Mac OS 8 / 9

How were these versions? Not to meme but they look "comfy", like most of the retro OS from this era I guess.

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Hardware support was shit. People jumped the ship when osx came up.
Nothing bad about it besides that.

extremely comfy
the key commands feel so right and most of the software has that homebrew feel

I love OS8/OS9. Wish they were a bit easier to emulate - bloody PPC!

can you run in this a virtual machine or something?

whats the most modern hardware you can run os9 on

You should try OS9 just as a historical lesson, because compared to OS9 all 3 modern OSs are the same. It feels different, kinda simpler, even down to the way the file browser works.

The idea was that to the user, the icon *is* the file, so instead of opening the file browser program, you start by eg. opening the hard drive icon. (It does of course have shortcuts, but they're clearly distinguished from regular files.)

Simple didn't mean dumb, apparently, because the user isn't prevented from modifying the System Folder. It's pretty clear what you should or shouldn't mess with, and it actually takes quite a lot to make the system unbootable.

Also, its multitasking was designed for the program on top to get almost all the system resources, meaning switching windows to another program takes a few moments. Some people say it helped them focus.

On Mac, it can be emulated with Sheepshaver. There might be one for Windows, but idk the name.

Greatest os of all time. The system was easy to use and very intelligent.

Unstable if you mess with extensions.

>You should try OS9 just as a historical lesson, because compared to OS9 all 3 modern OSs are the same.

Is this unique to OS9 or would you say this about similar OS' from the era like IRIX or Win95/98?

Apple was always utter fucking trash.

Damn, mac os 9 could get errors? That's really unique to apple and definitely not something I have seen in any other operating system.

>no memory protection
That might have been okay in 1985. In 2000, much less so.

Even Windows got memory protection in 1990. One might argue about how well it worked until NT came around for most people, but sure worked better than nothing.

>three decades
What does this refer to?

>It's pretty clear what you should or shouldn't mess with, and it actually takes quite a lot to make the system unbootable.
You clearly never used classic MacOS. The lack of protected memory and system extensions frequently made the system unbootable.

>Also, its multitasking was designed for the program on top to get almost all the system resources
It was called preemptive multitasking and was a horrible feature for its age. For example you couldnt do anything on your computer while you were burning a CD or you would get buffer under runs.

Whats this about protected memory

If a process tried to write to memory address it does not own on a system will protected memory, the process will crash. If it does the same on a system without protected memory, other processes or the enter system can crash.

tl;dr: software bugs would take down the entire system or corrupt data in other programs.

agreed

how well do these old os' handle modern web browsing?

they look nice to use but all the screenshots are always just terminals or system settings windows. I imagine everything runs like ass trying to run the "modern" web.

Someone exaggerating the lifecycle of Mac OS Classic. They used what was essentially the same core OS for 17 years, from 1984 to 2001. Of course they added all sorts of shit on top of the old kernel, which is why crashes became common as time passed.

Good luck finding a browser that will still support any OS older than a decade or so. You'll have to use an old version. Even then, you'll be lucky to load something as simple as Sup Forums without some serious difficulties.

True, I never used OS9 when it was current. I bought an old original imac out of curiosity, and learned a fair bit about OS9 in the process of getting it working.

If I remember correctly, it should remain bootable as long as System Rom and Finder are in the right places. (And the bootloader can actually search for a misplaced System Rom, within reason.) Deleting system things would of course be a problem. But if you mess with extensions, you can always hold down a key (shift?) to open extension manager at the start of boot.

Unfortunately I don't know anything about IRIX. Win95 doesn't feel as weird to me because I got used to it when it was new, but maybe I should revisit it.

netscape can browse Sup Forums but not post and the formatting is off.

Sad.

>If I remember correctly, it should remain bootable as long as System Rom and Finder are in the right places.
The system ROM was an actual chip. I think you're talking about the system file. Tehy are different things. The system ROM was the way Apple kept unlicensed clones from entering the market.

>But if you mess with extensions, you can always hold down a key (shift?) to open extension manager at the start of boot.
Shift disabled all extensions. Space was the extension manager key, and that only appeared in later versions of MacOS.

And even then you go to spend an hour or two performing a binary search to try to determine which extension was causing the issue.

Even the thumbnails on Sup Forums are too much for any browser that runs on OS9. I think I was able to load Sup Forums with js and images disabled, but it struggled and I certainly couldn't post.
On the other hand, it was nice to see that homestarrunner.com hasn't changed a bit, and still works fine.

Easy and intuitive to use, weak performance but more stable than Win-shit.

Attractive OS.

Also programming in it was a nightmare. Old versions of MacOS used pascal strings everywhere, latter versions used C strings. You often had to convert strings from one format to another.

Since most people here dont know what pascal strings are. The first byte specifies the length of the string, and the remainder are the data. As a result for some APIs you couldnt pass a string longer than 255 characters.

And callbacks, callbacks everywhere in the Carbon API. Everything is done with passing function pointers for callbacks.

Classilla?

And does anyone remember pic related? Before the PCfags came in and ruined everything with banner clicking?

QEMU now emulates OS 9/9.1/9.2

emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=7047&sid=8e04590813c32bd67f4ec718f8219a54&start=1850

Sheepshaver was ported to NT a while back.

macOS did not have preemptive multitasking until 2001, it was cooperative (like legacy Windows 1.0-3.11, Win9x/Me-not running Win32s)

when macs started having colors, they looked pretty good

the only serious (for me) flaw I ever found was no automatic icon alignment

the folder icons in the OP are probably the best folder icons i have ever seen

yeah got terms mixed up

>How were these versions? Not to meme but they look "comfy", like most of the retro OS from this era I guess.
Best OS of the era. Only problem was multitasking. But that didn't matter as much as you'd think since CPUs of that era were all slow shit not worth multitasking hard.

>the only serious (for me) flaw I ever found was no automatic icon alignment
Icon management sucked shit on those things, damn. There was nothing more annoying than dragging and dropping into a folder, opening it and finding that it had been placed in the middle of buttfuck nowhere on top of some other shit where you had to scroll out the ass to find it.

Not as comfy as IRIX, which you can't emulate at all right now. All of my PPC Macs with the exception of one are running some version of OS X.

It's very easy to emulate. What are you talking about?

You can run it on some of the older iBooks actually, but it requires modding the boot firmware for some of them. As far as virtual machines go it works fine in this thing called SheepShaver. I've tested it on Windows 7, OS X Sierra (needs the updated wrapper), and on Debian 9 and it works well. I've also tried it in QEMU and it seems to work better in that for some stuff and I think I'll be moving to that eventually.

This also happened with XP and is still happening with some shitty GNU/Linux distros (cough cough Arch and Ubuntu).

Pretty fucking poorly. I have a hard time finding browsers that support 32-bit Windows XP anymore. There's a site called Nekochan which is where I get software for IRIX. They have a section for Apple/NeXT stuff that you might want to look around in. I personally haven't spent my time on it because it isn't all that useful when I can just minimize the VM and fire up a new version of Firefox or Chromium.

>no automatic icon alignment
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

>needing to emulate PPC
Just get a $20 powermac g4 for the authentic feel

>>needing to emulate PPC
Emulation is future-proof. Hardware is not.

Alright, I switched over to one of my FagBooks. Here's a screenshot of one of my SheepShaver VMs with freshly installed Mac OS 9. I only changed the wallpaper and turned off virtual memory because it makes it slower on this for whatever reason. Full screen doesn't work well on OS X either so if you want to full screen the OS 9 VM then use SheepShaver on Windows 7 (doesn't work on some versions of XP).

>The lack of protected memory and system extensions frequently made the system unbootable.
This is a pervasive problem in older operating systems. Welcome to IT two decades ago. Windows' advantage was the variety and cost of software available. Apple's advantage was the security and stability inherent. That isn't to say you could not built a secure and stable Windows system, or a (relatively) cheap Mac with a varied software library, but you tended to sacrifice what made the chosen platform enticing to begin with.

And yeah, today it's a meaningless distinction. Using a Thinkpad vs. using a Macbook Pro is the distinction between a "city driving" car and a luxury car. Status, feel, comfort, hands on vs. hands off, etc. They do the same damn thing, it's just your budget and the concessions you're willing to make—in terms of what the machine can do and how comfy it is to use, both.

>Welcome to IT two decades ago.
I worked in IT 2 decades ago.

> Apple's advantage was the security and stability inherent
Not really, any of their security produces like AtEase were entirely laughable. And there were plenty of viruses and other malware which targeted classic MacOS.

>The idea was that to the user, the icon *is* the file, so instead of opening the file browser program, you start by eg. opening the hard drive icon. (It does of course have shortcuts, but they're clearly distinguished from regular files.)
Same goes for OSX. Actually, that's part of the Unix-Philosophy. Yeah, i know, Pre-OSX MacOS wasn't *nix.

Mac OS classic didn't even have a command line

They were comfy when I was 7. Now, looking back on it, it was worse than Windows ME. Hardware support was nonexistant and the kernel extensions were half assed.

Keep in mind that OS 8/9 occurred during Jobs's exile, so this stuff is to be expected.

The whole point of the operating system's existence was that it didn't need one. If you wanted one, there was the MPW, CodeWarrior or shit like MachTen that provided that functionality.

>The whole point of the operating system's existence was that it didn't need one
Not him but this is retarded. Anyone who does any serious software development is going to need the command line at one point or another. It's a useful tool and any OS without it is just a toy OS.

That's why the MPW and CodeWarrior included one. Did you read the post?

I remember we had this OS in my elementary school on those big all-in-one colorful Mac's back in 2008. These things ran Internet Explorer.

We also had those white Macbook's with OS Leopard for more advanced software.

>Did you read the post?
Yes. A terminal emulator will be built into any OS that isn't a toy OS. Did you read my post?

>my elementary school
>back in 2008
How old are you, 12?

He could be 8 or 19 if he was in 5th grade in 2008

*18

one word: comfy