
My coworkers made me use Mac OS 9 - dodders
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/11/my-coworkers-made-me-use-mac-os-9-for-their-and-your-amusement-2/
======
colanderman
_We live in an era of constant updates, where your browser changes every six
weeks, and your operating system changes every 12 months. […] Sometimes you
just want everything to stand still for, like, a second._

Amen. I for one wish there was a way to hop off the CADT [1] roller coaster
and stick with an OS stack that would just sit still and focus on _fixing all
its damn bugs_ for once.

X.org/GNU/Linux was finally in bugfix mode for a few years in the mid/late
2000s, and it was a stable place to live for the somewhat-technically-minded.
Then the cloud, smart phones, and the HTML5 "living standard" all took off,
and you're forced to ride that spastic technological train if you want to keep
up with anyone.

[1] [https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html)

~~~
rsync
I have done this.

In early 2009 I bought an octo mac pro with Snow Leopard and 6 GB of RAM.

Although I have reloaded Snow Leopard thrice, it remains the exact same
configuration: same mac pro, same 8 GB RAM, same Snow Leopard.

I have not run into any problems whatsoever. I run a perfectly modern browser
with 30+ tabs open, I run multiple guests in VMWare Fusion and I don't miss
having the app store at all.

In a few months, this will be seven years of platform stability. I have
enjoyed it immensely.

Further, provided nothing too sticky comes up with continuing to run Snow
Leopard, I think I can add one of those bootable PCIe SSDs and max out my ram
and run this to the 10 year mark.

~~~
avn2109
Snow Leopard was pretty much the peak of the OSX's, IMHO. If for no other
reason that they hadn't yet broken Expose/Spaces and called it "Mission
Control."

~~~
wtallis
And it was before they killed Front Row to force you to buy a separate box to
do home theater duty. And before they broke full-screen apps. 10.7 kicked off
a round of experimentation that really should have been optional to the end
user, as most of that stuff has only recently started to settle down into
something usable.

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kawera
I still use OS 9 almost every week on a Powermac 1999 . The reason is that my
drum scanner requires a card/driver/app that wasn't ported to OSX and won't
run under "Classic Mode". Everything works perfectly, including original
keyboard and mouse!

[edit] Wrongly cited Rosetta, a PPC to x86 translator. "Classic" allowed OS9
apps to run on OSX.

~~~
gh02t
It's no wonder it still works... those Powermacs were built like tanks. In
high school my physics teacher accidentally smacked one with a baseball bat
and it fell down off a counter, but after we picked it up it worked fine, with
little more than a scuff on the side.

~~~
kawera
They are tough, largely overbuilt systems that seems indestructible. I have a
few old systems in a closet (SGI, DEC, SUN, NEXT) and always wondered why
they'd build computers like that, I mean, they weren't made to last for more
than a few years. And they sound like... private jets!

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Old OSes are perfectly usable on their own, the problem is always that they
can't interoperate with the newer outside world very well.

Sit someone down with a Windows 95 machine and they could happily play games,
write and print documents, and so on, but they might not have much luck
receiving or sending them, and sorry about browsing the web.

~~~
Decade
Those old OSes also had severe reliability and usability issues. They did not
have memory protection, so a web browser crash can take out your word
processor and everything else. Each of them had a key combination you had to
be familiar with to reboot the machine.

MacOS 9 also didn't have preemptive multitasking, so encoding a movie means
you don't get to read your email. Some people used MacOS 9 as a web server,
and discovered that if something fell on the mouse then the server was offline
until the mouse finished selecting something.

So, stick to the stable software, and don't make your document too big, and
you should be fine.

~~~
ido
I find the notorious win9x stability issues were to a large extent because
they seemed particularly sensitive to bad hardware - run win98 se on solid,
good quality hardware and it was actually quite stable.

As long as you didn't try multitasking too much at least...

~~~
DanBC
Bad drivers in particular would cause a bunch of bluescreens.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Title should probably be be "My coworkers made me use Mac OS 9 (2014)", since
it's an article from last year, but republished for Thanksgiving.

------
supernintendo
I grew up on Macs from the System 7 to Mac OS 9 era, so this was a bit of
nostalgia for me. I do think the OS was outdated even for its time. Memory
protection could be found in Windows NT, OS/2 and every Unix-like OS to my
knowledge. Meanwhile, Mac OS 9 could be segfaulted by a single failure to free
memory in a third-party application. Nostalgia is not enough to make you look
back on that fondly.

As an aside, those grey rectangles may be ugly to some but at least you had
themes [1]. 15 years later, people went crazy at the addition of "Dark Mode"
in OS X Yosemite.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager)

~~~
jd3
It may not be much, but I have been themeing OS X for a years now with
themepark/(s)artfiletool/themeengine. It may not be as easy as it was on OS9,
but I've made some pretty cool stuff. I do agree that it's ridiculous that
people are going crazy for just a tiny bit of customization that third parties
(cough max rudberg) have been doing for years.

------
kelseydh
Its kind of depressing to read this working on current projects knowing they
will be meaningless in 15 years. So much for my life's work!

~~~
salgernon
Unless your software happens to be fondly remembered in an article (or 3d
hypercybervis, or whatever we have then).

------
reustle
That 2002 PowerBook G4 has a thinner bezel than my 2015 Macbook Air and the
iPad...

~~~
ayuvar
The Titanium G4 was a really aggressive design, and for the most part they
pulled it off. There are a few pieces that don't hold up to rough daily use
(the hinges).

The contemporary iBooks had much thicker bezels and were built much more
durably, for a target market that probably included education.

Loved the ircle screenshot.

~~~
delish
Are thicker bezels associated with durability?

~~~
ayuvar
Not necessarily, but the PowerBook was built out of a titanium alloy and the
iBook some kind of polycarbonate.

I'm no materials engineer but I can see an argument for the iBook needing to
be thicker to support the same design loads.

(I'm sure it was just a side benefit that it let them save a few bucks on
display size, without having to also shrink the keyboard to an unusable size.)

~~~
kelseydh
It's because they need the wider bezel in order to make the dramatic space
savings on thickness that people appreciate more.

------
beloch
"when the system is working smoothly things open and close pretty much
instantaneously. That is, unless you get a pop-up message that momentarily
freezes the OS"

The OS isn't frozen. OS 9 just didn't have preemptive multi-tasking. If the
code for that dialogue box wasn't specifically written to hand control back to
the OS, it wouldn't do so until you click it away. Yes, this was the state of
Mac OS a full five years after Windows 95 came out. There's a reason why Apple
nearly died in the late nineties.

------
jimmies
Heh, I was playing with OS 8.x recently on the Raspberry Pi, and it made me
somewhat more productive. I can't believe that I could have a fully functional
computer for just $5.

Here is what it looks like.
[https://goo.gl/photos/jPzant4sB71tnU149](https://goo.gl/photos/jPzant4sB71tnU149)

------
xixixao
This is what you gotta give to MS. You can still install AoE2 on Windows 10 no
problem (right?), but trying to get it to work on a Mac requires custom third
party wrappers. (I also didn't even know/forgot AoE was released for the Mac)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I wish that Apple had MS's backwards-compatibility on iOS. Poor BC combined
with a walled garden means old games and apps simply disappear out of
existence when the developer cannot afford to support them any more.

~~~
vbezhenar
iOS usually runs apps from previous iOS versions. I'm not sure about exact
level of backward support. But usually apps disappear because their developers
decide that they don't want to pay $100/year anymore.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> iOS usually runs apps from previous iOS versions.

iOS routinely breaks many apps with each upgrade.

> But usually apps disappear because their developers decide that they don't
> want to pay $100/year anymore.

Maybe small apps. Most big apps that disappear do so because their developers
cannot justify porting them. This is true for almost all the games that
existed on early iOS by major publishers.

------
wtbob
> Browsers of the day (Internet Explorer 5, Netscape) stopped being able to
> render pages properly a very long time ago

No, not really. Those browsers still render pages just as properly as they
ever did.

