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Yes, Amelio's departure coincided with the release of System 8 in July 1997. (The NeXT deal and Jobs' return was in February.) To be fair, System 8 was more th

Yes, Amelio's departure coincided with the release of System 8 in July 1997. (The NeXT deal and Jobs' return was in February.) To be fair, System 8 was more than just a service update for System 7: it introduced the Platinum UI, the Appearance API, a multithreaded Finder, and various Copland features. (This was quite a rich update, maybe second only to System 7. It would have been a bit strange to just give this all away as System 7.7.)

hnbear 4y ago
7.6 felt like Snow Leopard. Great stable OS after the flakiness of low 7s. Then 8 felt like a huge shift to the modern. Yes, would have been weird to be 7.7. An ideal break point. Seems odd the clones licensed by OS version, not duration. 9 didn’t have the same change feel.
- masswerk 4y ago
  System 9 was really just about some compatibility layers in preparation for OSX, as I remember it. (And, yes, 7.6 was a major step in terms of stability. There was also some pre-PPC, pre-OpenDoc version of System 7 that was pretty stable, but with all those major integrations that came with the further iterations, things became a bit "delicate".)
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    IIRC Mac OS 9.0.x had significant changes for users directly booted into it, as did 9.1 (though to a lesser extent). I think it was 9.2.X that was mostly focused on usage with Classic.
    - hnbear 4y ago
      Yes, might be right there. 9 introduced the changes to allow multiple-users on a Mac, with a log-in screen. Going off fuzzy memory. And then Classic/Carbon/Cocoa came around.
Someone 4y ago
> System 8 was more than just a service update for System 7 A lot more, eventually. System 8.6 brought a fully pre-emptive kernel with multi processing (http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=3656.0 http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=3656.0) Problem was that, for backwards compatibility, all applications ran in a single pre-emptively scheduled task that cooperatively scheduled between them. You could write additional tasks that got scheduled preemptively, but they couldn’t make all system calls (https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/Multitasking_MultiproServ/03tasks/tasks.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ca...)

hnbear 4y ago

7.6 felt like Snow Leopard. Great stable OS after the flakiness of low 7s. Then 8 felt like a huge shift to the modern. Yes, would have been weird to be 7.7. An ideal break point. Seems odd the clones licensed by OS version, not duration. 9 didn’t have the same change feel.

masswerk 4y ago
System 9 was really just about some compatibility layers in preparation for OSX, as I remember it. (And, yes, 7.6 was a major step in terms of stability. There was also some pre-PPC, pre-OpenDoc version of System 7 that was pretty stable, but with all those major integrations that came with the further iterations, things became a bit "delicate".)
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  IIRC Mac OS 9.0.x had significant changes for users directly booted into it, as did 9.1 (though to a lesser extent). I think it was 9.2.X that was mostly focused on usage with Classic.
  - hnbear 4y ago
    Yes, might be right there. 9 introduced the changes to allow multiple-users on a Mac, with a log-in screen. Going off fuzzy memory. And then Classic/Carbon/Cocoa came around.

Someone 4y ago

> System 8 was more than just a service update for System 7 A lot more, eventually. System 8.6 brought a fully pre-emptive kernel with multi processing (http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=3656.0 http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=3656.0) Problem was that, for backwards compatibility, all applications ran in a single pre-emptively scheduled task that cooperatively scheduled between them. You could write additional tasks that got scheduled preemptively, but they couldn’t make all system calls (https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/Multitasking_MultiproServ/03tasks/tasks.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ca...)