My little misadventure with an errant Mac OS 9 boot partition has allowed me this chance to step back and reconsider my computer lifestyle. Circa 2003, I was a devout Mac OS X convert, coming from a long 11 year run with the classic Mac OS. I wanted to know everything about this fantastic new powerful and stable incarnation of the Mac OS.

Although I stuck with 10.2 Jaguar, even after both 10.3 Panther and 10.4 Tiger were introduced, I never really felt left behind. Sure, most recent versions of Apple software (iLife, iWork, Safari, and Mail for a few good examples) were not available to us lowly Jaguar users. Which is where the many fantastic third party Mac software developers were willing to pick up the slack when it came to supporting older versions of Mac OS X.

THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST
Somewhere along the way between 2003 and 2005, I started falling back in love with the classic Mac OS. I would suppose the old passions started rekindling when I acquired a never used LC 580 back in the late summer of 2003. Even the stock configuration provided me with a a system which was considerably more powerful than my first Mac, an LC II.

When released in 1995, the LC 580 was a slightly inferior followup to the excellent LC 575, with an ATA hard drive and shadow-mask display instead of a SCSI hard drive and sharp Trinitron tube in the latter. Over the long haul, the LC 580 may have proven the better compromise. I prefer the LC 580 because of the low cost of adding a big ATA hard drive, the increased RAM capacity, and the greater amount of upgrade slots. Between this Mac and a Power Mac 7300 also acquired in 2003, I had two really nice older Mac systems. I definitely spent too much money upgrading the 7300. Faster processor, more RAM, bigger hard drive, ATA card, USB/FireWire card, lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Something is clearly odd about that sentence. The motherboard eventually took an early retirement, but parting the system out enabled me to recoup a good portion of the upgrade money and overall I had fun learning about older PowerPC Macs.

The LC 580 was also a willing recipient to my upgrade fervor, but I stretched the process over two years, 2003 to 2005, and the project was merely a $5 here, $10 there hobby. In the beginning I did not abandon Mac OS X, instead continuing to happily operate within Mac OS 10.2 on a fairly modern duo — 466MHz Graphite iBook SE (purchased new from a private party in 2001) and a 500MHz Snow iMac G3 DV SE (purchased new from the Apple online store in early fall 2000). While I spent some time running Mac OS X on the Power Mac 7300, I spent most of the time within Mac OS 9.1. I found Mac OS 8.1 to be a nice system for the LC 580. This mixture of different Mac OS versions allowed me to learn more about both Mac hardware and software configurations than I ever though possible way back in the early years of System 7 and the LC II.

The more I experienced working with older Mac software and hardware, the more time I poured into finding the optimal solutions for each system. During times when I had enough space, I would acquire any and every local Mac which was released during or before early 2001. Generally, I would flip the more valuable systems (Blue and White G3s, early Power Mac G4s, Beige G3s, iMacs, and the occasional Mac laptop) for a small profit to help subsidize the time and effort spent acquiring and testing these systems. I made enough to get me by, but clearly this was no full time endeavor. At least from a monetary standpoint, obviously my addiction; er, fascination with these older systems was only growing. So much did this fascination expand, my duo of Jaguar powered Macs ended up being sent elsewhere. My G3 iMac was now my mother’s primary system and the G3 iBook was sold to a fellow out in Arizona or some other southwestern state in this grand union.

ALMOST OS X FREE, BUT ALONG CAME A SWIFT KICK IN THE PANTS
Consequence of this new found addiction were an almost total abandonment of OS X for around 12 to 18 months. I knew I could not continue using my hodgepodge of older Macs forever. Yet, I was getting enjoyment and a surprisingly high amount of productivity from this collection — two LC IIs, LC 580, G3 upgraded Power Mac 7600, Blue and White Power Mac G3, PowerBook 520c, and PowerBook 1400c. My computing experience was sublime. Even when bad things happened, I ended up in a better situation. E.g. Power Mac 7600 CD-ROM drive goes bad, no problem, I received a free Blue and White Power Mac G3.

Until that fateful day almost one month ago in early June 2006. Formerly working so well for my mother, my old iMac started to behave inconsistently. The modem refused to maintain a connection longer than a few minutes at a time. My mom explained the symptoms to me and I figured no problem, I would be the hero riding to the rescue on the shining white horse named “Macs never die because their TCO is so much better than those other computers”. Regardless of passing the hardware diagnostic tests, there was clearly something wrong with the modem. The modem did not function correctly with any phone jack, phone cord, presence or absence of the call waiting enabling Catch-a-Call, whether dialing from OS 9 or X, any modem script, or ISP phone number. I was flummoxed but not altogether surprised. After all, the iMac had given 5 and a half years of mostly trouble free service. Things happy, systems eventually break down. The iMac was certainly worth its price of entry back in year 2000.

Down, but not out, I tapped the Low End Mac Swap list for a Keyspan Twin Serial Adapter. This fantastic little device allows older Mac serial devices (except those needing LocalTalk) to connect to newer Macs. Arriving for $10 shipped to the front door, I downloaded the drivers and connected a very reliable v.92 56k Global Village serial modem. Things went well, and a little under a week later, maybe five days total, hello LEM Swap list and two 512MB RAM modules are purchased to give the iMac breathing room. 10.2.8 was a little heavy on the installed 256MB and the bump to 1GB should make a nice improvement. Not to mention I was on the hunt for a set of Panther Install discs. Another 5 day time span and the LEM Swap list served me another reasonably priced success. Together, the three investments set me back $134, but I figured I made a wise move if these upgrades would allow my mom to wring at least another year from the iMac. She certainly loves the nice all-in-one simplicity of the G3 iMac and the neutral snow coloration helps it look at home with any room’s decor.

Everything is settled then, I am clearly to remain a classic Mac OS junkie, yet enacted forthwith was the “nothing is ever fixed that easy you dimwit” law. A little over one week later the infamous Blue and White G3 data corruption issue occurred. More than a little peeved, I did not hesitate to express my frustration to any and every person who was unlucky enough to pass within distance to my griping. One such poor victim happened to be my mother who suggested I make the move to a modern computer and cut some of my legacy ties. Not a bad suggestion, but to a Mac addict like myself, this would be tantamount to asking my lungs to stop drawing in air. Good luck. I sputter in protest to the merits of working with my creaky old systems and hardware. I attempted to relay something akin to how a G3 iMac like my mother’s would suit my needs just fine and there happened to be a slightly older iMac DV SE available for only $30. Always the prudent one, my mom shifts gears. She suggests purchasing a new computer, maybe a Mac, maybe not. She would leave it up to me suggest a suitable replacement. I could use her recently upgraded and repaired G3 iMac (yes, my old iMac).

OBSOLETERRIFIC
I took that weekend to compare options and by monday I had the perfect replacement — a refreshed 1.33GHz 12″ iBook G4 at the low price of $629 out the door. The local Apple Store obliged and now my mom had a much newer computer than I have ever owned. For almost two weeks now, not only have I been getting to know a G3 iMac running Panther, but now I have the chance to run a Tiger equipped system through it’s paces while awaiting replacement software install discs. I prefer to do a clean install after acquiring any system, new, used, or somewhere in between. Hard to do without the install discs, hence the wait for AppleCare to come through with the replacements. While the iBook G4 is considered by many to be obsolete technology with the arrival of the vastly superior latest and greatest from Apple, the new MacBook in this case, I think it fits the bill nicely for my mother. The iBook is small, very quiet, except for the fairly noisy optical drive, and blends in nicely with any room’s decor. Very soon, my mother will get to have a fully configured and customized Tiger system, just as soon as those replacement discs come her way.

Having tasted the stability and power granted by Panther on the iMac and Tiger on the iBook, I do not want to go back to a mostly OS X free Mac environment. Before the shenanigans began, I originally intended to use this space to talk about how well Mac OS 9 and below continues to function and how I plan on sticking with it a little longer as my preferred Mac OS environment. I wanted to talk about how greatly my appreciation measured for the classic Mac OS and its adherence to interface coherence. How easy it is to troubleshoot extension conflicts once you understand the basics of what extensions are necessary components and those which can be safely deactivated. I would have mentioned how fast a Mac OS 9 machine booted and the general ability to operate with lower RAM requirements. 256MB still feels like a vast amount when running a few basic applications in Mac OS 9, yet 256MB is the minimal amount needed to run Mac OS 10.4. Dragging and dropping system folders or other folders for backup or transfer is nice to do without worrying about permission woes.

Unfortunately, the inherent instability and less than heroic uptime (start directing blame towards cooperative multi-tasking and lack of memory protection) coupled to the increasingly limited support from developers, means I am ready to move back to OS X as my primary Macintosh workspace. Not completely mind you. Those Macs with sufficient RAM and the appropriate software will run OS X. Older systems incapable of running OS X, the PearPC method does not count, can continue soldering on with the classic Mac OS. I’m still going to cut down on my legacy systems, but only because of issues surrounding time and space. Odd phrasing aside, I meant to imply the lack of enough storage space and/or time to keep every system running happily with a dedicated task or two, will cause some Macs to be redistributed elsewhere.

THINNING THE HERD AND SETTING A NEW DIRECTION
Say goodbye to the Blue and White G3, G3 upgraded Power Mac 7600, maybe one LC II, and maybe the PowerBook 1400c. If I could just get the accursed Global Village 56k/ethernet PC card to function with the 1400c, I would be overwhelmingly happy. The 1400c has a great active matrix display and superb feeling keyboard. I would hate to part company, but I need some easy networking options. Does anyone remember how slow serial networking was back in the old days? Well, I’m still there with this otherwise fantastic legacy Mac. If anyone is familiar with Mac OS 8.1 or 8.6, Global Village PC cards, and PowerBook 1400s, please drop me some information in the comments section or otherwise contact me. The LC 580 will continue to operate as a bedroom entertainment system and the PowerBook 520c still works nicely when I need basic text web browsing and a backup email machine. The LC II was my first Mac and I am not going to part with it after 14 years. I’ll find something to keep it busy. Maybe LocalTalk bridge to my ethernet network, especially handy if I decide to keep the PowerBook 1400c around. My current primary system will be the very same G3 iMac which introduced me to the modern Jobs’ Apple era six years ago. Now configured with 1GB RAM and Mac OS 10.3.9 instead of the original 256MB and Mac OS 9.0.4 from early fall 2000.

While I am not totally abandoning the various incarnations of the classic Mac OS, I am clearly prioritizing my Mac OS X systems. However, I am not totally sold on the Mac OS X way. Great system all around and I have no reason to even consider any version of Windows at this point. Yet, there is another path I am finding myself being inevitably drawn towards in my search for computing happiness.

Our trilogy is drawing ever closer to finality and many questions are still up in the air. What is the mysterious third article only briefly alluded to in Mac OS and I, Part One? What siren beckons from the shadows, hoping to entice our dashing protagonist to stray from his current path? Why did he enjoy organic macaroni and cheese for breakfast on this fine AppleSwitcher Photo Friday #12 morning? Just what answers will be revealed in the closing chapter, only the winds will know until the time strikes divine.

A SORDID CONSPIRACY?
Fully intending to continue the ongoing saga of my own personal Mac OS past, present, and future, I was resoundingly thwarted in this attempt. Unknown conspirators set forth their dastardly machinations and succeeded in not only delaying my contributions to AppleSwitcher, but completely restructured my computing hierarchy by unseating my reigning Macintosh.

I should have seen the downfall coming, hindsight clearly illuminating every deceitful step in this march towards betrayal. Alas, there is no patsy to hold aloft and take the blame for these delays and internal computing unrest. I was happily complicit in this coup, if unknowingly at the time, by allowing myself to grow overconfident with my troubleshooting prowess. I thought I could take any straggling Mac and after a suitable testing period, put these rehabilitated systems to productive use. Worse yet, I stopped maintaining my fully primed back up system in case I encountered a setback with the newly designated leader.

Sometimes the best laid plans fail most miserably. A “flaming ball of detriment cascading off a cliff” sort of failure. I had two, count them — one and two, articles ready to go when my boot partition went poof. Ironically enough, my boot partition stores my recent working files and I fully intended to back up the new work directly after finishing my download quota from eMusic.  Big sigh.  One of those, “What the hell am I supposed to do about it now?”, exhalations of air.  Oh my, this last week has been an interesting adventure and while the tale has not yet reached a wholly satisfactory conclusion, I think the culmination is near. I should further explain or else be found guilty of being overly cryptic with my writing.

IT BEGAN ONE WEEK AGO TO THE DAY
During the process of writing for AppleSwitcher and downloading music, my lovely Power Mac Blue and White G3 (rev 2) started throwing up random errors about problems from my data volume. I have one hard drive installed, a 120GB Seagate ATA drive. The Seagate is partitioned three ways — Mac OS 9, an OS 9.2.2 boot volume; Stash, a large chunk of the drive reserved for saving data; and Mac OS X, a currently empty volume awaiting installation of OS X. All volumes were formatted as HFS+ using the Disk Utility application found on the Mac OS 9.2.1 install disc.

I did not think much of the errors because Disk Utility on my boot drive reported nothing out of the ordinary and the errors stopped not long after. Maybe 30 minutes to an hour later the same errors started popping up, but now the problems were reported with my Mac OS 9 partition. Thinking the problem is likewise a false alarm, I didn’t do anything right away. When the error popped up for the second and third time, I scanned Mac OS 9 with Disk Utility. Not good. Errors are reported, but Disk Utility cannot do anything. Time to delve into my stash of legacy software utilities, but the system freezes before I can shutdown or restart.

Rebooting from my Mac OS 9.2.1 CD gives me a warning about the Mac OS X volume (currently empty) and I dismiss the prompt explaining how I can format an unrecognized volume (strangely not the OS X volume). More puzzling, the Mac OS 9 volume cannot mount, but the Stash and Mac OS X volumes check out fine according to Disk Utility. I pulled out an old Norton SystemWorks disc and tried booting from it. Good news finally. All my volumes were able to mount, but diagnostic software discovers a major problem on the Mac OS 9 boot volume. Not fully trusting anything named Norton, I decided to postpone the repair procedure until I could transfer all important user data to a backup FireWire drive. Everything proceeded smoothly until I experienced a system freeze before I could get to my articles and browser preferences. Not a good sign, but I figure things cannot get any worse.

NAY, A DAFT FOOL!
Clearly, I’m a gigantic moron who does not understand the nature of personal computers. Booting from either my SystemWorks disc or TechTool Deluxe disc causes the computer to freeze. Booting from my Mac OS 9.2.1 disc allows the Power Mac to boot, but I cannot mount the Mac OS 9 partition. Consequently, I could not rescue my articles nor browser preferences (bookmarks and other such niceties). Round and round I went until I realized the Cyclopean scale used to measure the excess of my ineptitude.

Anywho, I later discovered the data integrity issue, or lack thereof, was a concentrated problem centered within my preferences folder. Attempting to access the folder initiated the freeze during my initial data recovery session. Subsequent attempts to boot from the Systemworks disc would fail while opening up the windows from the first session, one of which was a window to my preferences folder. Yes, I realize I could have booted with all desktop windows closed (for the classic Mac OS only: on boot, hold down the option key), but I had not yet diagnosed the exact problem. I circumvented this whole bag of worms by simply booting from the Mac OS 9.2.1 CD, canceled the volume initialization prompt and proceeded with a minimal OS 9.2.1 on the currently empty Mac OS X partition.

Once the installation was completed, I booted into this fresh and clean system with success. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I went ahead and ran some tools off the Norton Systemworks CD. While I could not excise all the corruption on the Mac OS 9 partition, I was able to do enough to get it to mount. I swiftly backed up every last bit of data I needed and then shut down the Blue and White G3.  Here it continues to sit untouched as I decide how to proceed with this unit. Not wanting to risk further data corruption, I made up my mind to get back to work on one of my other computers, but which computer or computers would I choose. I dearly could use a thinning of the computer herd, but which systems should I relieve from duty. I have a few final decisions to make before I let my course of action be known to all.

I’M NOT DEAD, JUST IN COMPUTER PURGATORY, AND I CAN NEARLY SEE THE LIGHT.
Wow, edge of the seat excitement with shocking cliff hangers with every recent blog entry. While this article is a mere digression to explain my mysterious absence, part two not only serves to conclude this tangent, but also to continue the Mac OS and I series. Cutting this article into two parts will also serve to lesson the bleary eyed boredom inherent in reading someone prattle on about computer maintenance. All the fanciful word play in China, something’s not quite right with that declaration, cannot obscure the inherently limited audience for overly tech focused subject matter. I do try to make the whole shebang one grand adventure, so please stay tuned or the man behind the curtain, I mean great and powerful wizard will say mean things to mean and pluck out my nose hair.

Audible gasp from the audience and then silence. Cue darkness.

In the past couple weeks, three distinct articles, authored by three different individuals, posted on three separate websites have tickled my brain enough to prompt a nice blog entry or two, or even three on the subject. All three articles deal with the Mac OS on some level and strike me as particularly relevant to my own state of Mac OS use. The two articles I want to explore today both deal with what, if any, part Mac OS 9 continues to play in today OS X computing landscape.

The first article, Is Mac OS 9 Still a Player takes a nice look at the relevance of Mac OS 9 in today’s Mac OS X world. Written by Charles Moore, a long time Mac user and journalist, who draws the line of demarcation for OS with those Macs sporting at least a 500 MHz G3 processor and 512MB RAM. I would put forth my own experience with slower systems and Mac OS X to be slightly more accommodating to even older Macs. Anything with at least 256MB RAM and a G3 procesor will be okay for a less demanding user. Someone who only runs one or two simple applications at a time, such as an email client and a web browser, could get by with even an original 233 MHz Bondi Blue iMac. Similar vintage beige Power Mac G3’s are a more complex install because many features are marginalized or downright abandoned by Mac OS X. If you have one of these models, expect to do without the floppy drive or AV ports, and only tepid support for the onboard Rage video chipset. Obviously, the older the system the least likely OS X will run at an acceptable level without decent upgrades to the processor, RAM, hard drive, and/or video card.

If more demanding use is needed from an older system, maybe Mac OS 9.2.2 (or an even earlier version) would be the better operating system choice. Charles Moore and I seem to be in agreement here:
Charles Moore:

On the other hand, if you have a slower PowerPC Mac, I think OS 9.2.2 is still your optimum operating system choice - although in the case of 601 and 603 PowerPC Macs up to, say, 166 MHz, you’re probably better off running Mac OS 8.6 or even OS 8.1.

Case in point, my mother’s G3 iMac has a 500MHz G3 processor and 256MB RAM. I was the original owner of this iMac and when the system was purchased new back in the year 2000, 256MB seemed like all the RAM I would ever need. Mac OS 9 could concurrently run my web browser, email application, iTunes, AppleWorks, and later my preferred graphics suite, Canvas 8, and still have a little RAM left over. Sure, the old bugaboos, no memory protection or preemptive multitasking, would rear their ugly heads on occasion The system could become unresponsive while whatever task hogging the system would work itself out, or even freeze/crash the entire operating system. Yet, when I settled on my preferred applications, control panels, and system extensions, I could go a few days of heavy use without needing to reboot.

Fast forward to 2006 and the iMac is now called upon to perform comparatively simple operations, email and web browsing. Unfortunately, Charles is right about Mac OS 9 and earlier revisions lacking quality choices for web browsers.

Charles Moore:

It’s still very fast, and there are lots of excellent production programs like word processors and image editing software that run very satisfactorily for serious work, but the biggest shortcoming of OS 9 now is the lack of a really satisfactory and up to date browser, and no major email clients are still being developed for the classic OS. With Eudora 6.1 or, if you must, Outlook Express 5.2 still available for Classic, the latter is not a big problem yet, but the browser issue is.

I do think the iCab 3.0 betas are very good and have many advanced features to give any browser a fun for its money. Unfortunately, the development process has not yet concentrated on rendering speed and iCab 3.0 feels noticeably slower than other modern browsers. The limitations of the classic Mac OS can exacerbate the feeling of slowness when the system momentarily freezes while some complex AJAX website is slowly being untangled. The other web browsers mentioned by Charles Moore are WaMCom (a Mac port of Mozilla 1.3.1, note there is also an alternative port as well) and Internet Explorer 5.1.7, all of which are decent enough under the circumstances.  With email software, I think there is still a decent selection of applications capable of handling most needs. Maybe not in the league of OS X, but my preferred email client for all my 68k and PPC Macs is SweetMail, which still does everything I need it to do except for IMAP support.  For more on web browsing options, feel free to browse the links from my Embracing Obsolescence profile (the earliest articles are the ones your after).

I cannot argue against all the improvements OS X has given to the Mac community. Clearly, the transition from OS 9 has proven a great boon for Mac users. One of two major improvements over the classic Mac OS is the way Mac OS X handles memory. Once upon a time, great swathes of RAM could, and often did, sit unused while awaiting manual memory allocation. Virtual memory was an on/off proposal and had to be manually allocated when turned on. With the current Mac OS, users can enjoy the stability gained from a much more robust memory management system. OS X is a great cat and your memory is the prey. Given this odd analogy, this great cat will hunt down every last byte of available RAM and every running task, whether created by the operating system or a running application, will be properly fed. No more quitting an application, selecting “Get Info” to manually allocate memory, and then restarting the application. Once we Mac users diligently quit applications in reverse order from startup to avoid fracturing the already precarious manually allocated memory blocks. With Mac OS X, users launch and quit applications willy nilly. These newcomers don’t understand our old Mac tricks and they want to act like monday doesn’t follow sunday. Okay, even I am at a loss with that bit of verbal tomfoolery.

No more do we have to suffer through random crashes caused by a lack of allocated memory, although the spinning beachball does rear its ugly head in OS X, especially when physical RAM is under 512MB. Maybe the great cat analogy is not so awful, because Mac OS X is a hungry beast and will gladly devour as much RAM you toss its way. Better monitor those pageouts, if you have more pageouts than pageins, it may be time to pop in some more RAM. Opening OS X’s Terminal and typing top will give you the data you need about memory usage.

The other major element lacking in the old Mac OS was preemptive multitasking, which is key for allowing Mac OS X to continue chugging on when multiple applications are vying for attention. Ever the responsible parent, OS X listens to all the various running tasks screaming look at me, look at me, yet deftly maneuvers back and forth between each demand, allowing all the applications to continue playing well together. As the responsible parent, OS X know the value of sharing system resources. While iTunes is busy burning a CD, switching over to Safari and browsing eMusic for more music to download should flow nicely without a noticeable pause.

With the old cooperative multitasking model used by the classic Mac OS, things sort of worked the same. While burning a CD with Audion (actually, Audion passed that baton over to Toast), switch over to iCab and start browsing through eMusic for more music to download. Dollars to donuts (if only I knew what half the phrases I throw out there really meant), a series of pauses, some minor and some annoyingly long, will interrupt your workflow. Where OS X is the responsible parent, the classic Mac OS is the bad babysitter unable or unwilling to cope properly with the demands from itself and other applications. It’s lackadaisical response to sharing system resources does not carry the same authority as governed by the responsible parent’s demands. This condition is best illustrated by this very simple test. If you click and hold the mouse button on some pull down menu, popup menu, or other action, the whole operating system grinds to a halt until you complete the selection. Everything from a web browser loading a page to the clock in the menu bar stops. Fun times.

Why then keep the classic Mac OS around when OS X has implemented such needed changes? Indeed, who could get by without such necessities required by modern personal computer users? Charles Moore’s rationale for why users continue on with older Mac OS versions is quite simple — hardware limitations and software limitations. Not every Mac technically capable of running the classic Mac OS, will run it well, and some Macs are utterly incapable of running OS X. There is the PearPC method, but this procedure is more for kicks than to accomplish an actual running system. Other hardware issues could be finding replacements or adapters for printers, scanners, drawing tablets, and other misc input and output devices. Next, is the software cost found when switching to OS X. Some applications will never be ported to OS X, some do not even play well within Classic (which is disappearing with the last PPC Macs anyway). If you can find an adequate replacement OS X application or there is an OS X native version, there may be a significant cost involved with switching.

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.

Gene, best known in recent years as the host of The Tech Night Owl LIVE radio show/podcast and cohost of The Paracast, is a self described early adopter. Not only with new software, but I gather he upgrades his systems very frequently, certainly more often than myself or even Charles Moore. Not only does Gene upgrade his systems frequently, he seems to want to grab the fasted new Mac systems currently available.

Where Charles Moore takes the standpoint from a similar place as myself, we both spend most of our time browsing the web, reading email, and writing articles, Gene comes from more of a multimedia standpoint. After all, he spends a significant amount of time working through audio production with his radio shows, and it would stand to reason such a user would require a little bit of power. Still, Gene makes an interesting point. Mac OS 10.4 Tiger is an awfully good operating system and has many compelling reasons for any user to upgrade to this latest release of the Mac OS. He is quite right about OS X being a great system and sums up some of the basic difficulties users had or will have when switching to OS X.

Gene Steinberg:

You have also been asked to consider Mac OS X. All right, I understand that it’s very, very different, and not just the stuff that’s happening under-the-hood. Despite its superficial resemblance to the Classic Mac OS, things have changed, sometimes drastically. You can’t customize the Apple menu without the help of a third party utility, control panels have been replaced by System Preferences, and there’s no Chooser.

Worse, you no longer have to cope with the quirks of a single Fonts folder, but several, for the single user, for all users, the network and even specific applications. For years, you coped with with PostScript and TrueType fonts, not to mention the original bitmap faces, and now you will have to deal with OpenType and something with the file extension .dfont.

Just as important, what’s this thing about file extensions? Isn’t that something that Windows users deal with? What’s going on here?

I think this point is a very fair description of possible difficulties arising from the jump to OS X. It’s one thing to have to learn how the dock operates or the file hierarchy of your user account, but what happens if OS X starts misbehaving. All those years spent troubleshooting the classic Mac OS are no longer applicable to OS X. This issue could be very unnerving to former power users who know the ins and outs of the classic Mac OS. Charles Moore has also made mention to the same ease of troubleshooting with the classic Mac OS in comparison to OS X. This new fangled operating system is indeed a different beast, apparently a great cat if you believe Apple’s marketing or my own feeble attempts to find analogous examples.

Yet, I am some how able to jump back and forth on a weekly, if not daily basis between Mac OS 8.1, 8.6, 9.1, 9.2.2, and 10.2.8. Sometimes I even go back to System 7.5.5 when I need to access my two LC IIs. Wow, remember when the Mac OS was called System. Sure, things are different, but not too different to acclimate oneself. After all, Mac OS X is no more confusing to the Mac user than Windows or a Linux distribution like Ubuntu. I should make clear, Gene’s piece never attacks holdouts of the classic way of doing things nor is his tact condescending or mean spirited to us luddites still using the old system. The tone is a pleasant enough inquiry into the hearts and minds of those users still sticking with the classic Mac.

Gene ends by making it abundantly clear that economic realities often force us to get by with what we already have, and that rationale needs no further explanation.

Gene Steinberg:

Feel free to post your reasons why you are avoiding Mac OS X, and not just financial. That I understand, and no explanation is necessary.

Reading the comments from the blog entry makes it interesting to see other Mac users reasoning for sticking with the classic Mac OS. Again, most issues can be traced to wanting or needing to run an application not available for OS X, although the Classic environment is sometimes a decent compromise when running older software within OS X. Not perfect of course.  For example, Coaster and some other audio applications I use will not run in the Classic environment, nor will they be ported to OS X. Also, some users require access to legacy hardware. Nothing terribly different from the Charles Moore analysis. Finally, there are the classic Mac interface fanatics who harp on every fault of Mac OS X’s usability. I think this quote is best able to sum up this sentiment:
From the Mac Night Owl’s comments:

Solo Says:June 2nd, 2006 at 11:04 am

OS 9 was usable, OS X is stable. What kind of choice is that? I want it all, baby!

After all my rambling, and was I ever on an incoherent lark today, those readers still with me are probably waiting for the insightful counterpoint dealing with why OS 9 is still viable. Well, wait you shall, because this entry was focused primarily on why OS X is a grand old thing with all the gee whiz features needed in today’s rough and tumble world of personal computers. Part two, will finish my little point, counterpoint indulgence about OS 9 and OS X. Wrapping things up neatly will be part three’s wild ride into an even farther out of left field craziness. Until then, feast your eyes on my Mac OS environment.

Tell me, oh discerning readers, is this Mac OS X or Mac OS 9.2.2?