Does anyone else think nowadays that OS 9 wasn't all that bad, as it used to be thought of as clunky? I think it has a charm OS X really can't match as far as GUI and functionality go. Anyone's thoughts?

I liked it on the 603e's, the 604's and the G3's, as long as you had at least 128 megs of ram. I always thought Mac OS X was slow on the G3s and that the G4s where the 1st great PowerPC processor.

This is my personal opinion and I'm sure there are others that think differently.

I liked it on my tray-load G3, but I kept Tiger on my SlotLoad G3. I liked it, but I'd much rather stick with OS 7.x if given the choice. My G3 iBooks all run Tiger as well. I had one with OS9, but it just didn't feel right with the hardware.

Ahh… Mac OS 9… It works best on the Macs it shipped on IMO…
It's the best version of the Classic Mac OS… I have it installed on My iBook, along with 10.3 server… I also have it installed on my iMac G3 (Slot Load without FireWire)…

I had no alternative to OS 9.x for starting MacOS apps.
Copland was almost crap and Rhapsody incompatible to all standards and APIs beside UFS and POSIX.

Hi,

OS9 was good but I agree with pizzaboy192 about 0S7, and if you had that on an SE30, well hardware and software heaven.

Kindest regards
James

I liked Mac OS 9 at the time and it worked well enough on the newer machines at the time. Like the original poster, I thought it had a certain charm to it. Still, I couldn't wait for protected memory and preemptive multitasking promised by OS X. I still have a partition with it installed on my Wallstreet laptop.

It's just great, because it's the last version of Mac OS Classic. And it's very important for the history!

I have a couple of Mystic (G4/450 Gigabit PowerMac) where System 9 works perfectly. Probably one of the best combination of Apple computer/OS.

I have an Apple PowerMac G3 Blue and White, that runs Mac OS 9.2.2 as a charm from the original Quantum Fireball 9.2GB Disk (with the Apple Logo)

That's a fantastic operating system. I love it. In my machine from work, I use Ubuntu, with XFCE and an Mac OS Classic Theme, that's very beautiful. I prefer the retro aspect from Mac OS 9.x that from the Mac OS X.

I actually tried it on an emulator, it wasn't that bad to be honest.

Love a nice snowy Sunday with a coffee and a B&W machine running OS9 with classic games... Fun.

OS 9 was a great operating system. I love it so much I actually have an entire computer that has 9.22 on it.

I haven't used mac os 9 before so I ran it on an emulator, and I would say it was good.

It was great....when it wasn't displaying bomb errors or crashing in standby mode. While I liked it more then OS X, it crashed too much to be useful.

We used to use this Operating System version at college, and it was very good. However, what was really a problem, I remember, were the many crashes occurring. It seemed somewhat instable. Not that the first version of OSX really was any better, in that regard...

I quite liked OS 8 and 9. Obviously, OS X made it a lot slicker, and was a huge improvement generally, but looking at OS 9 without comparison with X, OS 9 was good as a graphical OS of the time.

I got OS 9 up and running on SheepShaver the other day. I have Internet and everything going on it. It's a solid OS. I'm having a lot of fun with it.

I used OS 9.2.2 on my PM 5500 when I had it. I also used it on an iBook G3.

The early versions of OS X were pretty dire, with performance being pretty abismal, the Finder buggy and missing features.

I think Mac OS 8/9 were probably one of the most user friendly OS's ever given high level of abstraction i.e. the use of "Extensions" and "System Briefcase" metaphors to provide functionality etc. Of course that wasn't as useful for a power user and under the hood it was a bit of a nightmare.

The real irony is that we seem to be going full circle with OS X. I'm using 10.7 but I'd argue 10.4 was the best in terms of speed and features. However now OS X feels a bit clunky and of course there are the increasing security issues.

Technically with OS 9 they were behind Windows 95 and years behind NT.

Maybe it could be behind NT for several reasons. But I can't see how it could be behind 95, specially the first version of it. System was for a completely different market and it was not designed for games or home computing so they aren't on the same floor.

95 had at least preemptive multitasking and some form of memory protection.

I'd say the 9x series of Windows and classic versions of Mac OS were on par when it came to stability. Neither were that great.

I don't like OS 9 very much. I just like all the computers that run OS 9.

Mac os 9 was pretty good. I liked it but in my opinion it was, in advanced for its time.

I have a tray loading iMac G3, I run Mac OS 9 on it. It seems to run just fine.
My PowerBook 1400c runs beautifully on it. That happens to be one of the computers I use the most.

Now, the rest of my macs run OSX. They include my PowerMac G4, iMac G4, Intel 2011 iMac, MacBook Pro 15in 2011, My two Orange iMac G3's, and my graphite G3.

In theory I could run OS9 on my PowerMac but it already does EVERYTHING I want it too.