6 ms·

I don’t remember Mac OS 9 being slow—was it? I remember everything else—it was certainly unstable. Windows XP was introduced about a month after the G4 Cube was

I don’t remember Mac OS 9 being slow—was it? I remember everything else—it was certainly unstable. Windows XP was introduced about a month after the G4 Cube was discontinued. If you bought a PC during the time the G4 Cube, it would have likely come with Windows ME.

armadsen 6y ago
Mac OS 9 was very responsive. e.g. Clicking on something and seeing the results of your click tended to be very fast. Comparatively, early versions of Mac OS X running on the same hardware were incredibly slow/unresponsive. They improved that with subsequent releases, and of course the hardware caught up too.
- abrowne 6y ago
  I installed the Mac OS X public beta on my family's eMac. The computer had 64 MB of RAM while the requirements listed 128 MB IIRC. But I wanted UNIX! It was so unresponsive, I had to learn to use the terminal.
  - mattkevan 6y ago
    Oh man, that brings back memories of trying the beta on my parents’ 1st gen bondi iMac with 32mb ram and a 4gb hdd. Looked like it was warped in from the future. Moved at dialup pace.
    - abrowne 6y ago
      Now that you mention your iMac, I think it was also a 32 MB iMac (2nd gen, blueberry) that I first tried …
  - bluedino 6y ago
    I had a Bondi iMac and a friend had a Pismo, even after maxing our RAM and HD, we’d go back and forth between OS 9 and OS X Because one was crap and the other was terribly slow
- Lammy 6y ago
  It was very responsive, and then nothing else happened in the background while you held a menu open: https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/popup-stevedev.html https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/popup-stevedev.html (An aside from The True Story of Audion: https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/) I'm very nostalgic for those times and maintain several classic Macs, but for the most part I'm glad it's in the past.
  - some-guy 6y ago
    I just inherited a Powerbook G3 (Wallstreet, 300Mhz G3) from my mother-in-law's closet. Everything is fine and snappy until you have two programs open at once...then all of a sudden everything becomes unresponsive.
    - Lammy 6y ago
      It shouldn't be that bad. How much RAM in the machine? Is virtual memory enabled? What OS version? What disk is it booting from? With what disk driver? Which two apps? (Some, like Photoshop, have their own Scratch Disk settings). Is enough RAM allocated to each of them (in 'Get Info'), etc etc. This is a pretty deep rabbit hole. It's an environment that takes a while to know the ins-and-outs of, but it's also very fun and incredible hackable in ways no OS could be these days. The Wallstreet is a fantastic computer, one of the best Powerbooks ever made. Try it with Mac OS 8.6, at least 64MB RAM (128MB even better), RAMDoubler 8 or 9 with compression disabled (it has a better VM system than built-in), on a mSATA SSD in a JM20330 ATA/mSATA adapter, with the boot partition under 8GB (ATA-5 limitation) using either Apple's Disk Utility driver or Lacie Silverlining 6 if you're feeling adventurous :) edit: Unless your MIL was unfortunate enough to own the first (non-"PDQ") 233mhz model with no L2 cache, in which case yes it really is that bad lol https://lowendmac.com/1999/cacheless-mainstreet-powerbook-g3-233-road-apple/ https://lowendmac.com/1999/cacheless-mainstreet-powerbook-g3...
      - some-guy 6y ago
        This one actually has 512mb of RAM, funny enough. No RAM doubler or virtual memory enabled. I was using iCab and Word side-by-side. It's the fastest PDQ model made AFAIK. No RAM doubler. The main issue with it right now is that the sound doesn't work at all. I was going to take it apart and check the DC / sound card (which is the same module) and see if there's something obviously wrong with it once I get the chance.
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  Especially on the newest hardware that OS 9 runs on (or can be hacked to run on) it's probably the closest you can get to feeling like there's practically nothing between the software button you're clicking and the hardware it's running on. Modern macOS is decent at this but all modern operating systems tend to give the impression of unseen layers because of the latency involved.
  - bluedino 6y ago
    BeOS was even better and you could get real work done (with the little software it had)
- kalleboo 6y ago
  The UI was very responsive, but things like networking (Open Transport...) and disk access were very slow compared to even the sluggish early OS X versions (I have a PowerBook G3 Bronze Keyboard I still use sometimes)
wmf 6y ago
Classic Mac OS was very slow. I triple-booted my 7600 with Mac OS, Linux, and BeOS and I remember that Netscape was 10x faster on Linux.

armadsen 6y ago

Mac OS 9 was very responsive. e.g. Clicking on something and seeing the results of your click tended to be very fast. Comparatively, early versions of Mac OS X running on the same hardware were incredibly slow/unresponsive. They improved that with subsequent releases, and of course the hardware caught up too.

abrowne 6y ago
I installed the Mac OS X public beta on my family's eMac. The computer had 64 MB of RAM while the requirements listed 128 MB IIRC. But I wanted UNIX! It was so unresponsive, I had to learn to use the terminal.
- mattkevan 6y ago
  Oh man, that brings back memories of trying the beta on my parents’ 1st gen bondi iMac with 32mb ram and a 4gb hdd. Looked like it was warped in from the future. Moved at dialup pace.
  - abrowne 6y ago
    Now that you mention your iMac, I think it was also a 32 MB iMac (2nd gen, blueberry) that I first tried …
- bluedino 6y ago
  I had a Bondi iMac and a friend had a Pismo, even after maxing our RAM and HD, we’d go back and forth between OS 9 and OS X Because one was crap and the other was terribly slow
Lammy 6y ago
It was very responsive, and then nothing else happened in the background while you held a menu open: https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/popup-stevedev.html https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/popup-stevedev.html (An aside from The True Story of Audion: https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/) I'm very nostalgic for those times and maintain several classic Macs, but for the most part I'm glad it's in the past.
- some-guy 6y ago
  I just inherited a Powerbook G3 (Wallstreet, 300Mhz G3) from my mother-in-law's closet. Everything is fine and snappy until you have two programs open at once...then all of a sudden everything becomes unresponsive.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    It shouldn't be that bad. How much RAM in the machine? Is virtual memory enabled? What OS version? What disk is it booting from? With what disk driver? Which two apps? (Some, like Photoshop, have their own Scratch Disk settings). Is enough RAM allocated to each of them (in 'Get Info'), etc etc. This is a pretty deep rabbit hole. It's an environment that takes a while to know the ins-and-outs of, but it's also very fun and incredible hackable in ways no OS could be these days. The Wallstreet is a fantastic computer, one of the best Powerbooks ever made. Try it with Mac OS 8.6, at least 64MB RAM (128MB even better), RAMDoubler 8 or 9 with compression disabled (it has a better VM system than built-in), on a mSATA SSD in a JM20330 ATA/mSATA adapter, with the boot partition under 8GB (ATA-5 limitation) using either Apple's Disk Utility driver or Lacie Silverlining 6 if you're feeling adventurous :) edit: Unless your MIL was unfortunate enough to own the first (non-"PDQ") 233mhz model with no L2 cache, in which case yes it really is that bad lol https://lowendmac.com/1999/cacheless-mainstreet-powerbook-g3-233-road-apple/ https://lowendmac.com/1999/cacheless-mainstreet-powerbook-g3...
    - some-guy 6y ago
      This one actually has 512mb of RAM, funny enough. No RAM doubler or virtual memory enabled. I was using iCab and Word side-by-side. It's the fastest PDQ model made AFAIK. No RAM doubler. The main issue with it right now is that the sound doesn't work at all. I was going to take it apart and check the DC / sound card (which is the same module) and see if there's something obviously wrong with it once I get the chance.
kitsunesoba 6y ago
Especially on the newest hardware that OS 9 runs on (or can be hacked to run on) it's probably the closest you can get to feeling like there's practically nothing between the software button you're clicking and the hardware it's running on. Modern macOS is decent at this but all modern operating systems tend to give the impression of unseen layers because of the latency involved.
- bluedino 6y ago
  BeOS was even better and you could get real work done (with the little software it had)
kalleboo 6y ago
The UI was very responsive, but things like networking (Open Transport...) and disk access were very slow compared to even the sluggish early OS X versions (I have a PowerBook G3 Bronze Keyboard I still use sometimes)

wmf 6y ago

Classic Mac OS was very slow. I triple-booted my 7600 with Mac OS, Linux, and BeOS and I remember that Netscape was 10x faster on Linux.