Still using OS 9?
 

I'm curious... what are people still using OS 9 for? To be clear, I'm not asking this in a rhetorical or sarcastic way. I'm being sincere. I'm genuinely interested in hearing some of the reasons people still use OS 9. There are a number of posts on this forum pertaining to OS 9 help requests, so there are quite a few members who still use it. Why do you use OS 9?

Rare legacy applications?
Old hardware?
Like it better than OS X? (really?)
Other...

Outlook 2001

Until recently, for TypeStyler 3.7. I've finally given that up, however. Strider will never upgrade it at this point.

I'm still running OS 9 to power a small dedicated webserver (for podcasting) on a 333 MHz/32M RAM/4G HD "grape" iMac that isn't good for much else these days. But the old iMac and OS 9 do the job well--and the ensemble brightens a corner of the office!

I run OS 8.6 in SheepShaver on a MacBook in order to use HyperCard. :)

I know some people who still use 9; I myself stayed on 8.6 until well after Tiger was released.

Here are some reasons:

1. The cost of upgrading all of one’s proprietary software would be prohibitive
2. A complicated system involving a variety of (admittedly rather old) industry-specific applications and applescripts would take a lot of work to change, so the crossover to OS X hasn’t happened yet
3. No time or inclination to learn something new
4. Just plain ol’ broke

Personally, I like 8.6 way more than 9 - when you force quit an application in 8.6, it doesn’t always cause the system to crash; in 9, it invariably does.

I vaguely remember OS 8. The memory that comes through for me is Extension conflicts. Oh, I shudder to think about extension conflicts! I like OS X if for nothing more than not having Extensions!

Well, at my old middle school, we used mac's as our base computers in computer labs and classrooms, and each teacher was given a MacBook as for using to put grades in and do whatever teachers use computers for in school. The only problem was that all computers were the old kind of eMac's, the one's with blue and green transparent back, running Mac OS 8.6 (i think). The laptop's the teacher's use weren't any better either, classic too. Except for my history teacher, she had a cool, wide screen Mac Book Pro I think, running OS X, but I think it was hers not the school's. Anyways, the computers are kinda old and crappy and froze often. I guess they are still using them because the school doesnt have enough money to buy new ones. Well, last year they bought newe computers for the 6th grade computer lab. They were new iMac's running OS X, but of course, we never got to use them, because, well, they were in the 6th grade computer lab...

I'm too cheap to upgrade some of the old software.... such as Pagemaker. Don't use it often, but there seems to be times when only PM will do what I need. An old chess game -- black and white with easily identifiable pieces that are just easier to see than the more graphic intensive current versions.

I surely do not miss all the extension conflicts fron os 9.

just the other day I wanted to do some audio recording from line-in sound. Fired up Audacity under 10.4.10 and #$@^@#^%@#$##@@!!!

Audacity recurrently does something screwy with my computer's sound. It convinces the computer it HAS no native sound-producing capabilities, and every time it happens whatever worked last time to fix it doesn't work so I have to futz with it.

Got it working, trashed Audacity, booted up the ol' Classic environment, fired up goold ol' SoundEdit 16, and recording my audio with no problems to report.

There is an app called Grapher in OS X that seems to do the same thing, but I'm not a math expert, so maybe Graphing Calculator does something better. Does it?

OS X does have extensions, but they operate under much stricter rules. However, kernel extensions can be nasty. If you install a bad one, it can destabilize the machine as much as OS 9. Fortunately, it doesn't happen often.

What is an example of an application that installs a kernel extension in OS X?

Fuse from macports. Uses a kext

And i use OS9 for an old acess control system. Never ported to osx.

I've got some from Ambrosia (SnapzPro) and iScroll2. Some people are miffed because Parallels installs a few of them.

If you're curious about yours, open your System Profiler and click Software/Extensions. I think holding Shift disables the non-Apple ones at startup.

One clue is, if you install software and it asks you to restart, it might have installed a kernel extension.

To check what is loaded you could (from terminal) run
kextstat
To avoid apples:
kextstat|grep -v "com.apple"

I then see:
Index Refs Address Size Wired Name (Version) <Linked Against>
97 0 0x553e5000 0x2000 0x1000 com.bresink.driver.BRESINKx86Monitoring (2.0) <11>
98 0 0x55430000 0x10000 0xf000 com.google.filesystems.fusefs (0.4.0) <6 5 4 3 2>

The bresink is for some monitoring software.

I guess I'm kind of tired to see people trashing OS 9. (and its antecedents)


Up until 10.2, MacOS X users had no excuse to point fingers at OS 9 for instability. The old MacOS should have been a fragile frustrating environment to work in, but for many of us it wasn't. You did have to weed your garden of extensions and control panels that didn't play nicely with the rest of your environment, that's true; but most of us didn't spend our days fighting extension conflicts, and had very stable systems on which we got work done while Windows users were futzing with their misbegotten systems. OS X in the early era did not crash all that often, but all of its freaking applications did, with roughly the same end result of not being able to get work done. (And yes, kernel panics were a lot more common too)

Yeah, the memory model was shot to hell. No defenses there.

The interface, the GUI, the consistency, the ease of use, was spectacular. It was a system that had come of age. MacOS X is even now not clearly better. It's finally gotten to the point that OS 9 no longer trounces it in a head-to-head comparison of elegance, consistency and usability. But OS 9 was, dammit, earlier. To state the obvious. And it was very very very good at doing what operating systems need to do as their first and fundamental chore: BEING the computer to the user and making the computer responsive to the user's wishes with a minimum of opacity and confusion.

I still consider the classic MacOS (culminating in OS 9) to be the best OS of the 20th Century.

Interesting. When I run that (the one with grep -v) I get one from Micromat (Tech Tools), and one from USB Overdrive. Nothing else.

The office uses an antiquated accounting program that hasn't been updated in about a decade (Aatrix Accounting) Intertia is a major factor in getting an upgrade* (iPhoto is up to date, the financial system isn't) so I have to keep OS9/Classic up and running. I'm eagerly waiting for Apple to completely discontinue support, but a large coffin nail came in the form of OSX blocking the keyboard command that the accounting program uses to initiate repair mode. So the next major crash should do it.

* to be fair, there's plently of financial software out there written in COBOL

I have several clients who are running System 9 specifically so that they can continue to use Quark 5. They have RIPs and image setters that will cost tens of thousands of dollars to upgrade. So they are stuck in a decade old time warp.

I find the OS X version of GC even better than the classic, and quite reasonably priced. Compared to Grapher, it is much faster and is more tolerant of errors (with much better error messages), although it has slightly less functionality in areas like ODEs and vector fields.

Once I got in the habit of regularly trashing my Finder preferences and my System preferences, my old G4 powermac with OS 9.1 purred like a kitten. That one hint made life so much more tranquil.

So do I. It's easy to denigrate it by comparing it to current operating systems that have had nearly 10 years to surpass it. While it isn't as capable, it's still more polished than Linux and far less intrusive than any version of Windows.

The GC story was awesome.

Wow. What wonderful lunatics.