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I love OS9

C

coupdetat

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 11, 2008
451
0
It's been ages since I booted my iMac Snow into OS9, but I did it again just to play around with it and realized I had totally forgotten about all of the amazing things about OS9!!

First off, there was TONS of software on my OS9 partition that was all extremely useful. There are tons of old Classic programs available for free or really cheaply that rival the productivity of modern apps. Here's what I have on my partition:

Clarisworks
Photoshop 6.0
Acta Outliner
Office '98
iTunes 2
Alpha Centauri
Deus Ex

Next, there's the overall working environment. Finder is insanely fast and the spatial paradigm is actually consistently implemented. Resizing windows doesn't take forever. I also really like the overall look of the system, it's just refreshing and minimalistic compared to flashy OSX. This G3 honestly rivals modern Macs in OSX in terms of responsiveness.

Also, some comments on the different apps:
iTunes 2 is what iTunes should be all about. It's really, really fast and easy to use, unlike horribly bloated and slow iTunes 8. It launches almost instantly.

Office 98 and Clarisworks are definitely faster than Office 2008 under OSX on a new Mac. This is also the reason why I use Office 2003 on my Vaio instead of 2007.

Acta Outliner is great.

Web browsing is terrible, but also useful in a distraction-free way. I can access sites like Pubmed and Wikipedia easily, but Youtube doesn't really work :p

Any thoughts from you guys?
 
I like OS 9 too, I still run it on a G4 450 with a GeForce 2 card for Deus Ex and Rune and speed wise the finder blows OS X out of the water.
 
Im a Research Assistant at school and we have macs and we have OS9 on some of them. I dont know about you guys, but after OS X, OS9 is just like a car with square wheels. It belongs in the past.
 
Rodus said:
I like OS 9 too, I still run it on a G4 450 with a GeForce 2 card for Deus Ex and Rune and speed wise the finder blows OS X out of the water.
Click to expand...
I'll 2nd that! The finder in the classic OS was much more responsive than OSX and had some great features. I miss the control strip and Sherlock.
 
I am posting right now with OS9.1 Have ten on a machine but come back to 9.
Just bought a B&W G3 at the thrift store for $12.00 and plan to move my graphics apps to it from a beige G3.:D
 
A lot of that has to do with having an older Mac. OS X on a new(er) Mac is faster than OS 9 on a G4. Also what OS X may lack sometimes in responsiveness it makes up for in being able to do a lot more at once. Cooperative multitasking, & even the available preemptive multitasking in OS 9, are definitely inferior to OS X's model for preemptive multitasking. True, full, memory protection is a wonderful thing.

OS 9 isn't a bad product, and I actually thought it would be a good option for a small netbook like device before the Atom and Netbooks as we knew them came along, but I'm particularly happy that I no longer have to deal with Type 2 and Type 11 errors haha.
 
as soon as i get my second MBP i though about dumbing down my PB 1.5GHz to Tiger and run the classic enviroment. I also have somewhere a emac sitting around that natively boots into OS9. I just don't have OS9 disks anymore. where can I get those? also I'd like to get macwrite pro, mac draw pro and such. would be great to have a OS9 machine around. play with control panels and sytem extensions:p
 
I have a G4 cube, just to run classic stuff. I'm amazed at how quick running PS5 or office is. While OSX certainly provides a lot of features, it clearly also has a lot of overhead. Software too has continued to increase insize.

I haven't cranked up my cube in months, maybe I'll do that later :)
 
I had a 550 MHz PowerBook G4 with 128 MB RAM in 2008(because my 1.67 GHz PB with 2 GB RAM was being fixed due to a short in the DC and sound card). The only way you could use it was in OS 9 unless you consider firefox + iTunes + Mail the only thing you do on the computer Even terminal with the 3 previously mentioned would put it over the limit. OS 9 I could do what ever I wanted without it slowing down. iCab worked great as a web browser (No flash which is good) OS 9 is just better on a old computer. If it came with OS 9 (or 8) I would just leave OS 9 on it (without upgrades. If you put 1 GB+ RAM I would put tiger on it.)
 
I have ClarisWorks and ClarisCAD on my PowerBook G3 Wallstreeet from 1998. And guess what its running? Good old Mac OS 8.5 :D

Its a blast to go through all the retro stuff on there.
 
the worst part is when an app crashes and brings your whole system down

also the OS 9 web browsers are woefully out of date

i think OS 9 works a lot better for offline activities like games
 
I still use OS 9 for Photoshop, Quark, ClarisWorks v2, Unreal Tournament GOTY edition, and a host of other apps from that era. Having a 1.1GHz G3, 1GB RAM and a ATI 9200 w/128VRAM helps greatly. This is my home unit, it is dual boot w/OS 10.4.6 on another drive. I think things happen faster in OS 9, but when an app crashes a re-boot is sure to follow.
 
I will always have a soft spot for pre-Mac OS X as I did some developing back then.

As some have said, the minimalist approach is very nice. It was easy to customize Mac OS 9 and earlier.

I've been thinking of trying Sheepshaver when I have some time. It promises to be a good way to run Mac OS 9 on an Intel Mac. Has anybody out there tried it before?
 
sushi said:
I will always have a soft spot for pre-Mac OS X as I did some developing back then.

As some have said, the minimalist approach is very nice. It was easy to customize Mac OS 9 and earlier.

I've been thinking of trying Sheepshaver when I have some time. It promises to be a good way to run Mac OS 9 on an Intel Mac. Has anybody out there tried it before?
Click to expand...

I ran Sheepshaver with 9.0.4 for a while, I found an old copy of Office 98, Corel Draw 8 LE, Dreamweaver 4 and Flash 5 that I used to play around with on my iMac. Problem is, the app isn't a universal binary even if it says it is and therefore runs under Rosetta, so you don't get the full speed benefits.

I also found it crashed fairly regularly, but it was nice to play with :D

I'll have to see if I can dig out a screenshot I took

pac
 
macJC50640 said:
I have ClarisWorks and ClarisCAD on my PowerBook G3 Wallstreeet from 1998. And guess what its running? Good old Mac OS 8.5 :D

Its a blast to go through all the retro stuff on there.
Click to expand...

Just found this pic while looking for a Mac OS 9 screenshot I took - see the retail CD?

Its a PPC 7200/90 with 48MB RAM and 1.2GB Hard Drive. It was my first OWN Mac that I bought.

pac
 

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