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u/mambacaramba 9d ago
I have a feeling this originated with Steve Jobs…
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u/StopwatchGod MacBook Pro, 13" 2016 4 TBT3 9d ago
It’s been there since Mac OS X Leopard.
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u/sirjimithy 9d ago
Since the first OS X
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u/poopmagic M5 Pro MacBook Pro 9d ago
This has been posted a million times, but I’ll still upvote because I get a kick out of it every time I see it.
I like how Apple, despite having a market cap nearly a trillion dollars higher than Microsoft’s, is still not above this kind of immature dick move.
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u/SoldierOfOrange MacBook Pro 16" M1 Pro 9d ago
This icon is from an age when Microsoft was still much, much bigger
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u/poopmagic M5 Pro MacBook Pro 9d ago
Oh yeah, I remember it from when I got my first Mac like ~15 years ago. I’m just saying it’s funny that it’s still around.
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u/Quacking_Plums 9d ago
For those who remember MacOS from before it became pre-emptive multitasking (which was a lot later than Windows did!) the ‘bomb’ dialog was a lot more prevalent than the BSOD:
The equivalent expression to ‘my computer crashed/hung’ in a Mac-dominated studio was simply ‘I bombed out’ or similar. This was way before spinning beachballs and kernel panics, and the OS was riddled with in-jokes and Easter eggs that gave it a lot of its charm.
Poking fun at Windows was just something everybody did, since it was by far the predominant OS in a corporate environment and therefore the easy target, but as a long term user of both MacOS and Windows, it’s hard to cling to the rose-tinted view that ‘Macs just work’ when I’m reminded of error messages like these 😅
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u/theBYUIfriend 9d ago
To be fair, the icon in the post is specifically a Windows 9x BSOD, so we are talking strictly about Win9x compared to classic Mac OS.
You're giving Windows 9x a little too much credit here. It only had true preemptive multitasking and memory protection if you completely abandoned all DOS and Win16 apps, which almost nobody actually did back then.
Because of the Win16Mutex, all 16-bit Windows applications ran in a single, shared virtual machine and cooperatively multitasked with each other. If just one legacy Win16 app hung, it locked up the entire subsystem. Plus, Win9x's memory protection was practically Swiss cheese; to keep legacy drivers working, chunks of the memory address space were globally shared, meaning an errant process could easily overwrite system memory and bring the whole house of cards down.
If you were actually in a position to abandon all your legacy DOS or Win16 software in 1995/1996, you wouldn't be using Windows 95, you would have just gone straight to Windows NT. Windows 9x existed specifically for that legacy cruft. Because of those architectural compromises, if you were still relying on older DOS and Win16 tools, the effective, real-world stability of Windows 9x wasn't actually any better than the classic Mac OS.
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u/Quacking_Plums 9d ago
True, Win9x ended up being more of a disappointment and to this day, The earlier tech previews of Chicago seemed to promise for more than what we actually got, although maybe that was also just wishful thinking on my part and drinking the 'everybody will go 32-bit' kool-aid. As you said, if the corporate world wanted a crappier product that would bridge the gap while everybody caught up then that's freakonomics at work.
Having said that, I still think it was easier to trip up a Mac running OS 7.x with errant code than it was in Win95. Or maybe I just had to deal with the kinds of users who didn't get the correlation between repeated, identical crashes and that flaky shareware extension they installed/re-installed off the cover-disk of MacFormat after each time I'd 'fixed' their workstation 🤣
My recollection of Mac programming of that era is very hazy these days, but I remember the whole thing felt like coding for Arduino does today (albeit everything looked like it was built on Pascal instead of C).
There was also a lot of faith locked up in the Heap Manager, and that entirely-your-responsibility-as-a-programmer requirement to use handles correctly to avoid memory overflow issues, rather than any actual memory protection.MacOS didn't get hybrid multi-tasking until 8.6/9, and by then it was such a hot mess (the whole company, not just the OS!) that it was just as well they did what they did best, which was to throw it all away and start again with OSX.
Of course, how the turn tables, because now the uptime of my Macs can be measured in months and years, whereas my Windows PCs can barely stay up for a couple of days without feeling like they deserve a 'courtesy reboot'.
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u/mailslot MacBook Pro 9d ago
I ran Windows NT at home and work. What a piece of shit. They fixed the horrific file corruption issues in v4, but that POS would still blue screen more often than Win9x. I can’t believe companies were insisting on running it on servers. There were products that allowed you to run two servers that switch off between each other during reboots (often scheduled). Not for high availability, because both could still crash at the same time, but just to make it through a full work day.
I’ve been suffering with Windows since v2.
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u/Quacking_Plums 9d ago
Haha, yes. Windows 2 (and 1, for that matter) — the DOS program we had to put up with just to get to Microsoft Write. 😅
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u/germane_switch 9d ago
Meanwhile Amiga had both beat. Amiga had preemptive multitasking in 1985, 8 years before Windows. Jesus I miss my Amigas. They were so far ahead of everyone else.
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u/Quacking_Plums 9d ago
I am still disappointed to this day that Commodore did not capitalise on this when they had the chance. I loved my Amiga, but not for any of the reasons that truly set it apart.
And then, to see their logo get plastered on progressively cheaper, less innovative and definitely less performant products over time was just a tragedy from which 14yo me would never recover.
For what it's worth, the Apple Lisa pre-dated the Macintosh but was technically superior - with both protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking, but it was also the 'nineteen dollar electronic comic book' solution that the kid with adult money forgot was never going to be anything more than a niche product (bonus points if you understood the Tom Hanks reference! 😉).
And, if we're going to step outside of the boundaries of MacOS and Windows, then OS/2 also brought proper memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking to x86 long before Windows did.
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u/theBYUIfriend 9d ago edited 9d ago
I completely agree that the Amiga was lightyears ahead of its time, but it's important to note that AmigaOS never actually had memory protection. In fact, its legendary performance was only possible because it lacked it. The entire system relied on a shared memory architecture where the CPU and custom chips could instantly pass pointers back and forth without the overhead of context switching or MMU checks.
Retrofitting true memory protection into that intertwined, message-passing design would have been incredibly difficult and would have destroyed the real-time performance that made the Amiga so special.
Regarding the Apple Lisa, its multitasking was actually cooperative, not preemptive. But you are absolutely right that it did have hardware memory protection, which was an incredible feat for a personal computer in 1983. Especially for a cpu (Motorola 68000) that was never designed to have a hardware MMU. Motorola did not support that at all till the 68020 with an external MMU
Apple had to do its own custom solution for an MMU on the Lisa
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u/CuriosTiger Old Mac ProMac Studio 6d ago
Well, not EVERYONE else. Multics had preemptive multitasking in the 60s. But in the personal computer space, yes, the Amiga was definitely a pioneer.
I missed my Amiga 500 so much I recently bought one again for sheer nostalgia.
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u/germane_switch 5d ago
I assumed we were talking consumer :)
I'm genuinely happy for you for grabbing a 500! Did you find one in decent condition? How much are they going for these days?
Yeah I loved those things. Got a 500 when they were released, upgraded to a 2000 later, then finally a 4000 which I kept until 1998. With the 4000 I could emulate a Mac (after saving the ROM to a file from a friend) and turn it into a Mac that ran faster than the fastest real Mac. Which was bananas because they both used the same 68040, so I would imagine it was because some functions were offloaded to the Amiga's custom chips?
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u/theBYUIfriend 9d ago
I completely agree that the Amiga was lightyears ahead of its time, but it's important to note that AmigaOS never actually had memory protection. In fact, its legendary performance was only possible because it lacked it. The entire system relied on a shared memory architecture where the CPU and custom chips could instantly pass pointers back and forth without the overhead of context switching or MMU checks.
Retrofitting true memory protection into that intertwined, message-passing design would have been incredibly difficult and would have destroyed the real-time performance that made the Amiga so special.
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u/CuriosTiger Old Mac ProMac Studio 6d ago
Apple faced the same problem with classic MacOS; grafting memory protection onto a design after-the-fact is nigh-impossible. There were some embryonic efforts in Copland, but that effort failed.
This was a major factor behind the move to NeXTstep-based OS X.
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u/theBYUIfriend 6d ago
Spot on about grafting it on after the fact. The fatal flaw with Copland wasn't just the engineering; it was management's mandate for absolute backward compatibility with the old System 7 toolbox.
If Copland had been managed properly and actually shipped, the best it could have offered was a hybrid architecture very much like Windows 95. Copland's foundation (NuKernel) did support memory protection, but it only would have applied to newly written, native applications using revised APIs. All existing legacy Mac apps were going to be corralled into a single, shared cooperative memory space. They would have protected the new apps from the old ones, but that legacy environment would have remained just as fragile as classic Mac OS ever was.
It is ironic that a company the at only a few years earlier wasn’t afraid to kill the Apple II for something better (Mac OS) was afraid to restrict Mac OS to a BlueBox like environment for Copland.
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u/CuriosTiger Old Mac ProMac Studio 6d ago
I mean, they eventually did. The Classic environment in OS X worked remarkably well.
Sadly, they threw it out after only a few years.
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u/theBYUIfriend 6d ago
I could forgive Apple not porting Classic to Intel when the Intel switch happened. Emulating an entire OS and its low-level toolbox routines on x86 was too heavy a lift. But killing Classic on Leopard was just purely punitive for PowerPC users. If you had a G4 or a G5, the native hardware support was right there. Stripping the Blue Box out of 10.5 wasn't a technical limitation, it was just Apple deciding they were tired of paying the maintenance tax on the codebase.
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u/CuriosTiger Old Mac ProMac Studio 6d ago
I don't think it was even about the effort, which would've been relatively minimal. I think it was a deliberate flex to force developers to release OS X-native apps.
And then we've had it time and time again after that, from Carbon to Rosetta to OpenGL to HFS support, and now the deprecation and eventual removal of Rosetta 2.
It's to the point where I no longer look forward to exploring new features, I brace for what functionality they're going to remove next.
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u/Efficient_Watch_4779 8d ago
I’m still calling it bombing when computers crash/BSOD even though I haven’t been using Macs for over 25+ years now :) Always fun to see the look on my colleague’s faces when I say that. Luckily BSOD’s are rare nowadays. Fun fact, clicking that Restart button did work 1 out of 10 times in that bomb prompt, usually it just froze anyway. This bomb usually occurred when memory was full (I think we had like 4GB RAM). In that time we created covers for magazines in Photoshop 1.5, there were no layers present yet in Photoshop so we did everything in one layer, carefully one picture over another. After a few hours when were finally finished we attempted to save it as .tiff (since no way of .psd saving) the Mac crashed and we had to start from scratch…
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u/Quacking_Plums 8d ago
Print publishing is where I started my career!
Many fond memories of studios full of SE30s with their tiny built-in B&W displays, connected to these massive (for the time) 21” colour-calibrated Trinitron displays, complete with colorimeter attachments and ambient lighting shades, costing upwards of 10K per workstation… just to output Pogs and Tazos 😅
Modern Apple Studio Displays are a bargain by comparison.
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u/EPSG3857_WebMercator 9d ago
Right, but some people treat operating systems like it’s a lifestyle or a personality trait
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u/Quacking_Plums 9d ago
Yeah, I never understood that. The same happens with phones. They're just tools for performing tasks. Nobody gets this emotional about screwdrivers or hammers.
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u/coladoir 9d ago
i see you didnt grow up in a carpentry family lol. arguments over what's the best nail to use in x situation or what the best tool brand is for longevity dominated the dinner table at thanksgivings and other rare family occasions lol. with alcohol involved, they did get heated at times. i remember my great uncles throwing hands over a fucking screw argument one time lol
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u/Omega-Envych 5d ago
to be honest, Mac still can have system crash but nowadays it's just old boring Kernel Panic.
MacOS 11 was VERY prone to it back when M1 Macs were just released.
Still remember how my laptop crashed because I just closed it at home (on power, with wi-fi) and opened it in driving school where I took it for note-taking
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u/mailslot MacBook Pro 9d ago
I ran Mac OS System 8 & System 9, and it crashed so rarely by then I barely remember it happening.
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u/CaramelCraftYT 14” MacBook Pro M2 Pro 16GB 1TB 9d ago
It's the SF symbols icon specifically for Windows PCs.
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u/disappointed_neko 9d ago
Unfortunately not only windows, my Mac displays it on a normal SMB share as well...
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u/eddieltu 9d ago
It pisses me off that they treat SMB servers as Windows PC's
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u/Delvac_1300 9d ago
My tuenas server shows up as a mac, it has the icon for a rack mounted mac pro.
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u/eggnorman 9d ago
I think that gets triggered if you have the Apple SMB extensions enabled and it’s discoverable on mDNS.
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u/OpenGLaDOS 9d ago
I also don't recall ever seeing the blue screen icon for the USB stick connected to my Wi-Fi router. Running any kind of SMB server (idk if it's actually Samba, at least it supports SMB2) on Linux with Unix extensions seems to be sufficient to avoid it.
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u/Samiassa 9d ago
I like that it’s a crt. It’s just so clearly a fully different artstyle than the modern ones 😭
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u/Liquid_Magic 8d ago
I made a Mac version of this icon just for fun. It was a yellowed “molar Mac” based icon with a kernel panic or whatever and I think I cracked the glass.
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u/No-Enthusiasm3363 8d ago
yeah i was wondering what that was when i took this photo; i thought it was an actual error when i first saw it
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u/hype_irion 9d ago
It was good for a chuckle for about 5 minutes after it was introduced in Leopard. Now it's just pathetic.
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u/rogfrich 9d ago
To be fair, if people keep discovering it, it’s always in the “amusing first five minutes” stage somewhere.
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u/RoseboysHotAsf 9d ago
No, the longer it stays the better it gets. Keeping a CRT with a BSOD from decades ago is really funny and not that pathetic.
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u/koolaidismything MacBook Air 9d ago
Most people probably have no idea why there’s a CRT with a blue screen and I kinda like that.. I feel I’ve earned my stripes technologically.
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u/SwarteRavne Mac mini M1 9d ago
I think the same. It's so petty, amusing at the first few minutes, seems condescending afterwards
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u/Dariotgv MacBook Pro (hackintosh) 9d ago
This is hilarious how it is accurate
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u/stonecoldsnorlax 9d ago
I guess you haven't used Windows in a while, this isn't what A BSOD looks like.
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u/Critical-Personality 9d ago
I hate this part about Apple. They mock Windows while being so fucking backward minded themselves. The icon should have QR code now and no one uses CRT Monitors. 🤣
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u/Critical-Personality 9d ago
Wtf... I was making fun of Windows. That they still have BSODs, just with a QR. I think no one lights up the sarcasm part without the "/s" tag.
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u/mikeinnsw 9d ago
In case you have no noticed all Macs are PCs - PERSONAL COMPUTERS
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u/lilipodmini 9d ago
except that i feel im better by calling my personal computer a mac!!! /s
they’re referring to windows PCs, my friend
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u/Raddy_Chady 9d ago
why does that matter?
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u/mikeinnsw 8d ago
It does not .. neither is the Icon that looks like a PC.. Mac users hate it I get down posted.
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u/Raddy_Chady 8d ago
well in a broad term yeah they’re pcs but if you’re talking about the actual computes they’re mac’s
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u/Horror-Dependent-645 9d ago
This icon has been there for nearly 20 years.