When a program crashed in OS 7/8/9, it would often take down your whole system due to lack of memory protection. Also setting max RAM for each application one by one was tedious and annoying. While I wasn’t a huge fan of the skeuomorphic bubbly OS X interface, I was ecstatic to leave all that memory management nonsense behind.

I’ve used Macs all of my adult life, my first Mac came with System 7, and then up to Mac OS 8 and beyond. I’ve used every iteration of Mac OS since.

System 7, Mac OS 8, and Mac OS 9 were in a word: FUNctional! By that I mean the ol’ Apple tagline “it just works” wasn’t just marketing. It really did just work. Never crashed, no viruses, just easy, smooth, simple functionality.

And it was FUN to use. Since things did what they were supposed to do, and the system was build from the ground up to be intuitive for anyone - from children to the elderly, there weren’t any struggles to get stuff to do what you wanted, and especially the later versions, the OS interface was highly customizable. You could modify the window skins, scroll bars, icons, schemas, everything. Want to make your Mac look like a tropical fish aquarium, with all the windows swimming sound and making glub glub sounds when you opened files? Easy. Want it to be no-nonsense black & white fast as hell pro system? No problem.

Sometimes people got carried away and overdid it with the customizations, and they’d brick their computers (I was an Apple certified tech for a while and had to repair many a file system) - and that was even a fun challenge.

Ultimately, pre-OSX MacOS was a great product of its time. It was different from Windows - and that’s what threw off many Windows users - they’d try to approach MacOS as if it were a WinPC, and things weren’t where they expected them to be, but if you learned MacOS (which was easy) you’d find it did everything you needed it to do.

I don’t follow your comment that the current MacOS “being more fisher priced down in looks,” I think it looks very sleek & professional, but whatever. To each their own.

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.

Sorry if off-topic. You can try it here: https://macos9.app (or 8 if you replace the 9 with 8)

I used to joke that the last Mac I used was the first one they made that had colour - I’ve used every Mac from the seminal one up to and including the Color Classic (MacOS 1 up to 7) - but my last job gave me a MacBook. I was curious about it since I’ve seen many a coworker love them, but I soon found myself hating the damn thing so much that I ended up installing the work tools on my own Linux-laden ThinkPad.

Used to be, they were fast and no nonsense, simply effective and efficient work horses. No doubt they still are, but it was fighting med in everything I wanted it to do. What do you mean “there’s no way to mount a USB stick on MACOS”?!

Hardware wise they’re still brilliant wrt. power and battery life, but getting a 2nd (or, gasp, even 3rd) monitor to work with it? Yikes what a shit show that was. Truly a walled garden, I stand by my usual words of “they’re excellent machines if you want to use them exactly as Apple intended.”

…sorry for going off track. So, back in the day. There was MacWrite, MacPaint, Aldus PageMaker (which, then, was way more useful for actual publishing work than after the Adobe take-over), and a ton of games! Granted, you only had 512*whatever in pure black and white, but it was crisp and the games had excellent sound. Pinball Construction Set had 4-voice digital sound and flawless physics (hmm, except I don’t actually remember if it had a Tilt feature). Oh yeah, add in AppleTalk which blew Novell and Windows for Workgroups plain out of the water. The ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) connector predates PS/2 and curiously allowed a Mac to have any number of keyboards and two mice connected, something we made good use of when gaming.

There was the ImageWriter which could do plain copy paper rather than Leparello paper and had exquisite resolution compared to the clunky 8-pin DOS offerings. Really, the Mac SE and the ImageWriter II are, in my mind, the pinnacle of industrial design - at least of the 80s era.

Thanks for reading all that. You should go have a look at folklore.org if you’re interested in stories from the inside.

Oh I liked it a lot. In the early 90s, I had enough UI extensions running that OS7 looked exactly like BeOS. Gaming life was a lot of Bungie and AmbrosiaSW games and shareware games. So many shareware games. I established my first gamer tag at that time when playing A-10 Attack and A-10 Cuba. You want to talk about Nintendo-hard… Bungie’s Myth - The Fallen Lords was super-hard in single player, and the cross-platform multiplayer was amazeballs. I miss that game so much. Did all my Warcraft RTS playing, and waited a few agonizing months for the mac version of Starcraft to come out. Coincidentally, it was around then that I started doing file sharing through Carracho and Hotline

I didn’t use it myself, but the parents of a friend of mine did. They had two macs of different generations.

On the newer one we played command & conquer (although not being able to right click to cancel placing a construction was annoying).

We didn’t use the older one a lot, except that the Screensaver was also a game of some sorts, kind of a cross between Asteroids and some 2d space exploration game.

In my high school we had several of the Compact Macintosh models and I remember using them in two classes. One was English where we used a word processor. The other was more interesting: some sort of computer literacy course where we wrote HyperCard programs on the Mac.

Apart from the HyperCard stuff I found the courses and Macintosh computers quite dull. Maybe because I had been using Amiga computers for years at this point, and knew “The Fastest Apple Mac is an Amiga” (piped).

First started using Macs with OS7 and I find the whole Mac vs. Windows arguments silly. Windows 386, 3.1, and 3.11 were garbage, yes, but all that changed with Windows 95 and it instantly went head and shoulders above MacOS.

OSX didn’t come about until 2001. So Windows had the edge for 6 years. To give you some idea, the initial G3 iMacs that came out in 1998 were still running OS8.

The big problem with using a Mac back then is that Steve Jobs had his own ideas about the way things should work and the lack of compatability with other industry standards was a problem.

Example: Getting my Palm Pilot to sync with my iMac was a NIGHTMARE. I worked with Palm support for several weeks and we finally got it working, if the dock was connected to the iMac directly. The USB ports on the keyboard didn’t carry enough voltage to operate properly.

Windows machine? No problem… until Windows 98, when Microsoft decided to prioritize Windows CE devices and intentionally broke Palm functionality. That was fun! Took a while to get the driver updates to fix that one!

I used them for word processing stuff in school and it was fine. I was mostly working on Amiga at home at the time, moreso than DOS/Windows.

It would crash every fifteen minutes…