[tkmd]

Just wondering what would be better on an older Mac. Suggestions?

[OptimusG4]

It really depends on the machine. 8.6 only required 32MB RAM and ran quite well, where 9.x requires 64MB. Both had their shortcomings, but IMO 8.6 was the best. OS 9 was just a filler til X came out.

[mAxximo]

Originally posted by tkmd:
Just wondering what would be better on an older Mac. Suggestions?

Both 8.6 and 9.2.2 were very stable to me. My better uptimes on the Mac were using 9.1 on a G4, usually running non-stop for 3-4 weeks before something made it crash, namely Real Player after some while of playing streaming media. DAVE caused some instability also, as well as random crashes in After Effects caused by a bug in the type engine. I'd still say a well configured System 9 was somewhat more stable than 8.6 but I'd leave the final decision to what type of Mac you have.

[leperkuhn]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
usually running non-stop for 3-4 weeks before something made it crash

I do not believe you. I'm sorry, I really don't.

[CharlesS]

9.x was horrible. It freaking crashed all the time. 9.0 is the OS that has the dubious distinction of being the one that started the trend of people on the Internet calling each release of the Mac OS a "beta".

8.6 was better, but still not all that stable. The last version of the classic Mac OS that I actually liked was 8.1. That one was decent - afterwards, it all went downhill until OS X came out.

[larkost]

As long as you did not have "ObjectSupportLib" in your system folder both OS's were very stable. That one file, which was installed with almost every VISE installer made (and that was the method used by all the big software houses), was probably responsible for %95 of all crashes from MacOS 8.0 through 9.x. This was a well known problem the whole time, and VISE was informed of it, but kept on producing bad installer software, and the big software houses kept doing it wrong. There was even repeated requests to Apple to write something that would look for it and remove it in the system software.

The solution is to simply remove the file from the system folder. As background, this file was required for a lot of GUI operations before 8. With the advent of OS 8 the functions were all moved (with the same symbol and variable names, and the same locations in the system heap) into the system file. But there were subtle differences. So when a program when to use it the system would get confused and randomly use one instance or the other.. and things would just go downhill from there.

As long as you kept you system folder clean of this nasty problem, uptimes of a few months at a time were very common. With the problem you would be lucky to get more than 4-5 days.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by larkost:
As long as you did not have "ObjectSupportLib" in your system folder both OS's were very stable. That one file, which was installed with almost every VISE installer made (and that was the method used by all the big software houses), was probably responsible for %95 of all crashes from MacOS 8.0 through 9.x. This was a well known problem the whole time, and VISE was informed of it, but kept on producing bad installer software, and the big software houses kept doing it wrong. There was even repeated requests to Apple to write something that would look for it and remove it in the system software.

The solution is to simply remove the file from the system folder. As background, this file was required for a lot of GUI operations before 8. With the advent of OS 8 the functions were all moved (with the same symbol and variable names, and the same locations in the system heap) into the system file. But there were subtle differences. So when a program when to use it the system would get confused and randomly use one instance or the other.. and things would just go downhill from there.

As long as you kept you system folder clean of this nasty problem, uptimes of a few months at a time were very common. With the problem you would be lucky to get more than 4-5 days.

That was true in 8.x, but in OS 9, the OS would automatically detect that extension and not load it if it saw it. So no, OS 9's crashiness was not due to ObjectSupportLib.

Oh and yes, when I used the classic OS I always made sure this extension didn't get into the system folder (along with several other problem-causing extensions whose names I can't remember anymore). OS 9 was still unstable. I never got anything even close to a month of uptime.

[msuper69]

Originally posted by leperkuhn:
I do not believe you. I'm sorry, I really don't.

Ditto. Just moving the mouse could sometimes cause OS 9 to crash.

R.I.P. OS 9 and earlier.

[larkost]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
That was true in 8.x, but in OS 9, the OS would automatically detect that extension and not load it if it saw it. So no, OS 9's crashiness was not due to ObjectSupportLib.

Oh and yes, when I used the classic OS I always made sure this extension didn't get into the system folder (along with several other problem-causing extensions whose names I can't remember anymore). OS 9 was still unstable. I never got anything even close to a month of uptime.

Care to provide references there. I talked to Apple tech support (largue university account, so we had regular visits by Apple Support Engineers) repeatedly about ObjectSupportLib in MacOS 9 and made that sort of suggestion and was always told "that is a good idea, but has not been implemented".

A quick scan of the net only revels someone saying that such behavior would happen in (the then in development) 9.1. There is no mention whatsoever in the 9.1 release notes, or developer notes. I think you have bad information.

As to a month uptime. I got that regularly. Were you running anything by Norton? That has always been a mistake that otherwise knowledgeable people make. I also ran as clean as possible (few extensions that were not in a default install). I did have some problems with 9.0, but by 9.2 everything was much smoother.

[Don Pickett]

My experience with all Mac OSes from 6 onwards was that stability was directly related to how good you were at pruning your extensions folder. As they years went by, and I got better at it, my systems got more and more stable. By the time 9.x rolled around I rarely ever crashed, and only restarted once in a blue moon. I think part of the reason for this was the narrow range of uses for my machine; I had it optimized for desktop publishing software (Quark, Photoshop, etc.) and home use (web, mail, Quicken, games, etc.) By narrowing the field, you narrowed the chance of extension/memory conflicts, the chief cause of crashes.

Most people I knew had their machines narrowed to their particular niches, whether it was non-linear editing or programming or whatever. The benefit of this was that it allowed you to narrow the seemingly infinite number of extensions and extension conflicts down to a manageable number. The only real problem I had with 9.x turned out to be caused by the mouse drivers for my scrollwheel mouse. The minute I turned them off and installed USB Overdrive, my problems went away. Because I knew what the extensions in my System Folder did, I was able to track the problem down in not too much time.

Conversely, it was the machines which had everything installed on them will nilly that were, in my experience, the most crash-prone.

[Apfhex]

On my B&W G3, the *most* stable OS was the one it shipped with, 8.5! Now that was a nice piece of software. Of course, 8.6 became required for a lot of software, and the same goes for 9 when it came out. Honestly, 8.6 seemed like the least stable to me. Of course I never had much uptime since I shut down at night back then. I doubt it would have lasted more than a few days, though.

[alphasubzero949]

I had the most uptime with 8.6..............a day and a half.

9.x saw at least 2-3 reboots a day, even with every "maintenance" trick I could think of. Internet Exploder was almost always the usual suspect.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by larkost:
Care to provide references there. I talked to Apple tech support (largue university account, so we had regular visits by Apple Support Engineers) repeatedly about ObjectSupportLib in MacOS 9 and made that sort of suggestion and was always told "that is a good idea, but has not been implemented".

A quick scan of the net only revels someone saying that such behavior would happen in (the then in development) 9.1. There is no mention whatsoever in the 9.1 release notes, or developer notes. I think you have bad information.

Uh, ever actually tried it? Do so sometime. Dig up an old copy of the ObjectSupportLib extension, and throw it in the Extensions folder. Then reboot, and be amazed to find out that it's been moved to the Extensions (Disabled) folder!

Works on my machine. OS 9.2.2, with no Conflict Catcher or anything like that installed. I've done it on more than one machine, too. I remember being overjoyed by this development when it first appeared.

Sheesh, next time how about trying something yourself when it's easily verifiable information instead of just accusing people of having bad info, okay?

As to a month uptime. I got that regularly. Were you running anything by Norton? That has always been a mistake that otherwise knowledgeable people make. I also ran as clean as possible (few extensions that were not in a default install). I did have some problems with 9.0, but by 9.2 everything was much smoother.

No, I learned my lesson about the Norton stuff well back in the day.

The problem with OS 9 was that the first time some app either unexpectedly quit or froze so you'd have to force-quit it, the system would be in an unstable state, and you were basically gonna have to restart sooner or later. MS Word 98 used to do this to me all the time (specifically, what it would do was get stuck in such a state that it would actually respond to mouse input, but basically everything was dimmed - i.e. Save, Quit, all the options that you'd need to work would be grayed out, and you'd have to force-quit the app. Leaving the system in an unstable state. Every once in a while, it would lock up the whole OS too. Additionally, the web browsers that were available for OS 9 were pretty bad this way as well. So yeah, OS 9 could probably be stable as long as you never actually ran any apps. If you just stared at the desktop picture, it'd probably run fine. As it was, though, I had to run applications to get work done, and I was lucky if I got a day of uptime on OS 9.

[Big Mac]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
9.x was horrible. It freaking crashed all the time. 9.0 is the OS that has the dubious distinction of being the one that started the trend of people on the Internet calling each release of the Mac OS a "beta".

8.6 was better, but still not all that stable. The last version of the classic Mac OS that I actually liked was 8.1. That one was decent - afterwards, it all went downhill until OS X came out.

Even though I respect your technical expertise, Charles, I do not know about that claim about 8.1. 8.6 was much more functional and at least a bit more stable than 8.1 for me. I never ran anything higher than 8.6 on my personal Macs, so I can't comment on the relative stability of OS 9.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
Even though I respect your technical expertise, Charles, I do not know about that claim about 8.1. 8.6 was much more functional and at least a bit more stable than 8.1 for me. I never ran anything higher than 8.6 on my personal Macs, so I can't comment on the relative stability of OS 9.

I dunno, maybe I just was unlucky with 8.6 or something, but I do remember the thing crashing a lot. Not as bad as 9, but it was disappointing since OS 8.6 was being touted as being more stable due to the new nanokernel. There were three versions of the post-System 7 OS that I remember being pretty stable in my experience, and those were 7.1, 7.6.1, and 8.1.

As for functionality, the only thing I really remember 8.6 having over 8.1 was Sherlock, which was nice for Internet searching, but they should not have made it commandeer the Finder's Search feature as it took longer to load and was therefore kind of annoying. Sure, there were some other features, but they made such a non-impression on me that I honestly can't remember what they were.

[yukon]

Honestly I thought 8.6 was the best release ever. It took MacOS 8's modernness (ooh, basic finder multitasking), expanded it, and the OS felt ever so much faster than 8.0

9 was....9. It wasn't all that great, not much different from 8.6 at all, excepting improved networking I was told. It was unstable for me, but I ran a lot of varied applications....iCab was good in OS9, no crashing to speak of AFAIR. But OS X is rock solid, some applications crash themselves (Safari, Quicktime Player, Firefox, MPlayer, Simpletext) but not often on my personal machine, and I don't remember the last time there was any kind of system crash, gotta be way back in 10.2 before the crashreporter was turned off.

[barbarian]

I also have good uptimes (weeks) with 8.6 and 9.2.2 but I'm maxed out on memory. Memory is the key.

[kcmac]

I didn't know how to do much back then so nothing I did taxed anything too much. A fun thread but really, OS X is so much more stable than 9 I hate to think back.

[Geobunny]

I, too, had uptimes of over a month with OS 9. In fact, it was the same with OS 8.1 and 8.6. The only time I could crash my machine was when viewing a badly written web page in a badly written browser (although IMO it was the best available for OS 9, we called it Internet Exploder for a reason!) or when making some mind-blowingly stupid mistake with pointers in C !!

As has been said before, once you know what you're going to use the machine for, go routing around in the Extensions and Control Panel folders and weed out all the rubbish you don't need. Not only will it make your system more stable, it'll have the added benefit of shortening your startup times.

What computer is it? It may be that you have no choice as to what you can run. Computers that were released after OS 9 will not run anything lower.

[theolein]

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
My experience with all Mac OSes from 6 onwards was that stability was directly related to how good you were at pruning your extensions folder. ...

This was my experience from System 7 onwards, after Apple dropped DA's with the move from System 6 to 7. Although there were some systems that were notoriously bad (System 7.5.5 in particular), most of them were mainly a matter of only having those System extensions that were absolutely needed, without which neither the OS nor your particular piece of software would run. The system I had the worst experience with was OS 8.0. It actually managed to crash in the middle of a desktop rebuild and lose the whole disk once, which I managed to retrieve with Norton. Norton was quite good in those days, unlike today.

Of all the Systems I used I preferred 8.6 the most. It was fast, had lower memory requirements than 9.x and only crashed about once every two days for me. In fact, until I finally erased it from my Lombard's HD, I ran the same system without any reinstalls on that machine for 5 years.

[Don Pickett]

Originally posted by theolein:
In fact, until I finally erased it from my Lombard's HD, I ran the same system without any reinstalls on that machine for 5 years.

In all my years running various Mac OSes, I have only had to reinstall twice, once in 6.0.x and once in 10.1, and both were my fault.

[Phil Sherry]

Originally posted by alphasubzero949:
Internet Exploder was almost always the usual suspect.

no way. IE was always really good about being told to force quit. never took anything else down with it, but just died when told.

Finder was the one whose force quit dialog buttun should've just read: hang system

(cue image from CharlesS )

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
In all my years running various Mac OSes, I have only had to reinstall twice, once in 6.0.x and once in 10.1, and both were my fault.

I only ever had to reinstall once...and that was entirely my own fault. I installed Linux on a separate hard drive and tried to run MoL (Mac on Linux) as I needed access to a Mac program. I neglected to read the warning in the ReadMe which said MoL hadn't been updated for HFS+. Bye bye hard drive

Various repairs with Norton only served to screw it up even more. In hindsight, three things could've saved me. DiskWarrior could probably have retrieved my data, I should've read the ReadMe first, I should've rebooted into OS 8.6 instead of messing around with MoL which I didn't understand!

Don't know why I'm sharing my stupidity, maybe just to prove that OS < X was good until you took leave of your senses!

[bowwowman]

For me, the 8.6 - 9.2 versions were reasonably stable most of the time. My smurf box shipped w/ 8.6, so I had the joy of working thru the upgrade cycles. The major things I learned early on that were critical to stablilty were:

A) RAM: having the enough was great, but useless unless you learned how to allocate it properly amongst your applications...ie give them enough, but not too much.....

B) Trash Norton's (except Speed Disk)

C) Extensions: keep ONLY the bare minimum for what you needed, trash the rest. Or at least create optimized sets for particular uses, and only load them only when needed. Regularly check the folder for trash accumulations after installing any new software.

D) Rebuilding the desktop, pram, and finder preferences files regularly. I know some people thought these were relatively routine procedures, but they fixed or prevented alot of minor problems, before they got bigger

And last but not least: Virtual Memory: Turn it off if you had 128mb or more of real ram...

[Tyre MacAdmin]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
The last version of the classic Mac OS that I actually liked was 8.1.

agreed... 8.1 was more stable than anything after it.

[analogika]

Originally posted by Tyler McAdams:
agreed... 8.1 was more stable than anything after it.

My experience as well.

Unfortunately, an awful lot of peripherals required 9.1.

[Gavin]

8.6 was better for networking. It fixed some bugs in Open Transport.

I had an email server running 8.6 for over 4 years. It would crash about once every 2 months. The power key pro would bring it back up in about a minute. Previously it ran 8.1 and crashed more frequently.

The worst mac crasher of all time had to be netscape 2. Damn! It could take your computer down if a web page was missing a close tag.

I've had a computer running 7.5.5 go down and take 2 other computers with it. They were logged in over apple talk.

[mAxximo]

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
My experience with all Mac OSes from 6 onwards was that stability was directly related to how good you were at pruning your extensions folder. As they years went by, and I got better at it, my systems got more and more stable. By the time 9.x rolled around I rarely ever crashed, and only restarted once in a blue moon. I think part of the reason for this was the narrow range of uses for my machine; I had it optimized for desktop publishing software (Quark, Photoshop, etc.) and home use (web, mail, Quicken, games, etc.) By narrowing the field, you narrowed the chance of extension/memory conflicts, the chief cause of crashes.

Most people I knew had their machines narrowed to their particular niches, whether it was non-linear editing or programming or whatever. The benefit of this was that it allowed you to narrow the seemingly infinite number of extensions and extension conflicts down to a manageable number. The only real problem I had with 9.x turned out to be caused by the mouse drivers for my scrollwheel mouse. The minute I turned them off and installed USB Overdrive, my problems went away. Because I knew what the extensions in my System Folder did, I was able to track the problem down in not too much time.

Conversely, it was the machines which had everything installed on them will nilly that were, in my experience, the most crash-prone.

Exactly. IME, anyone having trouble keeping the MacOS stable (any version from 8.1 on) just didn't know what they were doing. Not that there was a lot to know, it was actually very simple and intuitive. Anyone with a bit of logical sense could configure a more or less stable set of Extensions. At least in my industry, that is...

[mAxximo]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
9.x was horrible. It freaking crashed all the time. 9.0 is the OS that has the dubious distinction of being the one that started the trend of people on the Internet calling each release of the Mac OS a "beta".

Sure, keep trying to re-write history kid...
That was OS X you're talking about.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
Exactly. IME, anyone having trouble keeping the MacOS stable (any version from 8.1 on) just didn't know what they were doing. Not that there was a lot to know, it was actually very simple and intuitive. Anyone with a bit of logical sense could configure a more or less stable set of Extensions. At least in my industry, that is...

Originally posted by mAxximo:
Sure, keep trying to re-write history kid...
That was OS X you're talking about.

mAxximo strikes again.

It's pretty clear the one of the points of a modern OS is to be built such that end users don't have to poke around in system directories just to achieve stability.

Quite frankly, OS 9's stability sucked. Good riddance.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Phil Sherry:
no way. IE was always really good about being told to force quit. never took anything else down with it, but just died when told.

Finder was the one whose force quit dialog buttun should've just read: hang system

(cue image from CharlesS )

Actually, my images are the ones with the bomb boxes. I think madra was the one who made the hilarious Force Quit dialog image.

Originally posted by mAxximo:
Exactly. IME, anyone having trouble keeping the MacOS stable (any version from 8.1 on) just didn't know what they were doing. Not that there was a lot to know, it was actually very simple and intuitive. Anyone with a bit of logical sense could configure a more or less stable set of Extensions. At least in my industry, that is...

Riiiiiiiight. Screwing around with extensions for a half hour was intuitive. And holding down the shift key, then the command and option keys at startup to rebuild the Desktop was really intuitive too. That's why newbies always fixed their problems on their own, and never made me come over and fix their freaking problems for them.

Also, the instability of OS 9 never caused any newbies I know to get fed up with the crashing and switch to Wintel. Nope, never saw that happen at all.

And even if you had your extensions pruned properly, it didn't help you that much, because if an application (like Word 98!) would crash, what would you do? It would take down the whole system with it, because OS 9 had no memory protection.

OS 9 sucked.

Originally posted by mAxximo:
Sure, keep trying to re-write history kid...
That was OS X you're talking about.

Oh, if only the VersionTracker page for Mac OS 9.0 were still up, because I could show you. I specifically remember this with 9.0. It did get more popular with 10.0, but 9.0 is the first OS where I heard this, because that OS was a joke.

9.0 was basically 8.6 plus an uglier, slower, Sherlock, a useless voiceprint feature, a weak encryption feature, a multiple-users feature that didn't work right, some other features too insignificant for me to remember, and a whole lot of extra bugginess. OS 9 sucked.

[Tyre MacAdmin]

I don't even understand this thread... there is No reason to put the Mac classic OS... 7,8 or 9 on any box. If your system is that slow you should put linux on it. There are more than enough free Linux apps to be just as productive on your old Mac as you would be with a Classic OS... minus all the crashes.

[mAxximo]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
9.0 was basically 8.6 plus an uglier, slower, Sherlock, a useless voiceprint feature, a weak encryption feature, a multiple-users feature that didn't work right, some other features too insignificant for me to remember, and a whole lot of extra bugginess.

You forgot the little annoying OSXish details like the �Applications (OS 9)� folder and the rest of the things they changed to prepare us for the transition to the NeXT OS.

OS 9 sucked.

At least we agree on something. OS 9 really sucked under the hood, no questions, but excelled at what made the Mac the computer of choice of the whole design industry worldwide: user friendliness. Its interface, functionality and usability are yet to be surpassed, much less by OS X. And believe me, if designers embraced something like they did with the Mac, it must have been really good. You won't find that many detail-oriented anal-retentive obsessive SOBs together in any other industry. Not strangely, those same Mac faithfuls don't seem to be really excited about today's offerings, judging by the really poor Powermac sales quarter after quarter during these last four years and the extremely slow adoption rate of the new system. Food for thought.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
At least we agree on something. OS 9 really sucked under the hood, no questions, but excelled at what made the Mac the computer of choice of the whole design industry worldwide: user friendliness. Its interface, functionality and usability are yet to be surpassed, much less by OS X. And believe me, if designers embraced something like they did with the Mac, it must have been really good. You won't find that many detail-oriented anal-retentive obsessive SOBs together in any other industry. Not strangely, those same Mac faithfuls don't seem to be really excited about today's offerings, judging by the really poor Powermac sales quarter after quarter during these last four years and the extremely slow adoption rate of the new system. Food for thought.

God, we went over this already in the other thread. OS 9's UI sucked, too, compared to OS X. You failed to bring up any convincing arguments last time, and I just don't want to go there again.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
OS 9 really sucked under the hood, no questions

Agreed.

but excelled at what made the Mac the computer of choice of the whole design industry worldwide: user friendliness.

Personally, I hated the OS 8/9 UI.

It's no surprise to me that the OS 9 --> OS X migration has been the fastest in computing history...

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
God, we went over this already in the other thread. OS 9's UI sucked, too, compared to OS X. You failed to bring up any convincing arguments last time, and I just don't want to go there again.

I have to agree with mAxximo to a certain extent. Don't get me wrong, OS 9 was well over the hill by the time Apple retired it, and I really love OS X. Aqua OTOH, well, I don't dislike it (in fact I used the aqua appearance file way back when OS 9 was my workhorse), it's just that it's too big and in-your-face. Platinum was smaller, there was less guff around windows, all windows (except QT player and iTunes) had a common look, and the whole thing just looked sleeker. There's a reason my office has just managed to sell our old Macs to a design house - they don't want to run OS X and so they have to snap up pre-X G3 and G4s wherever possible.

Anyway, as you've said, there's already a thread for that discussion.

To get back on topic and attempt to answer the initial question, it seems clear that while some people (myself included) had much success with stability in OS 9, it sounds like 8.6 was more forgiving to the less experienced user. If you know what you're doing, trim down OS 9 to do exactly what you're after, otherwise 8.6 is probably your best bet.

[Tyre MacAdmin]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
a useless voiceprint feature

I kind of miss that "useless voiceprint feature"... it was written poorly and did not recognize my voice half the time when my mood changed slightly but it was cool to have... I almost hope Apple redoes it and optionally integrates it in with the keychain.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Tyler McAdams:
I kind of miss that "useless voiceprint feature"... it was written poorly and did not recognize my voice half the time when my mood changed slightly but it was cool to have... I almost hope Apple redoes it and optionally integrates it in with the keychain.

Ah, memories of trying to get the voiceprint feature to work.

Me: My Voice is my Password.

OS 9: ...

Me: My Voice is my Password.

OS 9: ...

Me. My. Voice. Is. My. Password.

OS 9: ...

Me: My Voice Is My Password!

OS 9: ...

Me: My voice... is my password.

OS 9: ...

Me: MY... VOICE... IS... MY... PASSWORD.

OS 9: ...

My brother (at an adjacent computer): His voice is his password!!

It was a cool concept, but didn't work all that well.

[Tyre MacAdmin]

LOL!!!!

HAL OPEN THE POD BAY DOORS!!!

(Oh damn!!! he's using OS 9 voice recognition... CRASH!!!)

[mAxximo]

Originally posted by Tyler McAdams:
LOL!!!!

HAL OPEN THE POD BAY DOORS!!!

(Oh damn!!! he's using OS 9 voice recognition... CRASH!!!)

In retrospective it's easy to see how many �cool� concepts Apple was trying to pull out over the years that in the end amounted to little more than smoke and mirrors. Big buzzwords and concepts that miserably failed to deliver over and over. �Voice Recognition�, what a piece of crap it was.
Funny how the company hasn't changed its modus operandi to this day. The difference is many users are now able to see through things a lot better and won't buy into everything they throw at us so easily.

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
The difference is many users are now able to see through things a lot better and won't buy into everything they throw at us so easily.

Oh really? One word for you: iWork

[Tyre MacAdmin]

Apple has to blend "high-tech" and computer buzz words to make itself marketable to it's target audience... Of course it's a gimmick but it's Oh Wow! To the newbies.

[leperkuhn]

Originally posted by Geobunny:
Oh really? One word for you: iWork

I've actually found iWork to fit my needs very nicely.

[jmiddel]

I agree with Tyler's post. Use Linnux! 8.6 was OK, 9.xx crashed on me at least twice week, mostly freezes in IE and Outlook, sometimes Word and Quicken. In fact I was seriously considering migrating to Linnux to avoid the aggravation, then X came out, thank the computer gods. Often these freezes required a disk repair via Disk Warrior. Never used Norton, had only necessary extensions which never caused the problem, since booting with them off solved nothing. I religiously rebuilt desktop and did whatever maintenance via DW or TTP was recommended. Having read this forum from way when, I think I was pretty much on top of caring for the System, nor am I shy about getting under the hood. Linnux can do anything and everything faster and more stable than 8 or 9, and has modern appps such as office and gimp.

[ryaxnb]

If you have a reasonably-speeded Mac (7000 line except 7100, 8000 line ex/8100, 6360/6400/6500, 4400, 9000 line, 604/604e/603e-based clones, 3400, or anything with a G3/G4.)
Then you need at least a 3GB HD, and 64MB RAM.
Here's a gerneral guide to which other version to use:
68000-8 Mhz - System 6, generally.
68000-68030 16 Mhz - System 7.0-7.1
68030 25-33 Mhz - System 7.5.5/7.6.1
68030 40/68040s 25+ Mhz Mac OS 8.1, 7.5.5/7.6.1 if you have less then 20MB RAM
68040 20 Mhz - System 7.5.5/7.6.1 unless you can live with 8.1's speed.
Power Mac 601 60-80 Mhz or 603 - Probably Mac OS 8.1 - Mac OS 8.6 is pretty slow and needs at least 32 MB RAM, plus lots of room on the HD.
Power Mac 603e machines - Probably 8.6, but not the slow 52xx, and 53xx, and the 62xx and 63xx except 6360 line.
Most 604/604e/G3/G4s - Mac OS 9.1 or 9.2.
Mac OS X - Depends on whether you really like it.

[finboy]

I've found 8.6 to be less buggy than 9.1 so far. 9.2.2 on my newer iBook seems pretty stable and quick compared to the older OS, though.

And for whoever posted about X being the "fastest adoption in history": it wasn't by choice!!!! I wonder how fast it would have been adopted if folks had been given a choice between a revised OS 9 and X.

[ryaxnb]

Mac OS 9 is a nice OS, but very crashy. However, a lot of apps required it, and it's the best way to run Carbon apps, short of using OS X. And OS 8.5/8.6 is worth the upgrade from 8.1 because 8.5 added new, subtle refinements, like a new Appearance controller, better USB support, superioir View Options, FireWire support, etc.

[ryaxnb]

Originally posted by Tyler McAdams:
I don't even understand this thread... there is No reason to put the Mac classic OS... 7,8 or 9 on any box. If your system is that slow you should put linux on it. There are more than enough free Linux apps to be just as productive on your old Mac as you would be with a Classic OS... minus all the crashes.

This is simply not true. I run an iMac and Power Mac Beige, and simply like the OS 9 products.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by finboy:
And for whoever posted about X being the "fastest adoption in history": it wasn't by choice!!!! I wonder how fast it would have been adopted if folks had been given a choice between a revised OS 9 and X.

So... let me get this straight. Apple was supposed to develop two modern operating systems in parallel? They couldn't get Copland finished when they were concentrating all their resources on it, so how do you think they could do Copland and Mac OS X at the same time?! And... why?!

Unless you're just talking about maintenance upgrades to OS 9 to keep it running on new hardware, in which case... they did, for a long time. They even preinstalled it on machines' hard drives along with X for God's sake! They went way farther with this than they were required to - hell, you didn't see new versions of System 6 after System 7 was released, or new versions of System 7 after OS 8 was released. But, after OS X came out, you got 9.2, 9.2.1, 9.2.2, new System Enablers to allow it to work on new hardware... why should Apple keep on wasting their developers on updating old, outdated OS versions until the end of time? The reason OS X has become so good lately is because Apple has finally been able to concentrate all their OS developers on it instead of having to divide them up.

As for choice, OS X has caused many, many people to look at the Mac who wouldn't have before. Those people didn't like or want to use the Mac when OS 9 was current, but now that OS X is out, they're looking at it seriously. I wonder why? If you think the general public would choose OS 9 over OS X, you're wrong. Some old-school OS 9 diehards who use what they're used to may prefer OS 9 over OS X, but most objective third parties will not.

No one is forcing you to buy new hardware with OS X on it. No one is pointing a gun to your head and making you install OS X on your older hardware. Yet Mac users have been flocking to OS X, in droves. I wonder why?

Anyway, people in here seem to be having a hard time noticing that this thread is not about OS 9 vs. OS X! It's about which version of the classic OS to use on older hardware that can't run OS X effectively. God.

[Tyre MacAdmin]

Well if you "simply like" them I guess you're willing to take the good with the bad. And in this scenario it would mean crashes, freezes and lost work in OS 9,8,7... or Slow performance in OS X.

Personally I think using Linux on old Mac hardware is the best path... if you're stuck on commercial apps you should consider MOL or even waiting for Macromedia's apps to hit linux... supposably in the works of porting to well established Linux distros right now..

At least with MOL the Classic Mac OS is a VM and will not take down the entire machine... I personally think it's the best way to work with any Classic Mac OS install.

Linux has all the strengths that Classic Mac OS and OS X don't have on old hardware... a fast GUI and stability.