Apple's long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found
7 comments
·March 16, 2025userbinator
vishnugupta
Yeah the first thing I did after a fresh windows install was to create boot disk, and have 2-3 copies just in case because floppy disks were notoriously unreliable.
yjftsjthsd-h
> but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable.
Depending on your machines, we may have looped back to that point in the form of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40914761 - 20MB in one file is all it takes to carry around a UEFI bootable Linux system on every USB drive you own.
muppetman
I love people like this who are so dedicated to understanding things from our past. Really, it makes no difference to the world if this is every fully understood or not. But it's their passion, and it shows. And I think that's wonderful.
mmooss
That old MacOS UI looks so appealing. I want to use it and I don't care that it's low-res, black and white. I love that they created what seems like a texture in the window titlebars, I assume to give them physical-like presence and to encourage grabbing them.
I don't want to use my computer's UI; it's just necessary and slightly annoying in its aesthetics and cognitive load.
RossBencina
> texture in the window titlebars, I assume to give them physical-like presence and to encourage grabbing them.
That's called a visual affordance. Once upon a time it was canon that interactive UI items had visual affordance -- you could tell that you could interact with them at a glance, just by looking at them.
labster
I feel the same way. I have an original iPhone that I still use as a music player, and the old UI still looks insanely great compared to the flat, gray expanse we find ourselves in today. System 7 was pretty solid design work as well. Imagine what our desktops would look like if they had gotten Copeland running.
How many personal computers in 1994 still had the ability to boot after the OS was trashed?
In the DOS/Windows world, you'd insert the boot floppy you made and boot from that in order to undo changes that prevented the main system from booting, but DOS is simple enough that it's easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era, I'd make all my floppies bootable.