“nothing else happened in the background while you held a menu open“
That was because the OS was hacked (I guess the design looked differently, initially) to run on a 8MHz 68000 in 128k of RAM. To make menu opening and closing snappy (necessary because users will open and close menus searching for a menu option), it was implemented by
1. saving the screen bits that would be clobbered drawing the menu.
2. handling menu selection.
3. copying back those bits.
Drawing to the screen could mean writing directly to screen memory, which couldn’t be detected because there was no MMU, but even if it was done using system calls, programs couldn’t be halted when they made such calls. So, step 3 meant changes ‘under’ the opened menu would be lost, so nothing could be allowed to draw to the screen during step 2.
And of course, little of that mattered for the original OS, as it wouldn’t run multiple programs or multiple threads in a program. Step 2 would be the only thing running that was supposed to do screen drawing (with exceptions for drawing the mouse pointer, a feature that just have been fun to implement. Sound and async disk I/O (with its funny software-controlled floppy rotation speed) also would run, but those were limited in what they were supposed to do)
I’m not 100% glad those times are gone. Things were harder to do, but getting anything done felt way more as an accomplishment.
I just inherited a Powerbook G3 (Wallstreet, 300Mhz G3) from my mother-in-law's closet. Everything is fine and snappy until you have two programs open at once...then all of a sudden everything becomes unresponsive.
It shouldn't be that bad. How much RAM in the machine? Is virtual memory enabled? What OS version? What disk is it booting from? With what disk driver? Which two apps? (Some, like Photoshop, have their own Scratch Disk settings). Is enough RAM allocated to each of them (in 'Get Info'), etc etc. This is a pretty deep rabbit hole.
It's an environment that takes a while to know the ins-and-outs of, but it's also very fun and incredible hackable in ways no OS could be these days. The Wallstreet is a fantastic computer, one of the best Powerbooks ever made. Try it with Mac OS 8.6, at least 64MB RAM (128MB even better), RAMDoubler 8 or 9 with compression disabled (it has a better VM system than built-in), on a mSATA SSD in a JM20330 ATA/mSATA adapter, with the boot partition under 8GB (ATA-5 limitation) using either Apple's Disk Utility driver or Lacie Silverlining 6 if you're feeling adventurous :)
I had a 200Hz (?) Performa (maybe it didn’t have cache) and running AOL Instant Messenger and CodeWarrior at the same time was a joke. A new IM would interrupt what I was doing and it took three seconds to switch back to the other app.
Meanwhile on my Pentium 166, I could smoothly have a few IM windows going while doing other things (Visual C++, Netscape...)
This one actually has 512mb of RAM, funny enough. No RAM doubler or virtual memory enabled. I was using iCab and Word side-by-side. It's the fastest PDQ model made AFAIK. No RAM doubler.
The main issue with it right now is that the sound doesn't work at all. I was going to take it apart and check the DC / sound card (which is the same module) and see if there's something obviously wrong with it once I get the chance.
Yeah, it's counter-intuitive, but you should turn Virtual Memory on even if you set it down to 1MB. Also make sure the Disk Cache is set as high as you can go.
"If you disable virtual memory, the system's MMU is disabled. When that happens:
- Every program you launch needs to be 100% loaded from disk when you launch that program, which could cause program launches to take longer, particularly applications which are themselves large. The impact of this will vary based on the speed of the disk or network volume the application file resides on
- The other thing that will happen is all applications will instantly take up their maximum possible RAM allocation, which even in 768, if you're running 9-era stuff, especially anything creative, could have a big impact."
That's why I recommended RAM Doubler since it allows you to disable VM and its own memory compression without hitting this limitation.
What was especially cool was how older (pre-SDRAM) PowerBooks persisted files in RAM Disk across reboots. You could copy a minimal System, your documents, and an app (tiny ones like Word 5.1a), reboot off the RAM Disk, then eject and spin down the internal HDD for a big battery life boost!
https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/popup-stevedev.html (An aside from The True Story of Audion: https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/)
I'm very nostalgic for those times and maintain several classic Macs, but for the most part I'm glad it's in the past.