12 ms·

My coworkers made me use Mac OS 9

64 points by dodders 11y ago

reustle 11y ago
That 2002 PowerBook G4 has a thinner bezel than my 2015 Macbook Air and the iPad...
- ayuvar 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    Are thicker bezels associated with durability?
    - ayuvar 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        It's because they need the wider bezel in order to make the dramatic space savings on thickness that people appreciate more.
  - nathancahill 11y ago
    Yeah, I had one and have always been disappointed that the newer MBPs never went back to the thinner bezel. The hinges were indeed the weak point, they fell apart after a couple months.
kawera 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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!
- charlesism 11y ago
  I think by "Rosetta", you meant to write "Classic mode" right? I use an app called SheepShaver (think it's Basilisk uunder the hood) to run OS 9, and it works pretty well. I doubt it has support for USB or SCSI, but maybe it's worth investigating.
  - kawera 11y ago
    You are right, Classic not Rosetta. Thanks for SheepShaver but at this point I am a bit wary of touching my working but possibly fragile system.
    - charlesism 11y ago
      Fair enough. Not much gain in changing a setup that has served you fine for a decade+.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
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.
xixixao 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      > 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.
- hmottestad 11y ago
  AoE2 stopped working properly some time around windows 7 and required a bunch of workarounds until they fixed things with windows 10. They did a remake of AoE2 called HD edition that works much better under windows 7-10.
  - rodgerd 11y ago
    It certainly didn't stop around Windows 7, I was playing it quite happily, modulo the lack of understanding widescreens.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    Depends on the OS, of course. If you were lucky enough to use Windows NT, you had protected memory and preëmptive multitasking!.. but it was a bit slow.
  - ido 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      Bad drivers in particular would cause a bunch of bluescreens.
colanderman 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
  - aidenn0 11y ago
    Sadly my wife's macbook could only take 2GB of RAM, so we had to get her a new one; this means no more AppleWorks; I'm going to have to get her Bento to import her databases.
  - aidos 11y ago
    I was using the same setup as this for years. My laptop was stolen about 6 months ago so I got a new retina machine. I've just resigned myself to living with instability. Network dropouts that can only be resolved by restarting the whole machine. Occasional system crashes. Sluggish interface behaviour vs the old OS (which is insane given how much more modern the hardware is). One of the few reasons I actually had considered updating in the past was to get the latest 1password. It's a pretty thin silver lining, but it's something!
kelseydh 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Unless your software happens to be fondly remembered in an article (or 3d hypercybervis, or whatever we have then).
supernintendo 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
beloch 11y ago
"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 11y ago
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
wtbob 11y ago
> 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.

64 points by dodders 11y ago

reustle 11y ago

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

ayuvar 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Are thicker bezels associated with durability?
  - ayuvar 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      It's because they need the wider bezel in order to make the dramatic space savings on thickness that people appreciate more.
- nathancahill 11y ago
  Yeah, I had one and have always been disappointed that the newer MBPs never went back to the thinner bezel. The hinges were indeed the weak point, they fell apart after a couple months.

kawera 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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!
charlesism 11y ago
I think by "Rosetta", you meant to write "Classic mode" right? I use an app called SheepShaver (think it's Basilisk uunder the hood) to run OS 9, and it works pretty well. I doubt it has support for USB or SCSI, but maybe it's worth investigating.
- kawera 11y ago
  You are right, Classic not Rosetta. Thanks for SheepShaver but at this point I am a bit wary of touching my working but possibly fragile system.
  - charlesism 11y ago
    Fair enough. Not much gain in changing a setup that has served you fine for a decade+.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

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.

xixixao 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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.
hmottestad 11y ago
AoE2 stopped working properly some time around windows 7 and required a bunch of workarounds until they fixed things with windows 10. They did a remake of AoE2 called HD edition that works much better under windows 7-10.
- rodgerd 11y ago
  It certainly didn't stop around Windows 7, I was playing it quite happily, modulo the lack of understanding widescreens.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Depends on the OS, of course. If you were lucky enough to use Windows NT, you had protected memory and preëmptive multitasking!.. but it was a bit slow.
- ido 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    Bad drivers in particular would cause a bunch of bluescreens.

colanderman 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.
- aidenn0 11y ago
  Sadly my wife's macbook could only take 2GB of RAM, so we had to get her a new one; this means no more AppleWorks; I'm going to have to get her Bento to import her databases.
- aidos 11y ago
  I was using the same setup as this for years. My laptop was stolen about 6 months ago so I got a new retina machine. I've just resigned myself to living with instability. Network dropouts that can only be resolved by restarting the whole machine. Occasional system crashes. Sluggish interface behaviour vs the old OS (which is insane given how much more modern the hardware is). One of the few reasons I actually had considered updating in the past was to get the latest 1password. It's a pretty thin silver lining, but it's something!

kelseydh 11y ago

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 11y ago
Unless your software happens to be fondly remembered in an article (or 3d hypercybervis, or whatever we have then).

supernintendo 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

beloch 11y ago

"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 11y ago

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

wtbob 11y ago

> 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.