6 ms·

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

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.
      - Lammy 6y ago
        Yeah, it's counter-intuitive, but you should turn Virtual Memory on even if you set it down to 1MB. Also make sure the Disk Cache is set as high as you can go. https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?app=forums&module=forums&controller=topic&id=55749&tab=comments#comment-593179 https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?app=forums&module=forums... "If you disable virtual memory, the system's MMU is disabled. When that happens: - Every program you launch needs to be 100% loaded from disk when you launch that program, which could cause program launches to take longer, particularly applications which are themselves large. The impact of this will vary based on the speed of the disk or network volume the application file resides on - The other thing that will happen is all applications will instantly take up their maximum possible RAM allocation, which even in 768, if you're running 9-era stuff, especially anything creative, could have a big impact." That's why I recommended RAM Doubler since it allows you to disable VM and its own memory compression without hitting this limitation. What was especially cool was how older (pre-SDRAM) PowerBooks persisted files in RAM Disk across reboots. You could copy a minimal System, your documents, and an app (tiny ones like Word 5.1a), reboot off the RAM Disk, then eject and spin down the internal HDD for a big battery life boost!
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)

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.
    - Lammy 6y ago
      Yeah, it's counter-intuitive, but you should turn Virtual Memory on even if you set it down to 1MB. Also make sure the Disk Cache is set as high as you can go. https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?app=forums&module=forums&controller=topic&id=55749&tab=comments#comment-593179 https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?app=forums&module=forums... "If you disable virtual memory, the system's MMU is disabled. When that happens: - Every program you launch needs to be 100% loaded from disk when you launch that program, which could cause program launches to take longer, particularly applications which are themselves large. The impact of this will vary based on the speed of the disk or network volume the application file resides on - The other thing that will happen is all applications will instantly take up their maximum possible RAM allocation, which even in 768, if you're running 9-era stuff, especially anything creative, could have a big impact." That's why I recommended RAM Doubler since it allows you to disable VM and its own memory compression without hitting this limitation. What was especially cool was how older (pre-SDRAM) PowerBooks persisted files in RAM Disk across reboots. You could copy a minimal System, your documents, and an app (tiny ones like Word 5.1a), reboot off the RAM Disk, then eject and spin down the internal HDD for a big battery life boost!

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)