Re lunch. Let's make it happen, if not dinner with our ladies.
Re: the one you had. . . If it was Bondi Blue could have been as low as MacOS.8.1 as that was the one of the Gumdrop Macs G3 shipped with first. But they'd even run up to MacOS9.1 (not 9.2, that was for a Mac that had EFI) and OSX.3.9 Panther. . . and some of the later ones shipped with 9.1 and could go to OSX.4.3 Tiger.
Re NeXT did sell the NeXTStep Openstep software for OEM installation on PC, Indigo, and even heavy duty Mac boxes, plus any UNIX boxes from 1993 to its sale to Apple in 1997. I drooled over one but the $20,000 price tag, and toy status for me was too great.
I was doing a lot a graphic art work on an Amiga 3000 at the time using a program called PageStream. . . Blew Illustrator, photoshop, Printshop, and QuarkExpress out of the water. It did everything in one package from graphic manipulation to pre-press including color separations, masking, half-tones, text entry, editing, character manipulation (twist, turn, spin, image fill, translucency, cut-out, fades), dye-process, everything you could imagine and some you couldn't, better than the separate apps in Mac or PC. . . and here's the kicker. It was developed by ONE GUY, Deron Kazmaier, working sixty miles from the nearest paved road (as he puts it "in the high plains of North Dakota"), where he lived with his wife, sixteen sled-dogs, a generator, and several computers so he could make it cross platform! It ran on Atari ST, Amiga, PCs, Mac, Linux, and some weird OS in Great Britain! He'd take a two month break from coding every year to train for and race the Iditerod! Would you believe he's STILL updating and supporting it?! He now supports Amiga, Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows.
Lx, in the older version, PageStream supported document to 2000 feet in size! If you could find a printer that large, it'd print it. If you couldn't, it would tile 8.5" x 11" prints and you could paste it up. In color. Lol! I've designed building projects in it! Accuracy to .000" in drawing, math aware input editing, with complex formulae, including vector drawing. Fontography, to .000 point. Love this program. Not too steep of a learning curve.
Unfortunately, my graphic arts business dried up as people learned they could turn out "ransom note" flyers and newsletters in Microsoft Word. . . and I lost interest in publishing (and the time to do it properly). Their work looked horrid, but they liked it. . .
Besides, I made lots of money cleaning up after them. The amateur fonts the sent to the printers invariably screwed up the printer's computers after uploading a few too many modified Helveticas and Times Romans that had been, shall we say, tweaked, by Joe Blow font monger, with the fancy newly Script font pasted into their metrics? That just help grow the other side of my consulting business. . . and I picked up some of my publishing competitors to network their businesses, as well as clean up their messy font collections.
One of my magazine publisher clients called me two hours before they had to hand carry the cartridge HD with that month's issue to the printer. The typesetter/graphic artist had accepted a last minute ad from a long time advertiser who had his secretary "whip the ad out" in her copy of some DTP. He had a custom font he'd had a high school buddy of his son design for his company logo he insisted on using. The guy dropped the ad into the space they were holding, dropped the font into the font folder, tweaked the sizes to fit, then saved the file. (No backup, of course!) and went to lunch. Deadline to leave the editing office was 3:00PM.
At 1:00 I got a frantic call. After getting back from lunch, the graphics guy, doing one more check, was horrified to find that ALL the body text was screwed up royally! Each character was separated from the next by several inches of blank space! There might be only three words on a page.
I got there by 1:30. I knew what was wrong. That "custom font," was a FrankenFont, made up of metrics borrowed from other fonts, with the coding left in place. Dropping the "custom font" into the regular font collection caused the correctly coded metrics to be replaced with the coding for FrankenFont, which in no way matched the size, kerning (the kid had no idea what kerning was), and hinting was. . . Oops!
Fixing it was not easy. . . Because the font they had laid the magazine out with—which they THOUGHT was legitimate—was itself, an amateur creation they'd picked up from an ad somewhere that had corrupted the legitimate Garamond! This meant that after replacing the offending font folder. . . and finding fonts for ALL the other ads. . . the layout of the body text was still screwed up.
60 some odd pages of text. . . Rekerning. Find widows and orphans. I know we missed some. I know the ligatures were all broken. . . and unfixed. But the drive with that month's magazine issue at 3:10.
I laid down the law. They bought the entire Adobe Font Suite $1800 per work station, IIRC. . . for every production computer. Accept an outside Ad? Fine. It's to produced on a QUARANTINED Mac. The ad is printed with the customer's supplied font as a high def image file. . . at an extra charge. . . and then the image only is exported to the magazine/newspaper/publication. The Quarantined Mac’s fonts folder is then NUKED! Rinse, repeat with the next outside ad. No custom font, no matter how cool is to ever be kept! NEVER allow any outside artwork with text onto the production computer, Mac or PC. THEY ARE POISON! I put a sticker just above the CD drive slot on the computers "NO UNAUTHORIZED FONTS ALLOWED!"
One week after I laid down this law, I was called back. A new graphic artist had installed his favorite "cool" fonts on all of the production computers and had already poisoned about half of the new Adobe fonts. "But they're so COOL!" This punk kid said. "The fonts on these computers were boring junk. You can download lots of better ones for free."
Sheesh. . . and they vote.
Word is that Steve had beaten the Cancer. . . but died rejecting the Liver transplant. I too wish he'd paid more attention to the doctors. . . but doctors can be deadly too.
Apple has already taken the hit of Steve Jobs' loss. Tim Cook was actually running Apple for the two years before Steve's death. Steve was acting mostly as an advisor.
Microsoft irritated so many power users with stupid changes in the interface to Microsoft Word. Use a seldom used feature and it's suddenly on the ribbon. Old stand-byes are moved to obscure locations. Mail merge changed so that old merged files such as mailing labels don't merge the same and can't be properly edited, keyboard short-cuts are arbitrarily changed for no discernible sane reason (that drove touch typists up-the-proverbial-wall). Some body needed to be at the helm, a Steve Jobs like leader, to tell MS that change is not to be made for change's sake, and there must be a hell of a good reason to make the change. Steve Balmer wasn't it. . . and should not have been kept at the helm for as long as he was. We Mac users used to facetiously hope they'd keep him around "as long as it takes" for him to run Microsoft into the ground. He may have done it.
I doubt bringing Gates back in an active management position would do much good, now. In my opinion, Gates was not much of a tech genius. He was an opportunist. (as, in a sense was Steve Jobs. . . but Steve Jobs had taste and a madness lacked by Gates.) Gates' talent was seeing the work of others and grabbing it for Microsoft. . . after sometimes filing the serial numbers off. . . beginning with DOS itself. Then add things like Disk Doubler, stolen from Disk Stacker, graphical user windows codes grabbed while working under contract from Apple to make Office for Mac, the GUI for Windows 95 itself from Apple, Windows Media Player which was found to include Apple's QuickTime code in its entirety (including markers such as an Apple engineer's social security number, his mother's maiden name, etc., imbedded in the code) which resulted in the infamous so-called $150 million bail-out of Apple by Microsoft in 1997, which was actually part of a multi-billion dollar patent and copyright lawsuit settlement Steve Jobs negotiated with Gates to avoid a protracted court trial which would have given MS a huge black eye and an even larger dollar loss.
The story about the fonts is funny, I've had my own problems with Bitstream fonts in Windows, I think 3.0? They would work fine until I needed to desperately print a document and then it would blow up and you couldn't just highlight everything and select a different font, oh no, you had to go through a nightmare scenario to get things working. I stopped using Bitstream after a couple of those wonderful 'features'.
I love your user who thought the 'free' fonts were cool, another hipster doofus but they do keep us employed.
An Amiga 3000, damn that brings back memories although the latest version of the Amiga I used was, I believe, a 2500. I remember that the 3000 required some massaging to get a toaster working with it. The Amiga's O/S was awesome. I liked being able to grab the top of the screen and bang, a new instance of Amiga DOS. Great machines, I wonder what it would cost to get a running one?
I'd really enjoy editing a document 2000' long, damn, I could imagine making a mistake, hitting print and going to get a cup of coffee and coming back to a mountain of paper.
I didn't realize MS had hosed, and blatantly I might add, Apple's code, too funny. I remember in Windows NT 3.1 getting OS2 error messages and thought that was funny.
I finally powered up my FreeMac and it is already running OSX! I don't know which one, it looked like the version 9 and older screen so maybe the previous user had done something, the current owner said it was majorly screwed up but I plugged it into a network port and was on the Internet without doing anything. I'll get the specs and maybe you can tell me what the best thing I can do to it. I've got different types of memory coming out of my ears so I probably have some that will work with it. I saw some 1mb SIMMS the other day and had to laugh; I remember when 4mb was hot s**t back in the day.
I'm still swamped but maybe lunch at the end of this month or September???
I'm sorry to hear you had an infarction, man, that is some scary stuff right there. You've made it 16 years so I hope things are good from here on out. A friend of mine who was in perfect shape had a mild heart attack, he almost didn't go to the hospital; good thing he did and now he's mellowed out and is supposedly doing good. I take my blood pressure meds like clockwork abd my blood pressure is always 120/80 which is great considering my mom had serious hypertension. One time my BP spiked to almost 200, it took them a week of me in the hospital for them to come up with the meds to control it. Thank God for Doctors and the scientific method!!!