pull me aside to pressure me more. I’ll write more about Scott later, but one of his greatest qualities was that he took recruiting very seriously and if he liked someone, he would do everything to get them.
I can’t deny that it was flattering to me. I didn’t know how much I would interact with Scott day-to-day (turns out it was a lot!), but I liked him and it weighed into my decision. A small aside is that an unnamed person told me before I was hired that I should never trust what Scott says. Intrigue.
Paul Marcos was a big factor in my decision. I got along with him instantly and thoroughly enjoyed debating various technical topics with him during the interview. I learned a lot in the interview and he later revealed himself to be the best mentor I could ever have hoped for.
Mail was always my first choice but I wanted to be sure so I thought about it quite awhile before I accepted the job. The next four years would prove that I made one of my best career decisions ever.
QA
My position on the Mail team was really two jobs in one:
- Serve as the lone quality assurance engineer that was fully dedicated to Mail. This included managing incoming bug reports, analyzing, root causing, and prioritizing them (QA)
- Be an on-call support person for all of software engineering as well as important people in other organizations. I was the public face of Mail and also monitored the “help” mailing list (Technical support)
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I’d never done software testing before, so to be the lone dedicated tester on one of the signature apps for Mac OS X was very intimidating! Now, there were others that did testing across the system and there was this dogfood testing concept, but ultimately I was responsible when Mail was broken.
Even though I lacked experience, there was also an element of looking at things with fresh eyes. Also, there really wasn’t much uniformity and infrastructure in place, so I felt like it was a time to figure out how software should be tested. I felt an incredible amount of freedom to try things out, keep things that worked, and discard things that didn’t.
Bertrand Serlet, our fearless leader, believed that everyone was an engineer and that Quality Assurance (QA) engineering was engineering all the same and in our HR system, we were classified as software engineers. A psychological benefit of that is that I always felt like a true peer of everyone in engineering and I was generally always treated that way. That type of close relationship with QA engineers is vital to making a great product.
Test plans
The first time anyone running the overall project ever asked me for anything was when they asked for my test plans. I didn’t really know what they were expecting so I looked at what others had done. This is when I first realized that test plans are a list of things that seemed worthwile to test at the time that someone demanded you have a test plan. Then, you let them get horribly out of date and don’t ever use.
I learned that no one ever really looked at what you wrote in your test plan. I would miss major things and no one ever noticed. I would throw in random lines like “make sure this works on other planets” and no one noticed. So, it was basically like a checkbox item. Red tape. Didn’t sit well with me.
Eventually, I grew to where I always wrote test plans and I wrote them for me. And I used them. To the outside world, they may have looked the same, but there were key differences.
- They were very high level and not very detailed
- The goal was to list all the areas I wanted to be sure to check at least once before the product shipped. As products became more complex, it became easier to forget to check something.
- Nothing was described specifically, which allowed randomness to be inserted at the time something was actually tested. Each time I checked an area, I could check it differently to get better coverage.
Automated testing
After a few years, there started to be more demands from the higher ups and the biggest was to introduce automated testing into our workflows. I very quickly developed a dislike for it and also saw how other teams fared. The Finder team dedicated one of two QA engineers entirely to automated testing and I was shocked at the ineffectiveness of it.
I became more of a student of QA at this point, learning about what techniques existed and which were considered effective and ineffective. But even that didn’t always jive with my day-to-day experience. If I looked at things from an efficiency standpoint, looking at every hour I had to test software, which things were the most effective?
Manifestoes
I evangelized a lot of what I learned about testing, but never made much headway with managment. Eventually, many years later, my experiences in these early days experimenting with testing methods led to a number of documents I wrote about the testing process.
The seeds that were planted in 2000-2004 germinated for the next decade and more as I continued to test software in an increasingly rigid and larger company. These manifestoes have proven to be useful to those that have stumbled upon them so I have them available on this website and have listed them below.
![Reason Reason](https://dl2.macupdate.com/images/icons256/8161.png?time=1615483582)
Ok, these are all very long! But I’d been writing them in my head for 10+ years so when I got around to writing them, it was really just a matter of hours before each of them were written.
I could split them up, but, like software, all of this is deeply interconnected. You can’t improve your testing procedures for a feature without thinking about the usability mistakes you made the last time you did a feature like this. It’s one big interconnected mess.
Kind of like software. ?
Technical Support
My first 12 years at Apple, I held three different jobs that were just amazing. Mail edges out the other two, but it’s very a very close contest.
I’ll cover the technical support part of the job here. The reason for needing this was a mandate that everyone in software engineering live and work on Apple Mail as their only email client. Some of the executives were also heavily “encouraged” to do so.
This was my first exposure to the dogfood concept. Essentially, having everyone use the product would tease out edge cases that stemmed from the wide variety of workflows and usage patterns that people have for email.
Mail was not in very good shape when I started. I don’t think any of the engineers at the time would take offense at that statement. The codebase stemmed from the NeXT email client that would read messages from a local UNIX spool file. POP was added later and IMAP was just getting fleshed out when I started.
The support part of the job started out to be well over half the job. My phone was very active, people would stop by for help, or send email. There were so many benefits to this being part of my job, which I’ve split into two buckets: software engineering and important people.
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Software engineering
I got to meet everyone in software engineering due to this job. The benefits of that were reaped even many years after I left the job. Other than the networking aspect, I got to learn how people used Mail more than anyone else at the company. This helped tremendously when fielding bug reports, testing, and also participating in design discussions for the next versions of the product.
Some people that became long-time friends sprung out of this part of my job. Having a phone and in-person technical support background helped me out a lot here and I later found this was a big reason they hired me. Quite honestly, I had virtually no experiene doing any of the other parts of my job.
I learned the importance of having a public face for a team. If people know that a team listens and is responsive, they are more likely to write good bug reports and be cooperative when more data gathering might be a drain on their time.
I also learned the app inside and out, in ways I probably never would have if my job had only been to test the application. I was very proud of the skills I developed and so grateful to my team members for all the time they gave to me to learn what I needed to learn. It’s good to work with people that understand the need to invest in people and have it pay off later.
Important people
I had prior experience dealing with executives and potentially difficult people in jobs prior to Apple, so it was not intimidating to provide support to high-level people including executives. Again, this was profound for networking benefits. If I can send an email to an executive and have a higher chance of being listened to because of a positive support experience they had with me, that benefitted me greatly.
I also have some good stories that came out of it.
The head of the Mac OS 9 (“Classic”) team was challenging to help because there appeared to be a lot of bitterness there towards the Mac OS X team. So, while I’m trying to help, I would get an earful about how crap Mac OS X was compared to Mac OS 9. Not everything was unfounded, but it was challenging to be diplomatic because I understood how people feel when a company buys another company and essentially gets replaced by it.
Some of the people I dealt with like Fred Anderson (CFO) and Avie Tevanian (SVP of Software Engineering) were always very nice and enjoyable to talk to. It was nice to get to spend time with people several rungs of the ladder above you and to be granted some time for chit-chat or brainstorming.
Sometimes I’d deal with executive admins rather than executives. On the plus side was a wonderful woman named Bambi Fernandez. She was Avie’s admin and she sometimes had issues of her own or she would supervise me in Avie’s office. She would have a list of mailboxes with juicy, enticing names like “board meeting notes” and “emails from Steve”—I would threaten to click on the mailboxes and she would freak out but I never did.
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Steve’s admin was someone whose name I’ve since forgotten, but I got many an earful from her over the years. I had experience dealing with yelling people so I was cool with it, but nonetheless, this is Steve’s admin not just a random yelling person.
One of my favorite stories was going to Jon Rubenstein’s office to troubleshoot. He was the executive in charge of Hardware Engineering at the time. One day I was sitting at his desk with him behind me and I was mousing and clicking and noticed that the mouse felt weird. Heavier. Then I noticed no cord coming out of it. This was before the wireless mouse had been announced.
I was surprised to see this so I looked back at him and he was just holding his index finger in front of his mouth in a shushing gesture. Good times.
Conclusion
I later realized that combining so many skills into one job made a whole that was better than the sum of its parts. Unfortunately, as software gets more complex, you can’t realistically have someone doing all these jobs at once.
When I started on Mail, we hadn’t even shipped Public Beta yet, so we effectively had a few hundred Mail users in the entire world. Nowadays, there are probably thousands of active bug reports and tens of thousands of internal users. The app is far more complex.
I have some thoughts on scalability, but it’s a difficult task. In any event, the support part of my job was really fun and challenging and I feel proud of the work I did.