I take Jack’s point in Stolen Sheep about people getting all misty eyed about the consistency of the user interface on previous versions of MacOS.

I think he missed the mark slightly though, particularly by mentioning OS 9. I don’t know anything about Jack, so maybe he had an original Mac 128k, but I would never hold up OS 9 as a paragon of consistency, and people who do have obviously not been around that long!

The rot set in a lot earlier than that - for me it was around the time of Powertalk and Apple Guide. I would say that system 7 was pretty consistent though, and system 6 even more so.

Sheer complexity of the system is part of the problem I’m sure, but as I mentioned in Bring Back The User Interface Police I do think that Apple should keep a tighter overview, and at least conform to its own standards.