I agree on your entire post.

I agree with some of the previous posts that the 3D dock is gratuitous eye candy. However, I have a MacBook and have to disagree with Anti. My MacBook is more than capable of running Leopard. The dock does not handicap me at all. Even still, in some areas, Leopard is noticeably faster than Tiger was.

I agree with most of your previous post, AHunter3, except for the above. I don't want to see Apple sacrificing resources that could be put towards developing new features or refining the OS for better performance put towards supporting really old legacy stuff. That takes man-hours away from forward progress. That is exactly what is bogging Microsoft down. They need to free themselves from the shackles of worrying about being backwards compatible with 1980s software.

I noticed that with 1GB and 512MB of RAM, it chopped up every now and then, or would take a couple seconds to respond. Switching it into 2D mode fixed that.

Now with 2.5GB of RAM, having it in 3D mode shows no slow-down.

Actually I'd go farther than SheepShaver. I think a modern Mac ought to be able to open an emulation window and boot not only MacOS 9 but System 7 and System 6 and System 4.1 and so on back to the original 1984-vintage System 0.9. Apple would not need to stick many resources into it, the combo of SheepShaver, Basilisk II, and vMac cover the ground; all they need is a mechanism for letting those environments piggyback on networking provided by OS X for printing, file sharing, and IP address. For the older environments, they could skip that if they can provide a print driver that will print to some kind of file that can subsequently be printed in OS X. [The ancient printer driver Print2Pict comes to mind for System 3 etc; something akin to Adobe Acrobat's PDFWriter for System 6 and early 7].

A "virtual Mac" environment for running 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, etc up thru a second copy of the latest and greatest 10.5.x should also exist as part of the OS. 10000 times more useful than "Spaces"!

forgive my ignorance, but who needs to run os's that old?

You must not have been using a Mac back when those OS's were current state of the art. Or you do not care about files you created back in that era. Also, sounds like you don't support other folks' and their computer needs, but some of us do....

a) I have an entire book written in MacWrite format (divided up into chapters). With what, exactly, would you propose I open those files with under OS X? Or even MacOS 9?

b) I'm a FileMaker geek and I am asked periodically to convert some old databases to more modern format. Usually that means converting from FileMaker 6/5 format or sometimes 4/3 format to the current architecture, and FileMaker 9 can do that, but sometimes I get something older, and not as rarely as you'd think. In the last 18 months I have converted

• a couple of FileMaker Pro 2.1 databases, requiring a conversion first to FileMaker 4 format under Classic then a convertion to FileMaker 9;

• a FileMaker Pro 1.0 database, same process but unlike converting a 2.x db can only be performed in a Mac environment

• astonishingly, a Nashoba FileMaker 4 datbase, that is to say predating the era in which FileMaker was called "FileMaker Pro". Can only be converted by FileMaker Pro 1.0 which will not run with sufficient stability under anything newer than System 6 (crashes when you try to open/convert); the resulting FmPro 1.0 db then needed to be converted to 4.x as described above, and then to 9.

• Another of that era where the owner just wanted the data out as tab-delimited text, was no longer a FileMaker user. Required opening FileMaker 4 in vMac under System 6 and exporting.


c) Hobbyist stuff. I have FileMaker Server 2 and could run networked FileMaker 2 databases for multi-user environment but to do so I'd need not just the ability to run the software but to provide it with valid networking

I have two volumes of class notes and assignments written in an early version of Word (no longer openable in a version after 6 or so), with figures drawn in MacDraw. The only way I can get at them now is on a Mac SE/30 running Sys 7.5.5 that still has those apps on it. Knew there was a reason I kept it.

Give Apple some credit. You can't do all of what you ask for, but you can run a lot of very old stuff on a Mac. :D

But that's 10.4.11... Leopard is devoid of Classic support, and I think that's what AHunter is getting at.

If that was some form of sarcasm, I apologize. It seems my sarcasm detector isn't working well today.

Not really sarcasm. My point was that Lode Runner was written in 1984. I bought the Dual G5 in 2004, and Leopard came out in 2007. That means that you could run a 23 year old program on the most current operating system on hardware that was still relevant (although certainly state of the art) in 2007, up until Leopard came out. That's not perfect, but it is pretty good.

There does need to be a cut off though, and I think at this point, we've all had plenty of notice. We've seen other systems become obsolete, and we've seen others have problems with Y2K, and other issues related to old data/software. It's time to start thinking about what to do with our old software and data, especially if it's more than a dozen years old. That is after all, more than 6 iterations of Moore's Law.

Anybody remember Power Pete?

That was where I was headed as you noted, but I figured that I'd already pushed pretty hard. Shoulda completed my thought I guess.

I personally would like the infinite backwards compatibility. I will pull back to my original recommendation though: except for weirdos like me, the ability to run MacOS 9 vintage apps would be sufficient, hence my recommendation to buy up & solidify SheepShaver.

Who woudn't? ;)
The problem is that it gets more difficult to do the farther out you get, and the returns diminish rapidly, especially while Moore's law still holds. At some point it just isn't worth doing.

Looks like it IS Snow Leopard.

I just hope it isn't as it sounds. IE we pay for a ton of things that SHOULD have been included in a Leopard update.

AT LAST!!!!

AT LONG LAST!!!

I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE IT!!!!

10.6 will FINALLY have integration BUILT IN for Exchange (only 2007)

In only a year I will be able to share contacts and cal's with my work colleagues! (so long as my work update their agin Win2000 Server)

errrm yaay exchange integration ....(i assume thats good)

Is Snow Leopard just Leopard cleaned up? Good, it needs it. Completely inconsistent interface.

surly leopard users should get it at a discount as well

Maybe even pleasantly happy Leopard users will get a discount.
:)