The reasons some Mac lovers stick with OS 9 are practically as numerous as Apple operating systems themselves. There are some OS 9 subscribers who hold out for cost reasons. Computers are prohibitively expensive where they live, and these people would also need to spend thousands on new software licenses and updated hardware (on top of the cost of a new Mac). But many more speak of a genuine preference for OS 9. These users stick around purely because they can and because they think classic Mac OS offers a more pleasant experience than OS X. Creatives in particular speak about some of OS 9’s biggest technical shortcomings in favorable terms. They aren’t in love with the way one app crashing would bring down an entire system, but rather the design elements that can unfortunately lead to that scenario often better suit creative work.
If OS 9 had modern applications and – even moderately – modern hardware, I would be using it. No question. I have an iBook G3 fully working and running OS 9, including important software, within arm’s grasp (I used to have an iMac G3 for the same purpose). It’s difficult to explain, but the reason for me is Platinum, the user interface. OS 9’s Finder, the graphical and behaviourial aspects of the user interface, the speed, the BeOS-like quirkiness – it all adds up to an operating system with a personality that is incredibly pleasant to use, regardless of the hodgepodge house-of-cards internals.
And personality is, unfortunately, what Windows, desktop Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android sorely, sorely lack.
You won’t find personality in any of today’s OSes because they can still be just about anything. The careful branding of Windows 10 and iOS may very well turn into ‘personality’ as soon as they are abandoned.
As for Linux desktops: WindowMaker is so instantly recognisable that it may have personality. I’m not sure it had one when it still had a future, though.
Why would I want my devices to have personality? Devices are there to do what they’re instructed to do. People have personalities.
Because that’s the difference between something being enjoyable to use and not. It’s the same with most things – why have a car that’s a joy to drive when there are perfectly good, alternatives that are totally bland. It still gets you to work and back, right?
I use the computer to get work done, this means running some apps. The purpose of the OS is to allow me to get to those apps fast and easy, anything else, including having personality, is standing in my way.
Yes, it shouldn’t get in your way, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be more pleasant or interesting to use. My car gets me to work just as well as any other car, yet the car I have is a lot more enjoyable for me to drive than most, and so that’s a perfectly legitimate reason to use my car over a boring one that lacks personality.
Of course, many people are happy with any boring car once it’s safe and reliable and there’s nothing wrong with that approach either, but it’s not any more correct than wanting to have a bit of interest or engagement.
For another example for those people who think of all devices (cars, computers) as tools: some people simply eat whatever minimum nutrition they need to stay alive and healthy, whereas others take a bit more time to cook things that they enjoy eating, and maybe has a bit of personality. Just because you aren’t bothered cooking interesting foods doesn’t mean someone who does is doing it wrong.
While I don’t equate the experience of using an OS to driving a car or that there’s any distinct “personality” differences between OSX, Windows, and Linux, I can support the idea that there’s nothing wrong with having preferences for things you engage with directly. I tend to prefer things that look & feel more luxurious than bland but get the job done. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a preference or an opinion, and there’s no requirement that others have to agree with it. This is true for everybody and so this `debate` over OS personality is really all for nothing.
My first car was an MGB-GT. That car had personality– it was cranky, cantankerous, and sometimes, downright snarky. On a good day, though, ye gods it was fun to drive. It also consumed a great deal of my spare time keeping up with the required maintenance (note: A well maintained MGB is actually very reliable).
My current car is the modern equivalent– 2 door, hatchback, sporty, and very fun to drive. But very reliable, and everything “just works”. The closest it comes to having personality is when it tells me a tire is low on pressure– but it won’t tell me which one, or by how much.
I’m not sure I want personality in my operating system, because the more personality it has, the more I envision a large red light, and a quiet voice saying “I’m sorry, Dave…”.
That’s why I use public transport and not a car: more efficient.
Often not, due to the public transport routes it takes me 2.5 hours to get to work, but 20 mins if i drive.
Earlier this year I found an old G4 Power Mac (dual 450Mhz G4), and it is capable of running MacOS 9.
Currently it has Tiger installed on it, and FreeBSD works like a charm, though, it seems my AirPlay card doesn’t work with my router (I’ll have to mess with it some more – it detects it and tries to connect, but is unsuccessful).
But, I am exicted to put MacOS 9 on it. It’s been a while since I’ve used classic OS. I haven’t had an actual Mac hardware since the (already old) LC-II I came across in the late 90’s. There’s plenty that I want to learn about it.
A friend of mine had asked me to help him try to get networking to work on a macbook he had, the AirPlay Card wouldn’t get a successful DHCP, but you could set the IP manually and it’d work fine. So I’d start there.
It’s not an issue with DHCP. My router (from Comcast) supports WPA/WPA2 with either TKIP or AES, in b/g/n modes, dual band, too, but when I used what should be the most widely compatible settings, the Mac can’t connect.
If I disable encryption, it will connect, though. I’m not keen on letting my access point go unencrypted, though.
There’s more stuff I can probably try, but I’m not as familiar with the inner workings of OSX, so it’ll be slow going.
And, who knows how well my Comcast router works…
It might only support WEP. A lot of the older cards were pre-WPA.
That’s what I figured after spending more time with it, though when trying to connect, Tiger specifically labels the password field as a WPA password, and not WEP.
I had that exact issue with a Powerbook G3 Pismo and the original AirPort card, running Tiger. I took out that card and put a more modern B/G card in the external PC card slot (it wouldn’t fit in the internal AirPort slot) and I was able to get connected to a WPA router. The replacement card was made by Sonnet, but I don’t recall the model.
No PC-Card slot, but it has a few 33MHz 64-bit PCI slots (Which should accommodate 32-bit cards, IIRC).
The trouble is, finding a WiFi card that will also work in OSX Tiger, and preferebly MacOS 9 as well.
While I’m primarily interested in FreeBSD, I’d love to be able to poke around Apple’s OSes, too.
If it’s a non portable why bother with wifi at all? Just use ethernet…
the only place I have for it while in use is the living room floor, hooked up to the TV. Otherwise, its under a table when not in use.
Using a cable isn’t convenient, though I may setup my laptop as a NAT if I can’t get it working well enough.
Well, Tiger itself supported WPA just fine. It’s the card itself that’s in question.
You used to have to have AirPort update 3.3.1 or 4.2 (for 10.4.2) installed for WPA to connect properly. This was certainly necessary for Panther (minimum 10.3.3 required) as it also updated the firmware on the AirPort card if it had not been done already. If you are running 10.4.0 through 10.4.2 try updating to 10.4.11. The Tiger AirPort update seems to be missing from Apple’s servers although this article still refers to an outdated link.
http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/apple-releases-airport-4-2-for-mac-os-x…
I suppose it was rolled up into later iterations of Tiger. The rest of the update deals with WPA2, which the original 802.11b AirPort card does not support.
Just look at those fundamentals. All items have enough contrast. There are borders enclosing related elements. Scroll bar that sits in its groove. Draggable items have texture affordance for dragging.
Google’s Material, Microsoft’s Modern and Apple’s Bauhaus can all go to hell.
By that argument, all UIs from Microsoft that appeared before Windows 98/Office 97 and its flush toolbar buttons are perfect with a special mention for Windows 3.x series. Right?
I can’t say that I don’t agree. I have some nostalgic love for Windows 3.x especially with the Office 4.3 common controls (grey background instead of white).
No matter which platform, there will always be a small group of die-hards who have all sorts of reasons to keep using the platform. Heck there are people out there actively developing DOS web browsers, and using GeOS on C64’s.
The systems you listed as not having personalities, really do have them! I don’t understand why you can’t see that, unless its just a pining for the olden times. In which case, sure have fun. We’ll just be over here ignoring you.
I mean for heavens sake, these things talk to us! how can they not have personality! With the amount of personal data they extract from us, they know us at a deeper level than anything ever before. And with the open source ones, we know them even better.
Usually personality is a flaw in the system. OS 9 like Windows 9x and most of the other OS’s of that time period had their personality. Because they were OS’s based on 16bit single/few process running at once, which were hacked over a decade to run like modern systems, which created a lot of bugs and odd crashes based on how you used the system. Hence why Microsoft went to an NT Kernel based Windows XP and upwards. And Apple with with a BSD Unix core for OS X. This protected memory environment reduced such personality due to being designed to work beyond the cusp of failure.
It’s not so much they don’t have a personality, it’s just they have the personality of an annoying teenager. You don’t want to deal with an annoying teenager, and would rather deal with the quirky old guy that tells war stories while he feeds the pigeons.
Eh, again, I think thats due to the effect of time on memory. Maybe older systems were newborns, completely helpless always needing your attention to do the most basic operations, and just periodically melting down for no apparent reason.
Yep, OS 9 would be like a toddler. Cute and very imperfect but you can see the growthpath and somehow forgive it all the imperfections and shortcomings it has compared to grown ups because it is also completely fresh, surprising yet predictable and pure.
But all OS’s have personality.
Windows is like a faithful dog that has a lot of historical baggage from a previous owner that abused it. So you constantly have to be careful that it will not snap at you and bite you in the butt.
Linux is that nerdy friend that has all the answers and lives the perfect live but nobody really likes him although we feel we should.
Apple is the supermodel that is so obsessed with couture that it forgot that most people just want comfortable pants they can afford, and she just doesn’t understand why other people think she behaves like a diva
Ha, perfect, though I think OS X (macOS?) is more like the aging supermodel, that keeps getting plastic surgery to try to remain beautiful and relevant.
See?
OS X *IS* a fat slut!
Stopped using it at 10.6 though, but from what I see doing some support it never got any better than that…
Lame. OSX is a pretty nice operating system, with a terrible GUI. Its like one of those 70 year olds you see running marathons in times that I could never hit at my peak with a year to train for it.
The attraction has nothing to do with personality and everything to do with nostalgia. Nothing more, nothing less.
Always fantastic when people whom you’ve never met and who have no fucking clue about who you are, what you do, what your likes and dislikes are, etc. etc. decide for you why you like or dislike something.
It sounds like I hit a nerve. Give me a break with this “personality” bullshit. All software has its quirks, pros and cons. I have no issue with someone having a nostalgic preference but pretending all current software is somehow soulless and old software can have some soft of personality is some kind of hippie bullshit. I think it’s ego that elevates your own nostalgia to some sort of personification of outdated software.
This makes no sense, because I have no nostalgia for OS 9, since I never used the fucking operating system when it was current. The first time I used it was in 2006, when I randomly bought an old iMac for fun’s sake. I grew up on MS-DOS and Windows 9x, and I hate both with a passion and never want to see them again.
So I’m sorry, your generalisation makes zero sense, and has no basis in reality whatsoever.
Only slightly related, but interesting anyway and can lighten the topic a bit: survivor bias
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w
Well I grew up with OS 7,8,9 (as well as 3.1,95,98) well before I experiment with BeOS, Linux etc..
And before I was even aware of the BSDs or Open Source software or OSes as a possibility I was very conscious that all the MacOS’s (certainly pre-OS X) were markedly less accessible – and I mean to the internals – than even Windows was. And that bugged me a lot — even though I quite enjoyed the layout and clarity of OS 7,and 8 & 9’s UI.
Thom, I don’t know you either – but I can still surmise that your personality reference might be far more to do with the Look & Feel – than it is to do with the underpinning engineering of the OS.
And vis-a-vis “personification” that was also mentioned by the commenter -With OS’s as with people –surely it’s what’s inside that counts
Everything else is just a skin…..
I assume you mean accessibility from a developer point of view?
In that case, from what little I know, I think I agree with you, as System 7/8/9 were notoriously a pain in the ass for developers (in my head Ballmer’s still screaming DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!!–if only it had been true…).
If I remember correctly most of the low level stuff was still in Pascal (shudder).
But from a user POV Classic Macintosh is still, TODAY, the best OS. Yeah, I’m talking GUI, not nano- micro- supa-dupa- kernels and whatnot.
In this sense, you might say OS 9 or System 7 or Be were just skins. But the following those OSs still have proves that they had something subtle but fundamental that today we’re missing. Win10 is goodish enough from a user POV. But then I sometimes wonder, what the fuck are my PhenomIIX6 cores doing, bathing in 32GB of ram, with a 7870 and a couple of SSDs sitting there, idling, and yet this friggin rig always feels sluggish.
Fuck Siri, Windows Store & the like. Everyone of us has a machine capable of sending men to the Moon–no, MARS!–and yet frustration lurks behind every mouse click.
I don’t know what Thom meant exactly by “personality”. At some point you get to hate the personality of every OS.
For me Classic was stormy marriage, Gnome a one night stand, OS X is a fat slut, Win 8-10 the boss who fucks you or you lose your job.
Be?
The eternal love of those sweet 16…
I never got to do a big 68K product, mostly low level shareware; I did several major PPC projects, which were the best part of my career. The last had to run on 10.0.4+, and that was by far the worst bit. The handwriting was on the wall, and I’ve mainly worked Windows ever since.
OS 7, 8, 9 were fun. You had access to everything, you could do almost anything, and you could do it fast! A mistake could take down the whole system, but rebooting and debugging were so much faster that I did almost all Carbon work in OS9 and tested on X when it was working.
Apple backstabbed Metrowerks (who had literally saved their company from ruin during the PPC transition) in favor of their own tools, which took 15 years to equal Visual Studio 6. If I could work on OS9 again I’d quit thinking of retiring.
Too right! Why, there is even a Programmer’s Interrupt button on the Mac so that when it freezes, you just hit the button and pop right into the debugger! People who complain about Classic MacOS are complaining about missing features, not about how difficult it is to actually use.
You can have nostalgia without personally experiencing the thing you are being nostalgic about.
See maybe you hate Windows with a passion because you had to work with it back then. I’ve worked with classic Mac OS between 1992 and 2002 and was quite happy to ged rid of it finally. It was very nice and polished compared to Windows 3 and Amiga OS 2 and even OS2 at the beginning but it sucked hard ten years later.
So software sucks. But you want software with personality. But you also love Google’s Material Design language because it is consistent, and apps following it looks and acts roughly the same.
Yet, software with “personality” must by definition suck for some population of users, since different people with different personalities respond to personalities in different ways. That is, if software can be said to have personality.
You can’t have “personality” if everything looks over “designed” and looks and acts the same – flat design, Material Design, Bauhaus whatever. And every design movement has a population for which it sucks, to the point where they’ll commit genocide in part because of it.
Then there’s the fun quirkiness of bugs and bad design that people have fond memories for.
So what’s the holy grail? Software that doesn’t suck and looks and acts the same meanwhile having a personality that everyone likes despite looking and acting the same?
Thom, it’s pretty disingenuous to claim that readers of osnews know nothing about you, given most of what you post is as much “OS opinion” as it is “OS news”, and is periodically punctuated with affectionate references to long dead platforms – long-winded Palm OS love letters anyone? *shudder*.
Unless you’re now claiming that what you write on this site is unauthentic, and not really representative of what you think or feel, please spare us the bizarre defensiveness.
Considering people think I am nostalgic for OS 9 even though I never used it before 2006 makes it very clear that indeed, people don’t seem to know me very well.
It’s quite frustrating to see people just put words in your mouth or claim to know how you think without even getting the basic facts right.
I had drawn the same conclusion as the parent poster, so I am quite surprised by your comment about not using it prior to 2006 when Mac OS 9 was already a dead system.
As lay internet readers of your site, we may not know your intimate computing history, but your article commentary would seem to indicate a deep knowledge and history of using OS 9 from the long past along with a distinct nostalgia that you would use it again (ibook within arm’s reach).
There was no indication that your view of OS 9 was more ‘rose-colored glasses’ and less experienced-hand revisiting an old workhorse platform.
If you don’t like the stories you could submit some good stories. I am a little more anti-Apple than most and even though I think Thom and the other editors love Apple, the site accepted this story from me…
http://www.osnews.com/story/28683/Microsoft_Funds_OpenBSD
The summary has a dig at Apple in it.
Edited 2016-09-13 09:50 UTC
I agree it can be annoying when others make assumptions about you or your group. I use the Mate desktop and many would likely assume I am against change but I love to play with things like Openbox and other interfaces so it’s not so much change as I haven’t seen anything compelling enough for me to really want to learn a new workflow… something like the fictional Jarvis with a more natural interaction may do it though.
I don’t think it’s down to the software, but the design.
OS 9 has more quirky test prompts and the like in comparison to the latest macOS, and things like the sounds while scrolling really do make for a very different feel.
I say this as someone who disliked OS 9 and it’s predecessors back in that period, I used Windows, Slackware and BeOS and it wasn’t until the release of OS X that a Mac appealed to me (not that I could afford one!).
I recently picked up an iMac G3 and an eMac on eBay for $10 just to repair and sell them. The G3 is running OS 9 and the eMac runs a version of OS X that feels faster than my MacBook Pro, though I think that’s down to some nice screen refresh rates.
It’s funny that QEMU isn’t mentioned anywhere here. Recent builds actually manage to run Mac OS 9. It should also be possible to use this in combination with KVM to run it on modern PowerPC systems.
See here for more information:
http://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=34
I’ve thought about looking into getting m68k running on qemu on my system and then using it to cross compile things. Or just use the cross compiler. Needing to compile some things for my Atari Falcon. Yes, this article is about Mac OS 9, but I’d much prefer FreeMiNT / Teradesk, which is still in development (if really slow development).
I am pretty sure in 25 years time there will be a group of Millennials and Gen Z who will feel nostalgic for Windows 10, macOS, iOS, Android and Ubuntu in much the same way as those in the article. And probably some will also proclaim that the current crop of UI (whatever form that maybe) the lack soul and personality of the systems from the 2010s.
Perhaps, though I can’t see it being a very large group for the same reason as there aren’t too many people using Windows 3.1 these days. 3.1 didn’t have much of a personality, and Windows versions since haven’t improved on that position. I figure it’s sort of like beer – some beers appear to be made as bland and generic tasting as possible, and as a result, people the world over drink them (I’m thinking of Budweiser here but there are others in a similar boat). It’s the tasty ones that you remember, not the bland ones.
I started computing at the end of win3.1 era and I think it was cool, and I love the look and feel of VGA era word and excel. Reading about those in books!!!! and occasionaly seeing those working at school and dreaming about having a computer someday
And if one visits forums like Vogon, or certain channels, there is a community around this, and there is PC-EM, with the exact purpose of emulating 80s and 90s computing. I installed Win2.0 lately, and I have a Win98SE install too with emulated Voodoo Grahpics. Quite coo.
There is another reason. You can still run a boatload of software made for Win3.1 on more modern versions of Windows and the look and feel has evolved instead of being completely redesigned at some point in time like OSX.
You must have fallen asleep through Windows 8. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss much.
“By only allowing a couple of active programs, classic Mac OS streamlines your workflow to closer resemble the way people think (until endless notifications and frequent app switching cause our brains to rewire). In this sense, OS 9 is a kind of middle ground between modern distraction-heavy computing and going analog with pen and paper or typewriter.”
Open only 2 or 3 programs. Then you can have OS 9’s productivity in Windows 10, right?
Perhaps they could write something like AROS if they want modern hardware support.
A zero cost scrap Intel/AMD is most likely considerably faster than any Classic Mac. It can run a modern lightweight Linux distro with modern software at no cost.
Edited 2016-09-13 03:10 UTC
These days computers may only be prohibitively expensive in some parts of Africa and Asia. I guess broadband is as expensive there as well, so acquiring gratis software might actually cost a lot. Cheap tablets off AliExpress are probably the best bet there, and they are more capable then classic Macs anyway.
I totally understand the feeling. If only the desktop was a separate beast from the rest of the OS in all Oses, it’d be great.
I personally preferred the Tiger and Windows 7 desktops… while on Linux I’m all for the KDE 3 series feel. Desktop gadgets on all and I’m a happy person.
Those were the oses and times where I was the most comfortable and perhaps productive with.
I was living in the US at that time, and I had one of those late CRT iMacs that could run System9 (yeah, it’s not the proper name and I love it!) and OSX.
Those were the times of MS Entourage as an email client and MS IE as a web browser! Yes, I’m that old, and no, Firefox came a couple of years later into the game.
While I loved with all my soul System9 and MOST IMPORTANTLY its spatial Finder, I simply found Cmd-H to be the single most important “innovation” (please, notice the quotes). And it was GOOD. So much so that, in those months of US-based dual-booting, I gradually stopped using Classic altogether.
Cmd-Tab wasn’t good enough, and its purpose was different anyway. Having both options at hand made a difference for me.
A short lived one: I didn’t have enough time to fully appreciate Tiger–the first REAL OSX release–and Steve Jesus Jobs switched to Intel.
Oh, and at the time (MacWorld Boston, 1997) we were all amazed by how much BeOS was quicker than MacOS9. On the same hardware. Now we’re remembering them as incredibly fast, both of them.
How bloated are these “modern” OSs, all of them…
A short lived one: I didn’t have enough time to fully appreciate Tiger–the first REAL OSX release–and Steve Jesus Jobs switched to Intel.
First real OSX release in what sense? I had an eMac (a white G4 version of the CRT iMac, originally aimed at colleges but released to the general public) and it came with Panther. I was excited to get a decent Unix-based system that had proper supported applications, which Linux didn’t have (well, a tiny number). I upgraded it to Tiger as soon as that came out, and it was a dog — it was a lot slower, and while upgrading I thought it had crashed when it paused for what must have been nearly an hour, presumably to build the search index (it didn’t tell me that). I didn’t bother with Leopard. They were both Unix-based, so I don’t know how Tiger was a ‘real’ OSX release and Panther wasn’t. Both had Classic, but I never used it because I had no OS 9 apps. I didn’t use the Tiger widgets much (have had three Macs since and that’s still the case) but I did miss the quickness of Panther.
I only meant to say that I consider Tiger the first really polished OS X release. I understand you might hate it given your installation issues.
Having used Rhapsody and then the various iterations of System 10, I can say that 10.1 was the first usable alpha, 10.3 a good beta, Tiger the first proper.
Snow Leopard also wasn’t bad: it was a nice OS *AND* I could run some PPC apps (some of those were actually 68k, later ported to PPC–what about good coding practices hey?) on an Intel MacBook I had to use for work. It was called Rosetta?
Anyway, that was kinda the best of two worlds…
I started using Mac OS 6 on the Mac SE. The magic of classic Mac OS was plug-n-play. Whether it was plug-n-play devices , drag and drop, or applications that were self contained making installation dead easy.
The integrated A/V capabilities that absolutely nobody had anywhere else that made my school projects amazing (my parents used it for real work too…).
Now this is true nostalgia — I used Morph 2.0 to animate a set of stills I drew in photoshop on mitosis and then output that animation to a video by connecting my VCR to my Quadra 660 . (Okay- Amiga guys could do this too). That took about 24-36 hours to animate a couple of minutes back then.
At the time, the ease-of-use factor blew everything else away. There was something truly magical about being able to plugin your printer and not having to install drivers, or having to deal with crappy installation nightmares [ Windows had those back in DOS days too].
What I do remember hating was when the system ‘bombed’ – a system would freeze (cmd-option-power button or hard reset), having to reset the p-ram (cmd-option-p-r). The fact that one app can hang the whole system because it was all using shared memory, and no hard context switching. [ Anybody else remember trying to run ‘servers’ on OS 9 – not pretty and why MacTen and A/UX were developed ]
Things got better around System 8 time frame, but the desire to have the stability of the UNIX platform that had people jumping from OS 9 to 10 in droves. Stability was one of the leading attractions when the first previews came out of OS X.
Regardless, the premise that users stick to OS9 due to financial reasons seams fairly preposterous. To make an OS 9 system usable these days for ‘real’ work beyond nostalgia would far outstrip the $1000 you would need for any basic windows system. They would be better off spending time virtualizing OS 9 rather than running it on pure Mac hardware.
Maybe old versions of Quark Xpress, or Adobe photoshop are being used, but it seems that any kind of modern layout would need the horse power that modern CPUs bring and disk space that modern hard drives provide.
I do know many who did use Classic Mac OS for the audio capabilities and a/v capabilities of the time– which were superior to all. Those thousands saved that was quoted in the article on old audio rigs sure would cost thousands today, but as he stated — he can’t do some of his serious work on those old machines anymore. I can get used equipment real cheap, but it breaks down or doesn’t have the features we need.
Again — today’s requirements for quality require modern hardware and capacities. Quicktime, integrated advanced audio/video hardware and lack of context switching allowed for extremely low latency audio processing that was hard to reproduce for a while in OS X.
It’s best to look at OS 9 as the classic ‘car’ it is — something very nice to take a ride in on the weekend, but serious work needs modern machinery.
Well Amiga and Atari ST come to mind….
Heh … articles like this are weird.
Trying to anthropomorphize software is strange imho.
I like the look and feel of classic macos (quite a bit), which is arguably the only part where “personality” comes into play.
The rest of classic macos is just a major PITA.
A major PITA for which we are still paying a price today … HFS, resource forks anyone? What about funky codepages? hmmm …
Remember how multiprocessing was handled? No memory protection either, voluntary multitasking, etc etc.
It wasn’t very stable, but the look and feel was very good imho.
I grew up with “classic” MacOS. The familiar bong on startup and a little face smiling at me (unless it sad mac’d).
The system came with an app to open with and play with the application’s source code (ResEdit).
I could tweak and tweak and tweak until *pop*
I spent a week bringing it back together having learnt what made it pop before.
This was fine and great fun, but as i’ve grown older, especially at work, I don’t want fun. I want consistent dependability. Is it less fun? Most certainly. Will it make sure I am paid? Yes.
I would compare it to formula 1 which has some parallels. In the 90’s turbo era, every car was going faster and faster, leading to engines catching fire and excitement for fans. Ferrari exemplified this. It either won or exploded. It was fun, exciting and constantly changing.
Over time teams moved away for this mentality until the modern cards have almost 100% reliability. They still race, but there is no longer any room for those unexpected moments. Money is making sure you complete all the laps, not completing 50% in the fasted time.
I think the difference lies with if the OS is made to sell an OS or if it’s made because the designers and programmers like a certain look and solutions to common problems.
I never thought of Windows, any Windows, as anything more than a patch work of parts put together to make stuff work. So it really feels like a disposable tool. A good tool, but still just a tool. My OS of choice on the other hand (MorphOS) is made by people who love to work on the OS, and it shows. It’s the one I prefer to work with whenever I can, despite it’s many shortcomings.
Find me a group of people who like to use Windows 95, 98, 2000 or XP purely because they find that any of these OS’s has personality and Vista/7/8/10 don’t and I will admit defeat.
I’ve seen that plenty of times at the shop, from the guy that had me build him a NOS Win2K Pro system just a couple years ago because he has a couple grand’s worth of Macromedia X-Res plugins and he can work MUCH faster in X-Res than in Photoshop, or the lumber company I had to build a half a dozen DOS 3 systems for in 09 because they have some CNC lathes that the controller software only works on DOS 3 and which will cost around half a mil to replace.
When you are using a system for serious but niche work, be it laser cutters or lathes or music DAWs or graphics work? Its really not hard to invest thousands only to have a company go “screw you buy the new stuff because we don’t support our old gear anymore” or the company folds, gets bought out, etc. In these cases it just makes more sense to buy a couple spares and stick with what works just as I’m sure when Win 7 goes EOL I’ll be keeping a couple Win 7 quads around because my DAW runs great in 7 and like ass on 10, it just makes good financial sense.
You couldn’t pay me to use Mac OS 9, how fast people forget the nightmare that was this OS. The lack of preemptive multitasking alone should be enough of a red flag to convince even the most nastalgic amongst us to stay as far away from this POS as possible. I mean you were able to bring the entire system to it’s knees by simply holding down a mouse button. Than there where the crashes, the ones that used to make my life a living hell. Yea, no thank you, I have nothing but disdain for that OS and was happier than a mosquito in a quadriplegic ward after I moved on to Next, than SGI, Sun, now OSX, Linux and Android. No, can’t use iOS either for the same reason as MacOS, multitasking is horrible, as well as the lack of a file system and many other issues.
Comment by my righteous self:
I could CONSISTENTLY bring down OS X (Tiger, I believe) just by plugging/unpluggindg harman/kardon sound sticks. The USB stack, supposedly in Userland, managed to freeze the whole fucking system.
In OS9 hitting Cmd-S had always been a safe practice.
Something we hoped X didn’t need. WE WERE WRONG!
Up until much later (my favourite is 10.6) System 10 was miserable and ridiculous.
I have nothing but disdain for NeXT, Rhapsody, SGI, Linux (in all its flavors) AND Android. Oh, and OS X, in each iteration.
Get over with it buddy, old OSs sometimes offer better value for ^a‘not 0 than all this modern crap.
And I’m gonna eat my own dogfood too: allow me 6 months and you’ll see.
If Mac OS 9 was so great, why is there no Linux desktop project to clone it? Mac OSX has a lot of clone projects, admittedly half of them are half-assed. But they exist. If the technology was so great. Someone would be trying to steal it/make a copy. But no one is. So the technology is clearly not that great. Amiga was good enough to clone and it’s 30 years old, AROS is proof of that. OSX is good enough to clone, GNUstep/Elementary OS are proof of it. Even Windows is good enough to clone with ReactOS and Wine. But Mac OS9? No one’s trying to clone it. Let it die. Emulation is where OS9 belongs. Finish adding sound support and GPU emulation to QEMU and then let it be.
Do yourself a favour, shop at Amazon for the original HUMAN INTERFACE GUIDELINES. From a tech POV, OS 9 was and still is utter CRAP. It’s mostly written in Pascal, applications need to run their infinite loop (geddit?) but it is
BEAUTIFUL
I completely agree.
I had a sysadmin job and was given a macbook running 10.3. The UI didn’t fit sysadmin work, especially for a Linux guy. I tried to put Linux on it and it wasn’t worinkg with the graphics card.
I brought in a dual monitor PC from home with RedHat 9 on it. Each monitor had a different window manager with 6 workspaces. They were not spanning so I could switch workspaces independently. Current Linux hasn’t been able to do that.
I used to open ~ 100 windows by the end of the week. I can’t do that easily with spanning window managers. Certainly not without workspaces.
Microsoft is trying to have 1 UI for desktop, tablet and phone. It won’t work. Apple has macOS for desktop and iOS for tablet/phone despite them being mostly the same OS underneath.