When were Macs easy to customize?

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Answering as a linked topic, because I expect this to generate a lot of comments…

Continuing the discussion from How to Avoid Sequoia’s Repetitive Screen Recording Permissions Prompts:

When was that?

Since day-one, any option that Apple didn’t provide in a control panel or preference panel somewhere always required some degree of hackery. Typically by installing third-party software that would hook itself into some part of the OS (e.g. INIT, system extensions, kernel drivers, background apps, etc.)

And the developer of those “haxie” packages typically needed to figure out the knowledge they needed the hard way - by using undocumented data structures and functions, hoping that future versions of the system software won’t break them.

Or by editing system resources (e.g. icons, fonts, images) using developer tools like ResEdit.

It might have been “easy” for ordinary users to buy or download one of these haxies, but it was far from easy for their developers.

This is compared to the typical Unix system, where anyone with the skills to be a system administrator (generally) had all the tools and knowledge to customize everything, thanks to a combination of open source code, software designed for massive customization (often with lots of cryptic configuration files) and really good documentation.

Mostly (I assume) due lots of fundamental development being done by the hacker communities at Berkeley and MIT (in addition to AT&T’s research group, which was also pretty hacker-ish).

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Macs were easy to customize in the same era that they had no bugs, that they were inexpensive, and that Apple treated developers well.

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Yeah, I probably should have said easIER.

Still compared to now, ResEdit seems like a sunny day in the park. And I was generally satisfied with my ability to modify early OS X versions. But recently it’s gotten difficult to change even non-Apple application icons thanks to Assets.car files

Sigh.

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I’m going to disagree. I think present Macs with OS X are a lot more customizable than the original Macs ever were.

With a modern Mac, you have a plethora of “defaults” (i.e. plist) settings you can change. Other settings can be changed through other Terminal commands. You can fairly easily create scheduled tasks, and tasks that run based on events, such as when a file or folder changes.

And you can easily install Unix and Linux programs through Homebrew, MacPorts, and Fink.

All of which can be done without any programming. You just need to find the right commands, but that’s what Google is for.

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