3 ms·

I thought all editions of System 7 were color! Apparently I was mistaken :)

by warrenm 4y ago

duskwuff 4y ago
System 7.0 supported color, but could run on most black-and-white Macintosh systems.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  Specifically the Mac Plus (January 1986), which is the all-time longest-supported Mac[1] in terms of operating systems. It is compatible with 7.5.5, not superseded until 7.6 in January 1997 (!). [1] The all-time champion among all Apple products is the original Apple II (1977), which ProDOS 8 supported until 1993 (!!).
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    > Specifically the Mac Plus (January 1986) More specifically, that's the oldest model which System 7 ran on. (The only unsupported models were the Macintosh 128K, 512K, and 512Ke.) It certainly wasn't the only supported system with a monochrome display; that also included the Mac Classic, SE, SE/30, and a bunch of the early Powerbook models.
    - TMWNN 4y ago
      Sorry, did not mean to imply that Mac Plus is the only System 7-compatible monochrome Mac; only that it is the longest-supported and (as you said) oldest such. I do wonder how many Mac Plus owners would have upgraded to System 7 as opposed to staying with, say, System 6. I imagine there is a significant performance handicap.
      - KerrAvon 4y ago
        IIRC it would have mainly been a question of RAM size rather than CPU cycles -- among other new features, the Finder was always running in the background in System 7, so you needed more memory.
      - mattkevan 4y ago
        I used to use System 7 on a Mac Plus right up until about 2002. That alongside (and on top of) a huge, noisy 100mb Frog SCSI drive and a StyleWriter II printer made for a surprisingly useful machine. The Plus still works fine today, though the Frog died long ago.
        TMWNN 4y ago
        > I used to use System 7 on a Mac Plus right up until about 2002. Were you able to run contemporary versions of Netscape? (Well, before it crashed, killing itself and probably the system.)
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        wiredfool 4y ago
        Probably not. My recollection from my Se is that a lot of http software was limited by the lack of color QuickDraw.
        mattkevan 4y ago
        No, that machine was never connected to the Internet. I did run IE and Netscape on a bondi blue iMac though. IE was the only software that could crash the machine so hard it needed a full system restore.
        duskwuff 4y ago
        Weird. My experience was always that Netscape was the unstable one; the Mac version of MSIE 5 was more reliable (and had much better support for CSS).

I thought all editions of System 7 were color! Apparently I was mistaken :)

duskwuff 4y ago

System 7.0 supported color, but could run on most black-and-white Macintosh systems.

TMWNN 4y ago
Specifically the Mac Plus (January 1986), which is the all-time longest-supported Mac[1] in terms of operating systems. It is compatible with 7.5.5, not superseded until 7.6 in January 1997 (!). [1] The all-time champion among all Apple products is the original Apple II (1977), which ProDOS 8 supported until 1993 (!!).
- duskwuff 4y ago
  > Specifically the Mac Plus (January 1986) More specifically, that's the oldest model which System 7 ran on. (The only unsupported models were the Macintosh 128K, 512K, and 512Ke.) It certainly wasn't the only supported system with a monochrome display; that also included the Mac Classic, SE, SE/30, and a bunch of the early Powerbook models.
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    Sorry, did not mean to imply that Mac Plus is the only System 7-compatible monochrome Mac; only that it is the longest-supported and (as you said) oldest such. I do wonder how many Mac Plus owners would have upgraded to System 7 as opposed to staying with, say, System 6. I imagine there is a significant performance handicap.
    - KerrAvon 4y ago
      IIRC it would have mainly been a question of RAM size rather than CPU cycles -- among other new features, the Finder was always running in the background in System 7, so you needed more memory.
    - mattkevan 4y ago
      I used to use System 7 on a Mac Plus right up until about 2002. That alongside (and on top of) a huge, noisy 100mb Frog SCSI drive and a StyleWriter II printer made for a surprisingly useful machine. The Plus still works fine today, though the Frog died long ago.
      - TMWNN 4y ago
        > I used to use System 7 on a Mac Plus right up until about 2002. Were you able to run contemporary versions of Netscape? (Well, before it crashed, killing itself and probably the system.)
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        wiredfool 4y ago
        Probably not. My recollection from my Se is that a lot of http software was limited by the lack of color QuickDraw.
        mattkevan 4y ago
        No, that machine was never connected to the Internet. I did run IE and Netscape on a bondi blue iMac though. IE was the only software that could crash the machine so hard it needed a full system restore.
        duskwuff 4y ago
        Weird. My experience was always that Netscape was the unstable one; the Mac version of MSIE 5 was more reliable (and had much better support for CSS).