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MacOS 9 was awful, a product of a rather unpleasant era for Apple really. I wanna say through 9.2.1 maybe even through to 9.2.2 the OS had a nasty habit of cor

MacOS 9 was awful, a product of a rather unpleasant era for Apple really. I wanna say through 9.2.1 maybe even through to 9.2.2 the OS had a nasty habit of corrupting your disk. Hardware-wise Apple used CMD64x based IDE controllers so when OS9 wasn't screwing with your data the hardware itself would. There absolutely were animations e.g. when closing a Finder window, but they were much lighter weight. As far as I'm concerned System 7 was probably the zenith.

tarsinge 11mo ago
To me it’s the opposite, System 7 crashed all the time and MacOS 9 was rock solid. System 7 was a mess until 7.6, at which point it was basically MacOS 8. And the UI was way more pleasing, the system 7 one had a 80s vibe to me.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
anthk 11mo ago
W95 and W98 werent' much better until W98SE. Linux distros were rough but mega-stable.
- deaddodo 11mo ago
  Win98 was head and shoulders above System 9, from a stability perspective. It had protected memory, actual preemptive multitasking, a somewhat functional driver system built on top of an actual HAL, functional networking, etc, etc. To be clear, Win98 was a garbage fire of an OS (when it came to stability); which makes it so much worse that Mac OS 8-9 were so bad.
  - anthk 11mo ago
    98's multitasking and memory 'protection' were a joke. In the same mid high machine for the era, 2k and xp were miles ahead of w98 on mid-high load. Maybe not on a Pentium, but once you hit 192MB of RAM and some 500 MHz P3/AMD k7, NT based OSes were tons better. You only realized that upon opening a dozen of IE windows. W98, even SE, will sweat. 2k will fly. On single tasks, such as near realtime multimedia ones, w98 would be better, such as emulators/games or video players with single thread decoders. On multiprocessing/threading, w98 crawled against W2K even under p4's and 256MB of RAM.
    - fabioborellini 11mo ago
      Well, Win NT is an actual operating system, and Win 98 and Classic macOS are just horribly overgrown home computer shells in an environment they should never have been exposed to.
    - deaddodo 11mo ago
      And yet, OS 8 and OS 9 couldn't even match that joke.
      - anthk 11mo ago
        Ahem, w98 BSOD if you sneezed hard near it. Installing a driver? BSOD. IE page fault? BSOD. 128k stack limit reached? either grind to a halt or a BSOD. And so on...
        icedchai 11mo ago
        I worked at a company that was delivering a client-side app in Java launched from IE. I think we had an ActiveX plugin as the "launcher." This predated "Java Web Start." It was hysterically bad. We were targeting 32 meg Win 98 systems and they were comically slow and unstable. Most of our developers had 64 and 128 meg boxes with NT 4.0. I mostly worked on the server side stuff, and used them as a terminal into the Solaris and Linux systems.
        deaddodo 11mo ago
        > To be clear, Win98 was a garbage fire of an OS (when it came to stability); which makes it so much worse that Mac OS 8 and 9 were so bad.
        anthk 11mo ago
        WIn 98SE and Mac OS 9 were on par. Ditto with System 7.5.3 and Windows 95 OSR2.
        deaddodo 11mo ago
Y-bar 11mo ago
Mac OS 9 was certainly not rock solid as far as crashes were concerned, but very much better than System 7, that was clear to me. Maybe it is my rose-tinted glasses colouring my memory but I also remember that there were very few small bug, you know the just annoying kind, than I have today with macOS 15, there may be fewer hard crashes, but the number of paper cuts have increased by many orders of magnitude.
- tdeck 11mo ago
  I remember it crashing a lot but maybe that's because I came of age around the OS 8/9 era. IIUC OS 9 had no memory protection so it's not exactly a surprise it was fragile.
  - Y-bar 11mo ago
    Yup. It feels like I have traded, on an average week, three hard crashes (enough to need a reboot) and five small bugs back then, with zero hard crashes and ninety minor bugs (some requiring restarting the app) today. Sometimes I feel like I would like to go back because many of the smaller bugs drive me mad in a way that never happened back then.
- inferiorhuman 11mo ago
  Well, I got my B&W G3 because MacOS 9 lunched the filesystem as it was prone to doing. SCSI drive so it wasn't that other disk corruption fun (which I went through in PC land). As far as I'm concerned MacOS 9 was mostly a bunch of paper cuts glued together. Lots of stuff that would've demoed in OSX if Apple had the time and patience. So yeah Apple had tacked on vestigial multi-user support, an automatic system update mechanism, USB support, etc., etc. but underneath it was still the same old single user, cooperative multitasked, no memory protection OS as its predecessors. Unlike OSX, MacOS 9 (like 7 and 8 before it) still relied on the Toolbox which was a mishmash of m68k and ppc code.
Angostura 11mo ago
7.6.x was pretty cool
julik 11mo ago
I'd rather say the zenith was 8.1 which was not very widely used. 8.5 did add some nice gimmicks like the app switcher palette but for some reason it felt way slower than 8.1.
- dep_b 11mo ago
  8.1 was peak MacOS Classic for me as well. 8.5 was like Windows 98. Just added stuff that made it slower.
bri3d 11mo ago
Mac OS 9 was Apple Windows ME; too many side ports of new features into the rickety legacy core OS (Win32 / Toolbox Mac OS) and not enough attention paid to detail since the Next Big Thing was already cooking (XP / OS X).

tarsinge 11mo ago

To me it’s the opposite, System 7 crashed all the time and MacOS 9 was rock solid. System 7 was a mess until 7.6, at which point it was basically MacOS 8. And the UI was way more pleasing, the system 7 one had a 80s vibe to me.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

anthk 11mo ago

W95 and W98 werent' much better until W98SE. Linux distros were rough but mega-stable.

deaddodo 11mo ago
Win98 was head and shoulders above System 9, from a stability perspective. It had protected memory, actual preemptive multitasking, a somewhat functional driver system built on top of an actual HAL, functional networking, etc, etc. To be clear, Win98 was a garbage fire of an OS (when it came to stability); which makes it so much worse that Mac OS 8-9 were so bad.
- anthk 11mo ago
  98's multitasking and memory 'protection' were a joke. In the same mid high machine for the era, 2k and xp were miles ahead of w98 on mid-high load. Maybe not on a Pentium, but once you hit 192MB of RAM and some 500 MHz P3/AMD k7, NT based OSes were tons better. You only realized that upon opening a dozen of IE windows. W98, even SE, will sweat. 2k will fly. On single tasks, such as near realtime multimedia ones, w98 would be better, such as emulators/games or video players with single thread decoders. On multiprocessing/threading, w98 crawled against W2K even under p4's and 256MB of RAM.
  - fabioborellini 11mo ago
    Well, Win NT is an actual operating system, and Win 98 and Classic macOS are just horribly overgrown home computer shells in an environment they should never have been exposed to.
  - deaddodo 11mo ago
    And yet, OS 8 and OS 9 couldn't even match that joke.
    - anthk 11mo ago
      Ahem, w98 BSOD if you sneezed hard near it. Installing a driver? BSOD. IE page fault? BSOD. 128k stack limit reached? either grind to a halt or a BSOD. And so on...
      - icedchai 11mo ago
        I worked at a company that was delivering a client-side app in Java launched from IE. I think we had an ActiveX plugin as the "launcher." This predated "Java Web Start." It was hysterically bad. We were targeting 32 meg Win 98 systems and they were comically slow and unstable. Most of our developers had 64 and 128 meg boxes with NT 4.0. I mostly worked on the server side stuff, and used them as a terminal into the Solaris and Linux systems.
      - deaddodo 11mo ago
        > To be clear, Win98 was a garbage fire of an OS (when it came to stability); which makes it so much worse that Mac OS 8 and 9 were so bad.
        anthk 11mo ago
        WIn 98SE and Mac OS 9 were on par. Ditto with System 7.5.3 and Windows 95 OSR2.
        deaddodo 11mo ago

Y-bar 11mo ago

Mac OS 9 was certainly not rock solid as far as crashes were concerned, but very much better than System 7, that was clear to me. Maybe it is my rose-tinted glasses colouring my memory but I also remember that there were very few small bug, you know the just annoying kind, than I have today with macOS 15, there may be fewer hard crashes, but the number of paper cuts have increased by many orders of magnitude.

tdeck 11mo ago
I remember it crashing a lot but maybe that's because I came of age around the OS 8/9 era. IIUC OS 9 had no memory protection so it's not exactly a surprise it was fragile.
- Y-bar 11mo ago
  Yup. It feels like I have traded, on an average week, three hard crashes (enough to need a reboot) and five small bugs back then, with zero hard crashes and ninety minor bugs (some requiring restarting the app) today. Sometimes I feel like I would like to go back because many of the smaller bugs drive me mad in a way that never happened back then.
inferiorhuman 11mo ago
Well, I got my B&W G3 because MacOS 9 lunched the filesystem as it was prone to doing. SCSI drive so it wasn't that other disk corruption fun (which I went through in PC land). As far as I'm concerned MacOS 9 was mostly a bunch of paper cuts glued together. Lots of stuff that would've demoed in OSX if Apple had the time and patience. So yeah Apple had tacked on vestigial multi-user support, an automatic system update mechanism, USB support, etc., etc. but underneath it was still the same old single user, cooperative multitasked, no memory protection OS as its predecessors. Unlike OSX, MacOS 9 (like 7 and 8 before it) still relied on the Toolbox which was a mishmash of m68k and ppc code.

Angostura 11mo ago

7.6.x was pretty cool

julik 11mo ago

I'd rather say the zenith was 8.1 which was not very widely used. 8.5 did add some nice gimmicks like the app switcher palette but for some reason it felt way slower than 8.1.

dep_b 11mo ago
8.1 was peak MacOS Classic for me as well. 8.5 was like Windows 98. Just added stuff that made it slower.

bri3d 11mo ago

Mac OS 9 was Apple Windows ME; too many side ports of new features into the rickety legacy core OS (Win32 / Toolbox Mac OS) and not enough attention paid to detail since the Next Big Thing was already cooking (XP / OS X).