OS 9 in retrospect.

[gio91ber]

I loved its graphics and I really liked its great compatibility with very old hardware. The only problem about was essentially its kernel: it wasn't really a multitasking kernel, it just looked like it was but it wasn't, as the normal thing that happened was being forced to manually shut off the computer as the OS was being locked by one single app.

It actually looks like certain today mobiles...

[cessnao3]

I really liked OS 9. It had desktop sounds that made the desktop experience more fulfilling, as opposed to the current silent desktop of OSX. It also has a lot of features that were useful, but not integrated into OSX, such as the sticky drawers, to minimize folders by dragging them to the bottom of the screen.

[theodric]

My issue with Mac OS 9 was stability, although its performance relative to Mac OS X 10.1 (and 10.2 to a lesser extent) was remarkable.

In context: I got a 700MHz iLamp G4 new in early 2002. I ran Mac OS X10.1(.2?) on it, and found it so maddeningly slow after upgrading from my rather old SGI Indigo2 R4400SC 250MHz & 240Mhz OC'd PPro running DeMuDi Linux that I installed Yellow Dog Linux on it (with WindowMaker) roughly until 10.2 came out. (10.1.5 did improve performance drastically, but that was too little too late.)

All this is to say, I went through all that to avoid running 9.2 which had a tendency to lock up on me several times during a computing session. If there's one thing I've always demanded from my computers, it's reliability and speed. OS 9 and early OS X failed to deliver either, and I give them both a big fat middle finger from a productivity standpoint.

That said, now that I have a B&W G3 that I don't need to use for daily life, I'm going to install 9.2.2 on it for kicks. When it hangs, I can go "how cute, how retro" and reboot it without ire.

[startmenus]

That's my favorite Mac OS version... the last Classic Mac OS.

[Marcello]

OS 9 was good. I never got to use as much as I wanted to it back in the days when it was prevalent but my experiences with it are good.
In recent years, I've used it in an emulator, on a Powermac 9600 and a PowerMac G4 dual core. It ran OK (a bit slow on the 9600, amazingly fast on the G4), although for modern usage (especially web browsing), it can be a real pain. Running apps and stuff was for the most part OK because I knew to take it easy, but even then it still crashed from time to time.

I also like its GUI quite a bit (maybe even too much), the whole platinum look. I've done my best to keep that appearance in the modern day even. Any time I set up a linux box, I configure XFCE to look and act as much like OS 9 as possible, and on OSX, I use Flavours and some custom icons to get an alright looking OS-9 feel (link to screenshot -- click here).

[yjchoi17]

I say OS 9 was good but not great.

The biggest problem with OS 9 (and other classic Mac OS'es) in my opinion is the lack of support for USB 2.0. That really slowed down everything.

[gtp]

I like OS 9 a lot. I use it every day alongside my modern Mac and it's been very stable for me. The Classic Mac OS got one thing right that Mac OS X never did: spatial Finder. Every Finder window represented a folder and its appearance stayed consistent. Every time you opened a folder, its window would appear in the same spot and with the same view settings. In Mac OS X, a Finder window is a file browser that can represent any folder as the user drills in or out. Its view settings are never consistent. One never knows where the window will be positioned or what view the contents will be in when a folder is double-clicked. Also, two windows can be open that represent the exact same folder. This was never possible (or necessary) in Classic Mac OS. To an extent, Apple attempted to replicate spatial Finder in OS X but it never quite worked and it seems like they just totally gave up trying altogether.

I also like the Platinum appearance of Mac OS 9. I feel that it had the perfect balance of eye candy and speed. Mac OS X still feels slow as you wait for GUI animations to complete in the Dock, Mission Control, Spaces, etc. And there's very little contrast between windows in focus and background windows. Mac OS 9 had distinct pinstripes that made it unmistakable to differentiate active and inactive windows.

One last feature I love in Mac OS 9 that is sorely missing in OS X are the tabbed folder windows. You could dock a Finder window to the bottom of the screen and use it as a drawer for frequently-used folders. It popped up when clicked and got out of the way after it was used. Great feature!

[startmenus]

I just like OS 9... for no reason. I still use my iBook with Mac OS 9.2.2 as a work machine.

[louisw3]

I liked 8 a heck of a lot more than 9... But I only played games and used ie on OS 8, everything else I did in os x server... Os x 10.0 looked nice but was dog slow. But they needed to push it out the door. 10.2 was my favorite PPC OS X, and I still like 10.6 on intel.

9 was always too much stuff tacked into system 7, and it showed. 8 just felt better to me.

[OltScript131]

For me = Great !!!

[RatPatrol]

Does anyone else think nowadays that OS 9 wasn't all that bad, .....

looking back, IMHO, each major OS segment was a Plateau ....

the 1st Mac OS I used on a regular basis was 6.0.8 on an Mac SE but

moving up to a Mac IIvx .... System 7 was Fantastic ... ofc the VX was the 1st Mac with a 500mb hard drive, so booting up was no longer on a floppy ... ah the days of Civ I, Pathways into Darkness and Marathon

7.0 - 7.1, 7.2 ... etc minor improvements ...
7.5 - 7.5.5 then seven five brought a host of improvements, 7.5.3 being a major bug fix release adding Open Transport and the Control Strip - finally culminating in 7.5.5 which added performance improvements
7.6 - the biggest WOW was the Extensions Manager, making it easier to troubleshoot extension issues - what a time saver
8.0 - 8.1 Gee Colors - the Platinum Skin for the OS ..... window shade, finally a copy operation did not take up the finder - you could do other things while writing to a floppy disk - 8.1 gave us HFS+ [but you had to wipe the hard drive to upgrade the format]
8.5 - Sherlock Search w/Plug-ins - Themes and Installation was much simpler ... oh and PPC Required
8.6 - last of OS 8
9.0 - 9.2.2 - my G3 Pismo shipped with Discs for OS 9.04 and OS 10.1 Puma available as well if I wanted to install X

9.04 [last OS to run my versions After Dark that ran from system 7.5]
and Finally 9.2 with the code to pave the way for classic mode ....

each update / upgrade made the Mac OS better and faster ....
... by the time OS 9 came around, 68k Macs were a thing of the past - sure there were plenty around, but you were stuck at system 8. not that, that was a bad thing, I ran 7.5.5 long after System 8.6 came out.

Gaming on a Power Mac 6500 / 250 [ATI Rage Chipset] I wanted to play Mech Warrior and System 7.6 did not leave me enough available memory to run [32mb total system memory] ... and running with RAM Doubler produced less than stellar results.

Finally in 2001 I pieced together a G4 / 400 from a Police Auction and replacement parts bought from Ebay and Washington Apple PIE User Group .... in 2002 I acquired a Powerbook G3 / 500 stuff it with 256 mb of memory ... and I still run OS 9.04 when I need to do some Photoshop Work.



So in my humble opinion 9 was great ... it was a long tenuous path from System 7, leaving some old friends behind, but finding new work horses .... where would Mac OS gone had JOBS not moved to Next Step code who knows, Copeland ??

[Buck]

From a repair tech's point of view, I hated the early revisions of OS9. It wasn't really what I'd call a stable OS until OS 9.1. Even then, customers trying to run cheap USB or SCSI scanners with crappy bundled apps and/or badly written Photoshop Scanner plugins, made OS 9 quite a pain. Try explaining to people that the several thousand dollar hardware "bundle" they just bought wasn't really going to be quite stable enough to browse the internet whilst scanning those 1970's photos.

I still liked MacOS 8.5 and 8.6. I also could say that MacOS 9.1 and 9.2.x were pretty good overall.

[sparcdr]

OS9's lack of threading which was supposed to be included in the abandoned Copland project, lack of preemptive multitasking, and lack of consistent system API (As in not a singular language/library/etc.) didn't help its position, but from my experience, it was still suitable for general purpose under the usage assumptions that we may have had about what we could do with a computer when each version was released since then.

Due to its simplicity compared to NT 4.0 or in the case of OS 9.1/9.2, Windows 2000, it may had been a better platform to program for if it hadn't been for the explosion of the usage of the internet by regular people during the 1999-2002 time-frame before it was replaced entirely by OS X. The need for a more networked system was ever evident, and Apple at the time without stewardship from Jobs, made some bad choices with with their design as a result, which made them non-competitive. Their deal in making 3rd party PPC support almost bankrupted the company as well.

Rhapsody by way of NeXTStep with its BSD roots had always had a better potential since BSD was the reference platform for DARPANET, but due to lack of application support caused by hardware tie-in at the time, and expensive cost of entry for both Mac and NeXT platforms, it wasn't until OS X that such a premium was justified. A lot of the early 90's Mac houses went on to make Windows software as the marketshare of Apple had declined until the announcement of the iPod. OS 9.2.2 was never updated again, and the platform was effectively and totally dropped after Carbonlib support was removed from their compilers around the OS 10.4 days. Some traces remained through to 10.6 as Apple pushed x86_64 kernel support, removed legacy components (Re-coding Finder with Cocoa) and the matching hardware to boot.

I started with OS 8.1 when I was in 4th grade (Around 1998), using Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and Sim City 2000 on Performa workstations when I still lived in California. After 1996, I never again saw a Macintosh again until I was in high school which had 300MHz G3 eMacs with 128MB of ram and a 3gb disk, which was slow even by that year's standard in 2004. I am a big retro-computing guy, so I do give classic the dues it earned. The Macintosh was the first commercial system that allowed us to interact with a computer without needing to use sets of black magic commands, and allowed for normal people to network and share data easily before Novell Netware and Microsoft Networks became more commonplace. I was not old enough to really understand how much of an influence it was on how we use computers today, and I have a lot of opinions about classic, but I still do as many others here enjoy running apps and coding little tools on my PowerBook G4 which I bought off of eBay for the express intention of using classic.

I had had so many bad experiences with Basillisk and SheepShaver due to their error coding/catching bugs that so far as to yet not been fixed. As of recent, Qemu purportedly can run up to 9.2 proper and has less of these issues, but I have not yet been successful with the process and wonder why there are no decent Qemu tutorials end-to-end for target platforms such as Classic on PPC or Linux on SPARC V8 ISA. (I've done this to the point of running Gentoo 2007 on 6 nodes with distcc and ccache)

It is kludge, ugly by today's standards, lacks support for most peripherals, slow, not modern even by 2002 standards, sparsely documented (From a developer's standpoint; fragmented rather), insecure, not ever network friendly regardless of what they bolted onto it, and like PCs of the day also had a lot of dodgy shareware available. I suppose you could say for me it is a love-hate relationship.

[jellybellys]

Mac OS 9 (or... classic Mac OS in general) from an OS design was obviously not considered a modern operating system even when it was first released. It's lack of preemptive multitasking, protected memory, etc. made it pretty clunky (as pretty well summarized earlier in this thread).

But all of this felt pretty cool when you pressed the programmer's interrupt switch, figured out some opcodes and A-trap codes and "hacked" the system to do things that it was not intended to do, returned to where the PC was, and laughed as you clicked buttons in the OS that did things wildly different than they were supposed to (that is, if you didn't cause a bomb error doing all the previous). It gave you a certain feeling of control over the computer while it was running that no system with preemptive multitasking or protected memory could provide. It was ugly, yet beautifully simple.

[sparcdr]

I still like MacOS classic, but the cooperative multitasking and need to fiddle with virtual memory settings depending on the game/application was rubbish. It did in fact as mentioned have a lot of built-in functionality that other systems lacked until a few years after. Windows wasn't taken seriously until 95, so a staple of many American public primary schools up till about 1999 were Performa or similarly equipped systems running OS 8.6.

My first experiences with the Mac were Cross Country USA, Sim City 2000 and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. I bought a 667 Ti (DVI) so I could run OS9 and earlier applications, and the machine is solid. The architecture is a more interesting topic to me, since not as much information is available now about the 68k to powerpc changes.

Side-note: Does anyone have a mirror of all the ADC docs with Carbon APIs and legacy MacOS apis (Going back to 6 if possible) or are there any sites that still remain, which have guides on setting up tooling, dealing with code porting quirks, etc. with os classic? I have a copy from 2010.

[jellybellys]

Side-note: Does anyone have a mirror of all the ADC docs with Carbon APIs and legacy MacOS apis (Going back to 6 if possible) or are there any sites that still remain, which have guides on setting up tooling, dealing with code porting quirks, etc. with os classic? I have a copy from 2010.

Here's a mirror from 2002 I've been using:

https://www.fenestrated.net/mirrors/App ... index.html

[Ghast]

I was always more of a fan of OS 7.6, constantly scoffing at both OS 8 & 9 aswell as the people using these versions.
Guess it boiled down to "Speed and stability beats fancy graphics, work is important and time is money!"

That is, up until 9.2.2, which I slowly fell in love with after hardware upgrades, and is something I still use on a daily basis for both work and pleasure. So, I feel that it passes the "Good" mark and lands somewhere around "Great"