I have uses the newer OS’s of Mac but never the classic series that were numbered.

For those who have used apple computing back in the day, what was it like using it? Was it a lot more snappier and better user interface intuitiveness?

I say this because it always seemed to me that the macintosh operating systems seemed to be more… “smooth sailing” than Bill’s 50/50 BSOD contraptions (Windows ME anyone?)

Obviously things have changed a lot more with newer macos being more fisher priced down in looks but I’d really like to know what you guys thought about OS 8 or 9!

Thank you!

  • @I_Miss_DanielEnglish
    7•1 month ago

    I had to support the damn things for a university. Crash prone bastards they were. The windows 3.11 and 95 boxes in the same environment were so much more stable than the pre osx macs of the time.

    The earlier ones - classics and the like were pretty stable.

    • @QuarterSwede
      2•1 month ago

      I learned ProTools and Digital Performer on OS9. It crashed so often we saved very often. God I hated those machines. OS X completely changed the game and absolutely destroyed Windows in stability. I moved from Windows when 10.4 came out and search was amazing. Haven’t liked Windows since. Linux, you’re cool. Anything *nix is really where it’s at.

    • HubertManne
      1•1 month ago

      I find this hard to believe. I feel 3.11 and 95 crashed pretty often. They generally recovered on a restart though so was it more that the macs crashed in a way that needed support more often?

      • @I_Miss_DanielEnglish
        3•1 month ago

        I suspect they just didn’t like being on a network. Often, killing off the startup extensions (or whatever they were called) would improve their stability. It was 28 years ago…

        • HubertManne
          3•1 month ago

          I just remember it seemed like more often than not I would come to a windows machine in the lab and it would be in a bad state and I would restart it and it was fine and much less often I would encounter a mac in a bad state but a reboot would not bring it back and I would have to bring it to the attention of the support person on shift.

          • @I_Miss_DanielEnglish
            2•1 month ago

            Could be.

            I think what I didn’t like was they often simply froze. There was no error message, so you had to just try different things to see if you could get it stable.

            • HubertManne
              1•1 month ago

              were the windows error messages that useful. I mean im thinking of the blue screen garbage.

              • @I_Miss_DanielEnglish
                2•1 month ago

                If it implicated a driver or file, at least you had a clue to the cause and could search for it online.

          • originalucifer
            1•1 month ago

            i lived this same experience. it just seemed like the windows stuff was more resilient not to mention modular. early apple/mac OS felt very monolithic