Let’s get this out of the way: I was one of the original, dyed in the wool OS X fanboys. I accidentally wiped out a computer in my haste to get Rhapsody Developers Release 2 installed, and the day the the OSX Public Beta shipped, I left work early to install it on my only desktop machine. I finally had a Unix system, with long file name support, real multi-tasking, real virtual memory, at my disposal. It was amazing. Also, the system didn’t require the sacrifice of live virgins to keep it from crashing every other day. A lot of people moaned and complained on the message boards about how Apple was destroying the childhood and raping their sisters, but I didn’t see it that way. Apple needed a new way forward, or they were going to die. I never looked back.

Last night, I fired up a copy of Mac OS 9.0.4 for the first time in over 10 years, and I couldn’t stop smiling. I spent so many years in that platinum interface that I had to chuckle. Life was simpler then: there were only a few hundred files that made a system fully bootable, and you could really get by with a dozen or so if you really had to just get the system up and copy a few files off of it. I actually still remember what a lot of the icons represent as the Extensions and CDEVs load at boot time, and I remember the relative hell of debugging extension conflicts.

What surprised me was my reaction to Finder windows. As archaic as they are, they are worlds better than the OS X Finder. Worlds. In OS X, the windows don’t stay where you put them after they are closed and reopened. When you open a new folder, it doesn’t open a new window – it simply fills the current one with new content. It sometimes remembers your viewing preferences, it sometimes doesn’t. Column view, honestly, is a hack to make the OS X Finder functional. The OS 9 model is so much more elegant, and makes you feel more… connected to the machine. John Siracusa really had it right. I’d forgotten what it was like to have real interaction with the filesystem in a GUI.

Apple, please… look into this again. For everyone’s sake.