6 ms·

Macs running classic MacOS were famously unstable for professional work. I got used to restarting my Mac when getting a cup of coffee as preventative maintenanc

Macs running classic MacOS were famously unstable for professional work. I got used to restarting my Mac when getting a cup of coffee as preventative maintenance. The few viruses that were around were mostly annoyances.

GeekyBear 5y ago
Nah. Once you got creative users to stop installing scads of extensions, Macs were way more stable than Win95 boxes. The problem was that creative users had no concept of "some extensions just aren't compatible with others".
- smilespray 5y ago
  It's not as simple as that. We ran a tight ship, extension-wise. There were plenty of bugs in QuarkXPress, Photoshop and Illustrator to make our Macs bomb, and the fundamental lack of memory protection, process isolation and preemptive multitasking in Mac OS meant that the whole system was wobbly from the bottom up. Also, my post wasn't meant as a comparision between Win95 and Mac OS. I just responded to a question about what Mac OS was like to work with on a daily basis in the decade of the 90s. Win95 wasn't around for half of it.
  - simondotau 5y ago
    It’s slightly weird and unnerving to realise that modern macOS is older today than classic MacOS was when it was obsoleted.
    - smilespray 5y ago
      Unnerving indeed. How time flies.
    - grishka 5y ago
      And it's been through 2 CPU architecture transitions.
      - mattl 5y ago
        More than that when you consider modern Mac OS X initially ran on 68k black NeXT hardware, then 486, PA-RISC and SPARC... plus PPC and Apple Silicon.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    There was also the thing with virtual memory. Some apps did run with it (so you had "more memory") and some didn't. Enabling or disabling it meant reboot. So you rebooted based on which app you needed to run.
    - sgerenser 5y ago
      That had to be a long time ago. I ran MacOS 7.6 through 9 for much of the 90s and don’t recall any apps not working with virtual memory enabled.
      - vetinari 5y ago
        Even in 9... Photoshop had it's own memory manager and didn't play nice with VM. Pro Tools couldn't even launch.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    > I just responded to a question about what Mac OS was like to work with on a daily basis in the decade of the 90s. Your experience does not match my own. I had way more issues supporting users on Windows, at least until Windows 98SE landed. It was a happy day indeed when Windows 2000 finally landed with memory protection, process isolation and preemptive multitasking.
    - smilespray 5y ago
      You keep bringing up Windows. I avoided it like the plague. It also wasn't an option for our use. (Until, as you point out, Windows 2000 came around. Then I started working on Mac and PC simultaneously.)
- dylan604 5y ago
  Woz has a chapter in his book about how a stable system magically became unstable after install IE. "Without making accusations" he says, but goes into some detail on how IE being installed caused a lot of chaos.
GhettoComputers 5y ago
What counts as professional? I think my friend had a G3 that never had issues as a student. I just had it in "computer class" to play crappy math games that hurt my eyes but they never crashed, and I wasn't a professional. I used Photoshop in 2003 or so, I think it was OSX by then, and never had an issue if you call photoshop and internet usage "professional" work.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  Professional has in getting paid for your work. MacOS 9 crashed if you looked at it wrong. And I still miss it.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    How about using Snow Leopard with Rosetta?
    - salamandersauce 5y ago
      You can't run classic Mac OS programs on Snow Leopard with Rosetta. Rosetta just let you run PPC Mac OS X apps on Intel Mac OS X. So it was just as stable as Mac OS X. Even with Classic on Mac OS X for PPC you'd just crash the Classic system at the worst and not whole OS.
masswerk 5y ago
Some of the professional Software was also famously unstable. Generally speaking, saving frequently helped. (Quark, I'm speaking of XPress 3 and memory leaks, guaranteed to strike, when it really hurts…)
- grishka 5y ago
  That's not just Mac OS and professional software either. Windows did that too. I was very young back then, but I do remember being angry at the computer crashing and losing whatever I was doing, only to be told "it's your fault, you should save you file more often next time". It becomes a sort of a subconscious habit really quickly.
  - masswerk 5y ago
    The important point being, once you saved, the working memory was also reset to sane conditions and you could keep on going for days, or weeks. Saving frequently not only kept the injuries, which added to the insults of a crash, in bounds, it also prevented those crashes from happening at all.

GeekyBear 5y ago

Nah. Once you got creative users to stop installing scads of extensions, Macs were way more stable than Win95 boxes. The problem was that creative users had no concept of "some extensions just aren't compatible with others".

smilespray 5y ago
It's not as simple as that. We ran a tight ship, extension-wise. There were plenty of bugs in QuarkXPress, Photoshop and Illustrator to make our Macs bomb, and the fundamental lack of memory protection, process isolation and preemptive multitasking in Mac OS meant that the whole system was wobbly from the bottom up. Also, my post wasn't meant as a comparision between Win95 and Mac OS. I just responded to a question about what Mac OS was like to work with on a daily basis in the decade of the 90s. Win95 wasn't around for half of it.
- simondotau 5y ago
  It’s slightly weird and unnerving to realise that modern macOS is older today than classic MacOS was when it was obsoleted.
  - smilespray 5y ago
    Unnerving indeed. How time flies.
  - grishka 5y ago
    And it's been through 2 CPU architecture transitions.
    - mattl 5y ago
      More than that when you consider modern Mac OS X initially ran on 68k black NeXT hardware, then 486, PA-RISC and SPARC... plus PPC and Apple Silicon.
- vetinari 5y ago
  There was also the thing with virtual memory. Some apps did run with it (so you had "more memory") and some didn't. Enabling or disabling it meant reboot. So you rebooted based on which app you needed to run.
  - sgerenser 5y ago
    That had to be a long time ago. I ran MacOS 7.6 through 9 for much of the 90s and don’t recall any apps not working with virtual memory enabled.
    - vetinari 5y ago
      Even in 9... Photoshop had it's own memory manager and didn't play nice with VM. Pro Tools couldn't even launch.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  > I just responded to a question about what Mac OS was like to work with on a daily basis in the decade of the 90s. Your experience does not match my own. I had way more issues supporting users on Windows, at least until Windows 98SE landed. It was a happy day indeed when Windows 2000 finally landed with memory protection, process isolation and preemptive multitasking.
  - smilespray 5y ago
    You keep bringing up Windows. I avoided it like the plague. It also wasn't an option for our use. (Until, as you point out, Windows 2000 came around. Then I started working on Mac and PC simultaneously.)
dylan604 5y ago
Woz has a chapter in his book about how a stable system magically became unstable after install IE. "Without making accusations" he says, but goes into some detail on how IE being installed caused a lot of chaos.

GhettoComputers 5y ago

What counts as professional? I think my friend had a G3 that never had issues as a student. I just had it in "computer class" to play crappy math games that hurt my eyes but they never crashed, and I wasn't a professional. I used Photoshop in 2003 or so, I think it was OSX by then, and never had an issue if you call photoshop and internet usage "professional" work.

imwillofficial 5y ago
Professional has in getting paid for your work. MacOS 9 crashed if you looked at it wrong. And I still miss it.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  How about using Snow Leopard with Rosetta?
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    You can't run classic Mac OS programs on Snow Leopard with Rosetta. Rosetta just let you run PPC Mac OS X apps on Intel Mac OS X. So it was just as stable as Mac OS X. Even with Classic on Mac OS X for PPC you'd just crash the Classic system at the worst and not whole OS.

masswerk 5y ago

Some of the professional Software was also famously unstable. Generally speaking, saving frequently helped. (Quark, I'm speaking of XPress 3 and memory leaks, guaranteed to strike, when it really hurts…)

grishka 5y ago
That's not just Mac OS and professional software either. Windows did that too. I was very young back then, but I do remember being angry at the computer crashing and losing whatever I was doing, only to be told "it's your fault, you should save you file more often next time". It becomes a sort of a subconscious habit really quickly.
- masswerk 5y ago
  The important point being, once you saved, the working memory was also reset to sane conditions and you could keep on going for days, or weeks. Saving frequently not only kept the injuries, which added to the insults of a crash, in bounds, it also prevented those crashes from happening at all.