You are responding to something a couple of years after it was posted, so this is not something that folks will readily gravitate to.

In saying that, there was never a Mac OS 9.5.4. As I recall, the last shipping version was 9.2.2.

As to issues with Mac OS X: none of this seems to amount to anything other than the fact that some things simply changed, since there the concept of system extensions is mostly nonexistent. There are kernel extensions in Mac OS X, but they normally don’t present all those incompatibilities of the Classic Mac OS.

Peace,
Gene

It’s been 4 years since I have been “forced” to use X, and during those 4 years it’s been very difficult and frustrating to accept. One of the most disturbing and backward changes would have to be the “Extensions Folder” not to mention the “System Preferences?” I mean come on Steve, what kind of Crack Pot programmers do you got going on back there? When I first installed X, I was thrilled by the new Look, but when it came down to the feel of it? I feel like the little “Beach Ball” that wouldn’t stop spinning in the first release Half the options in the “Finder” have been left behind or never adopted…. Plus, is it just me or has my sense of timing been a little off since Classic? I may be overdoing it by say this, but if any of you remember System 6.0.3 then you will also remember that since then and up until 9.5.4, I’d say that everything, with the exception of sometimes emptying the trash was on time, and right down to the second! While PC users weren’t really sure when that XP install was gonna be done….. But while I could go on and on about neXt, I would like to say; Welcome, to “Alex” The much anticipated arrival since “Vicky” and lets not forget “Fred” who have stuck with us through the very beginning of 7.
God Bless this ‘Mac’
(-;

I know I am a bit late for this thread but I have to comment.

I have used Classic since 1995, I loved it. About a year and a half ago I made the switch to Tiger and invested in a new iMac G5 after my old iMac G3 bit the dust. I appreciated the fact that Apple left OS9 on Tiger for the converts and this was why I thought it wouldn’t be to hard to upgrade. I was wrong. It was a culture shock and I really struggled to make the transition, certain applications I really relied upon no longer worked properly inside the ‘Classic’ environment: Strata 3D would glitch out. I had to install about three different versions of Stuffit Expander just to get it back on Mac. SoundJam MP no longer functioned as it should since its engine had been utilised by iTunes (not to mention Core Audio fought it all the way).

Norton Utilities could not even be used to run maintenance on Classic and frankly I had, (and still don’t) trust Disk Utilities with it’s obscure Disk Permissions jargon and Maintenance scripts that really don’t give me any idea what’s going on. (Linux jargon is not what I want from a Mac). Call me paranoid but I don’t use Disk Warrior or Tech Tool either for fear of contradicting OS X. Reluctantly I handed over control to OS X and just had to live with it. I just don’t find it to be transparently obvious like OS 9.

I agree that the File Structure in OS X is inflexible, I found I was literally tearing my hair out with frustration, I realise the benefits of this for multiple users, but I am the only user on my Mac, and resent having to conform to using a File system purpose built for Multiple users.

Oh yeah, I won’t even get started on unreliable Internet connections, although these have been improved upon with susequent updates.

Now I have been living with OS X for about 16 months, and although I have managed to work around most of it’s bugbears, i’m still not completley satisfied. Yes it is faster, yes it does multi-task, yes it is better for browsing, but it still is not 100% stable, and I still occasionally recieve kernel panics. Also, being a former Classic Mac user I still loathe the interface (Dock=ARRRGHH) and hate the fact that the Apple menu no longer serves the same purpose as it used to.

The fact is that I still need OS9 for programs that I cannot afford to upgrade, but even if I could afford them, there are still programs like Fontographer that are still unavailable natively in OS X, and I find my workflow is severly hampered when I need to use both, (although in fairness dragging and dropping images and text from classic to X and vise versa works brilliantly).

I’m not saying OS 9 is perfect, it did crash sometimes, although I did manage to stabilise it somewhat on the last release (OS 9.2.2). I had every program setup to use the right amount of memory, I had a definitive set of Control Panels and Extensions, and drivers that actually worked as they should for things like printers. The classic environment would be fine but in my experience the chooser in classic mode struggles to find my printer, my prefered screen resolution does not render graphics correctly or refresh, it just feels like bad emulation. In my opinion the only programs that really seem to work well under it are Photoshop, Illustrator and Freehand.

I realise I cannot go back to the good ol’ days when Classic was king, but in a way things would have been much easier if I’d just bought a Mac that could dual boot.

“If software development for OS 9 hadn’t stopped abruptly 2 years ago or so, I would probably still be using it.”

Me too . . . and happily.

Although it’s stable for me, I personally don’t like using Classic mode in OS X much because the Classic programs don’t fit in well with the rest of the system (then again, I’m very picky about my computer environment). That’s what’s so great about Mac OS 9, though: there’s a lot of potential for things to go wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s very easy to learn what to do when every system file has a name like “USB Extension.” Mac OS 9 had horrible multitasking, but it was very easy to maintain. I always felt completely secure when using it. It’s also a single-user OS, which is a plus for me because I don’t share my computer and having a multi-user system requires a lot more complexity and makes the file hierarchy less flexible. If software development for OS 9 hadn’t stopped abruptly 2 years ago or so, I would probably still be using it.

And yes, I miss the Chooser too.

Me, personally, I do use Tiger. At least for web surfing that needs better, bug-free (or bug-less) security. For everything else, there’s OS 9. The third-party build of Mozilla runs nicely, it’s stable enough for me, and my SNES emulator just runs smoother. If that sounds weird, so be it. But I’m happy, and productive, and that’s what the Mac is, ideally, all about. Isn’t it?

Happy hacking.

Steve

I’m a long-time PowerBook user who started in the days of OS 7. Of all the ‘Classic’ variations I have used, 8.1 was STILL my fave — I used it for eight years straight. But I digress. Having moved forward to a new PowerBook late last summer, I still make very good use of Classic. I don’t know what others are beefing about . . . I don’t experience those crashes or freezes and I run some pretty old stuff. Remember Claris Impact 2.0 (ca.1995)? Works just fine — like in a ‘Classic only’ machine. I also run antique versions of Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator. NO problems at all (I’m in a non-collaborative environment as a sole creator, so I can get away with this stuff). Personally, I think those who are having issues with Classic 9 had better clean out their prefs or have another look at their extensions. Gene asks “Do you miss the Chooser?”. Yeh, it always worked well for me. Honestly. Now for the record, I am using a G4 12″ PowerBook 1.5 ghz with 512 megs of RAM and 10.4.6, and, oh yes, Classic. I also have a ‘mirror’ G4 12″ iBook 1.3ghz doing the same with the same. I just don’t understand the negative attitude towards the Classic environment. To me, the brilliant thing about OSX is the ability to seemlessly run Classic 9 so smoothly and reliably. Now if Apple would only fix their messed up File Mapping in OSX . . .

From 10.4 on, Mac OS X can only make file sharing connections (AFP, SMB, or whatever) over TCP/IP, and not over AppleTalk. I had my Power Mac G4 (running 10.3) connected to my Mac IIsi (running 7.1) over AppleTalk for a long time, but when I upgraded the G4 to 10.4, that compatibility was broken. Here’s how the Apple Knowledge Base describes the situation (head over to http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106461#atalk for more information):

“The Network preference pane in Mac OS X 10.4 and later still offers the AppleTalk checkbox, but it is for browsing AppleTalk-advertised resources and zones. The subsequent connection must be over TCP/IP.”

Apple made 10.4 incapable of file sharing over AppleTalk for no reason, which has gotten me upset, too. With 10.3, I was running a fine AppleTalk network, and then, with no warning, 10.4 was missing that feature. Before anyone says it, this is not the same issue as USB ports in the iMac, or dropping floppy drives. Doing those things gave Apple an advantage in hardware design, but what did they have to gain by cutting this little bit of software from the system?

To throw in my two cents on the original topic, I’ve been using Mac OS X most of the time for about two and a half years (since December 2003). Before then I had an iMac, and I played with every version of OS X from 10.0 to 10.2 on it, but none of them satisfied me enough in interface or performance to switch. Then I got a Power Mac G4 which came with 10.3 (although it’s one of the Summer 2003 models that can boot OS 9), and I decided to stick with it after making some modifications. However, I still miss Mac OS 9, and I think OS X lacks its polish, speed, and good interface. It took me a while to tweak the OS X interface to roughly approximate OS 9, and it’s still not really there. OS 9 was more than stable enough for me, although the improved multitasking in OS X has been useful. I considered switching the G4 back to OS 9 a few times, but for some reason, OS 9 doesn’t recognize the special buttons on my Japanese keyboard, I want to use recent versions of iTunes, and the selection of web browsers doesn’t offer much. Overall, OS X works well for me, but I think Apple has hurt itself by releasing 10.0 with such a horrible interface (wasting programming effort on making a gaudy skin instead of improving the interface and leaving the appearance alone), and forcing itself to play catch up with OS 9 from 2001. The interface in Mac OS 9 runs circles around the one in Mac OS X.

I started my switch from Windows in 2002 when I entered art school and was required to have a Mac laptop (in my case a 667 DVI TiBook, later upped to 867 as an apology from Apple when it fried its second logic board). After getting used to Jaguar, I eventually started to see what all the Mac fuss was about in how things were simpler and more intuitive. My favorite example is drag and drop installation for anything that doesn’t need to hook into the OS. I was using OS 9 only for Quark Xpress through Classic and hated it, though I wasn’t sure how much could be attributed to Quark itself and/or Classic.

My first experience using OS 9 full time came in 2004 after I graduated and got my current job. It still continues. Before, using it in classic, I hated OS 9. Now I REALLY hate OS 9. I can see how some of the straightforwardness of things I saw in OS X was even more present in 9, but this doesn’t begin to make up for its shortcomings. There is no true multitasking, when Quark has to save a large file out to our RIP as an EPS, I might as well take break because I’ve seen the system go unresponsive for as long as 10 mintues from doing that (for the record, a Quicksilver 733 with 384mb of memory, no slouch). Then there’s the memory management. I’m sure this preallocation thing was brilliant on a machine with 128k of memory, but at this point it’s ridiculous to be getting “Out of Memory” errors, especially when according to the About This Computer window I have tons free. Why can’t I at least have a Virtual Memory system that works well enough to actually turn on? Also, none of the memory is protected, which means errant apps (*ahem* Quark) can spew all over ring 0 and down the whole thing goes. I have disabled every unneccessary extension I can find, and try to run as few apps as possible and still have trouble keeping the thing going all day without some horrific crash.

My biggest gripe though is the web browser situation. There is no good choice. All around, I use iCab 2.9.8. iCab 3 will not load a page without crashing. WaMCom has almost modern rendering abilities but is slow and has a knack for taking out the whole system.

This is really what makes a computer system old and unusable – compatibility with the rest of the world. Of course if a computer still does the job you need it for it’s still useful, but as a full time all purpose system OS 9 is hopelessly out of date. Many web pages (including this one) load strangely, or just flat out don’t work. I’ve had photographers bring their cameras to me and I wind up downloading the photos on my laptop with Tiger because OS 9 is incompatible. Every time some piece of equipment fails around here IT goes through this huge song and dance of “Oh no, can we get one that still works with 9?” I’m constantly getting files emailed from clients that I have to dump over to my laptop to open and convert into something our old software can use.

Honestly, by the time Windows 95 came out, the Mac OS was technologically ancient. Improvements that computer users began to take for granted were still not available to the Mac until OS X in 2001. The system of tweaks, extensions, 3rd party utilities and flat out hacks it took to keep the classic OS at all viable as long as it was is a testament to the cleverness of the Mac’s engineers, developers and users. However, the only way to really fix things was to do exactly what Apple did and throw the whole thing out and start over. It was just too convoluted to fix (I think Windows is now in that same boat).

I do not recommend OS 9 to anyone at this point, unless you have substantial monetary investment in its software. OS X may have complex underpinnings that you have to deal with as a power user, but average users will never delve into it anyway. OS X is plenty easy to use once you acclimate to it, just as I had to coming from Windows (which now seems horribly clunky to the point that I dread sitting in front of it). OS X didn’t just improve functionality in Internet and multimedia, it’s across the board. Handling of how the screen is drawn, how type is displayed, providing uniform interface widgets (how many wait cursors have I seen in OS 9 anyway?). If OS 9 still functions for certain tasks you need, wonderful. More power to you and your Plus webserver or whatever you’re up to. For anything that needs to go out and take in any kind of data from current computers, you need to be on X. For any computer you need to keep running for long periods under heavy load, or run multiple tasks, you seriously should consider X. My TiBook hasn’t even had 9 on it for almost a year, and the MacBook I bought this week (bought because the Ti chokes on some h.264 playback, especially in MKV containers) obviously can’t run 9. I’ve never had a situation where I’ve said “Man, I wish I could use Classic.”

Douglas P. McNutt: OS X does work with AppleTalk over Ethernet. My G4 is hooked up to a beige G3 running 9.1 via Ethernet.
(only works while booted into Panther though, but I have several hard disks).

[...] The equally esteemed Gene Steinberg, asks similar questions about the viability of Mac OS 9 in his article The Tiger Report: A Memo to Mac OS 9 Users. Like Charles Moore, Mr. Steinberg is a long time Mac OS user. Through their respective outlets, I gather both writers are very familiar with the ins and out of the Mac OS. While neither represent themselves as code junkies or programming inclined in the least, I will make a long distance determination that both are power users. Judging from their writing and in the case of Gene, his audio work as well, both spend a good amount of time tweaking, testing, and optimizing their respective work flows. By such usage, learning much along the way about the different versions of the Mac OS. [...]

The Appletalk that is found in System Preferences / Network / Built In Ethernet *Configure* / Appletalk / Tick “Make Appletalk Active.”

“That Appletalk?”

+++

It’s there all right, but have you ever managed to connect to a classic Mac running Appletalk through Ethernet? I sure can’t connect my Mac SE/30 with my Tiger-iBook any longer!

I have the 20″ iMac as well, only the slightly older 2.1GHz G5 model, and I agree, the screen is just stunning (its also very fast).

I have a B&W G3 that has Mac OS 9.2.2 installed because it has two software programs namely toast 5.2.1 (DO NOT UPDATE TO 5.2.2 btw) which burns bootable cds, as well as a web site optomization tool that has not seen it’s equal on Mac OS X to date. Also I have a lot of games that only run on Mac OS 9. My B&W G3 has 1gb ram and a 900 mhz G3 upgrade cpu with a radeon 7000 video card as well and a few extra usb ports on a pci card. add a firewire drive, two internal drives, and it runs Panther 10.3.9 nicely too. So it is a very useful machine and thanks I’ll keep it. I also have a beige G3 that is stored away until and unless I need to use it.
I do not recommend Mac OS 9 unless there is software you absolutely can not do without, or are a legacy user. However I also recommend upgrading to Mac OS X for any desktop publishing or video editing or other high end needs even for use of Microsoft Office. Everything just runs very very well on OS X with the occasional hang but no more “crashes”. Thus I fully use Mac OS X 99.9% of the time, but there is the occasional need for OS 9.

My two other machines are a Mac Mini 1.42 ghz running tiger as well as a NEW 20 inch iMac 2ghz INTEL with 256mb vram option on the radeon x1600 video gpu. It is absolutely super!! Fast fast fast. the 20 inch screen is gorgeous!!! Everyone should get a new 20 inch iMac its stunning!!!

“Tiger will not connect to my older Macs because AppleTalk over Ethernet was purposely disabled.”

The Appletalk that is found in System Preferences -> Network -> Built In Ethernet *Configure* -> Appletalk -> Tick “Make Appletalk Active”

That Appletalk?