dpaanlka said:
Well, my point being that all the classics are unstable compmared to OS X
Untrue in my experience. It wasn't until 10.2 that OS X was as stable as MacOS 9, let alone the more-stable MacOS 8.6.
True, the OS itself didn't kernel-panic so much once you got to 10.1, but the apps themselves were very much inclined to implode with an "unexpectedly quit" error message. If you just lost work and/or hosed a file or two, you don't particularly care if the freaking OS survived the experience you just think "Damn, if I'd been booted in 8/9, this would not happen anywhere near as often".
With 10.2, the very same apps (version number compared to version number, etc) were a lot more stable and OS X was finally usable, dependable even.
I never had the rash of stability problems some folks describe for OS 8/9 (or even 7, really). You had to be a janitor and test-pilot; you had to do regular maintenance chores like disk repair, PRAM-zapping, and Desktop rebuilding, and you had to troubleshoot extension conflicts. But once you had a nice configuration working, this silly little trinket of an OS that everyone laughed at because it didn't do preemptive multitasking
was more stable than NT (yeah, really), and despite its ridiculous memory architecture handled large amounts of memory a hell of a lot better than the desktop versions of Windows that were around and about in that era.
The "classic" operating systems are way underrated. There were lemons now and then but the overall quality was excellent. And good things built (Apple or 3rd party) tended to hang on and accumulate, and by the latter years it was very much a Grand Old OS with loads of brilliant legacy options and whatnot.