That's not true. My SE/30 with System 6 can boot dramatically faster than a Windows PC, in fact, it boots faster than a PC can wake from sleep. It even opens a document faster than a 'modern' PC. Come visit and see it by yourself... :)

.

Yes, it's tempting to think of the old Mac OS as being slow because the hardware they ran on is slow by today's standards. They got branded as being slow by guys who were used to booting into DOS, which booted fast because it really didn't do much!

The old Mac systems aren't nearly as stable as OS X and they don't have the same capabilities, but on the same hardware they are faster for the things that they do. You can really see it on older hardware that can run both. The early iMacs for example. ;)

Sure it was fast until you loaded like 4 extensions on your system or any third party extensions then boot time tripled. Or, if you had several desktop items it dramatically reduced your boot time.

Classic OS in my opinion sucked. I started using Macs around OS 8.1, but since I work IT, I was supporting as low as version 6 at that point in time.

I'm sure you're good at your job, but during those days, the absolute last person who should touch a Mac was an IT person who mainly supported PCs. I would rather have had my mother (who can't turn a computer on!) try to fix/maintain or do anything technical with one. I supported them back then, and I knew I was in for trouble if a client told me that their company's IT guy had tried to do something with their Mac. The first thing I'd have to do was figure out what the IT guy screwed up, then I'd take care of the original problem. It isn't that they couldn't have figured it out. It's that 1) they didn't care to, they just wanted to get back to their PC work, and 2) they assumed everything was a PC.

I was fully apple certified with in one year of using Macs, which in all honesty is one of the harder entry level computer certs. It was definitely harder than my HP, Gateway, A+, and even MCP certs. Apple has as very strange and particular way of handling their technology. I also had a mentor. One of my first IT bosses was a Mac wizard. In fact, right after our mac IT guy quit and I started supporting the Macs, the first thing he did was rebuild a Performa 6400 CDS power mac running OS 8.6 with me. It had a bad ADB port and the first thing we did was take a scrap logic board which was bad, take the port off of it, and resolder the ADB port onto the working machine with the bad part. I still have that computer in storage in my parents basement. Its not like I was walking around aimlessly in the dark, I was being taught hands on by an existing mac guru, my old boss. Of course he had managerial responsibilities so it was in his best interest to train his techs. This was back circa 1999

The first thing I did back then, to see what the user did is boot with no extensions. 9 times out of 10 the user had way to many extensions running at start up which caused super long boot times and lack of system performance. Or some user decided to create a RAM disk, which was retarded to let users do that, and wondered why their machine ran slow because half their ram was allocated to a RAM disk.

I like how OS X handles and manages things for the average user that they should not tinker with. The classic OS left too many open loop holes like what I mentioned which created a lot of help desk tickets.

But really, had you ever experienced working with System 6 installed in an early Compact Mac?

In my experience, System 6, written in assembly code instead of the high level C, is sleek and fast even when loading extensions. Before the release of Mac OS X , I considered it to be the best Macintosh operating system ever written, way ahead of its time, and probably the "nicest" operating system ever made. And yes, compared with what you could use and do at the time, it was very stable system and very, very fast...

.

So if a PowerMac 8500 had a full complement of 512MB or even 1 GB of RAM, and the OS wouldn't give any more than 100MB to an application like Photoshop, you think it wouldn't be a good idea to use some of the extra RAM as a high speed disk to speed things up?

I don't even think the OS could address anything over 512 mb of RAM, maybe not anything even over 256 at that point in time. I don't think the OS was able to address that much more memory until OS 8.6.

No, Sao, I never extensively used OS 6, and had no desire to at the time. When I got into using macs OS 6 was already way old and obsolete and it ran slow to that day and age's standards.

System 7 was 32 bit clean, meaning it could in theory go up to 4 GB of RAM. Unfortunately, the classic OSes, including 9, could only provide any single application with 100 MB of RAM, so if you maxed out the RAM the only way to take advantage was to run several large programs at once, which few people needed to do, or use a RAM drive as a swap disk. If you did it correctly, you got a good speed boost.

yeah and windows could address 2TB of memory in 2000, but there was no way in hell hardware supported that yet.

This is getting off topic.

I posted ways to constructively and effectively convince someone to switch to the Mac. Whether or not the classic OSes did this or did that is completely 100% irrelevant because of we are talking about modern day OSes and systems here.

The only point of reference to the classic systems is for those who tried Mac years ago and did not like it for the same reasons I did. OS X is like a billion times better than Classic Mac OS. I listed many reasons why I thought it was better. So, those who are skeptic because of past experiences need to throw those out the window because classic OS is a thing of the past and is not extinct.

We're talking RAM here, not hard drive space.

I agree that OS X is much better than the classic Mac OS, and much better than any version of Windows, but that's because of stability, security, and capabilities, not speed. You can dislike the classic versions if you like, but it's incorrect to say they were/are slow. Boot up OS 9 (not the fastest of the old OS versions!) and open some files in it, then boot up OS X and open the same files. OS 9 will likely win, and the time difference will be greater on older hardware.

OK, that was a bad example not sure why i was thinking HD space...

4GB of RAM is what it should have said, yet 32bit hardware has a three gig limit. Again this is relevant to what? I am still comparing the old ways of Classic OS to the new OS to convince people who tried Mac a long time ago and hated classic OS for the same reasons I did. Just because an OS had the potential to do something back then does not even mean it got close to reaching it. Classic OS was crap compared to what OS X is now. That is the main point that the original poster should use for their persuasive paper they are writing. A lot of people I know write things off on one or two bad previous experiences. How do you change their minds? people who tried classic OS and hated it, and won't touch a mac because they hated mac 10 years ago.