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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

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.)

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.)