So what can you do with it? Well, let’s first address the elephant in the room – the internet is still lousy on OS 9. Despite Cameron Kaiser’s genius effort put into his Classilla browser project, he’s pretty much squeezed every ounce of usability from the now 20+ year old underlying networking frameworks. A lot of websites still render “ok” in the browser, but most of the modern web will simply cause it to spit back an error. Also, file sharing with other machines on your network takes a bit more forethought these days as OS 9’s implementation of AppleTalk will only work with OS X versions up to 10.4 Tiger. In Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and later, AppleTalk will not function at all without some difficult technical workarounds, so a “bridge” Mac is generally recommended (for those not familiar with that term – bridge Macs are machines that can handle both legacy and modern technologies and can be networked between both old and new hardware). It is also possible to wring out a bit more usability by setting up a web proxy such as macHTTP and running a small Netatalk server on one of your modern Macs (this is something I’d like to feature in the future).
Adam Goff at Low End Mac
Running Mac OS 9 today has become somewhat of a rite of passage for retrocomputing and operating system nerds (…2006), and every few years a new article about the experience makes the rounds. For good reason, too – OS 9 is fun, quirky, has tons of software to play around with, and still looks and feels great.
MacOS 9 existed in a much simpler time. No notifications from a million apps constantly demanding your attention, no using the OS as a channel for advertising and data harvesting.
Classic MacOS with pre-emptive multithreading and memory protection would be a fantastic thing.
Yeah, that was the downfall of classic. It was great when things behaved, but when things were bad it was worse than windows, which is an accomplishment. The few macs we had during this time period would develop strange quirks where somethings would work and others wouldn’t depending on the order in which you did things prior to boot up. Macs were fine as long as they didn’t’ have to interact with non macs, or non mac built hardware or software, and you didn’t have to write software on them. They were pretty cool file management applications, or bundled with a mac specific printer.
if you look at certain internal Apple programs, many of the LOOK like Previous OS(9) with similarities. Why do they? and why has OSX changed, all the previous features don’t work, some worked very well and have less CPU time, but deprecated for Newer features(Which suck). MacOS Doesn’t need to Be that smart, only efficient and stable. It doesn’t need have it’s fingers on every file on your mac.