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[GaryN]

As of today, ARS TECHNICA has immortalized our own!
Kudos to Mr. Happy, Nanopico and llO.
Yet more gratitude to the one and only Cameron Kaiser.
This is required reading!

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/09/an-os-9-odyssey-why-do-some-mac-users-still-rely-on-16-year-old-software/

[mrhappy]

Holy cow!! Haha!!

[DieHard]

But as hard as it may be to believe in light of yet another OS X macOS update, there are some who still use Apple's long-abandoned system. OS 9 diehards may hold on due to one important task they just can't replicate on a newer computer,

Hehehe... they know me

The largest concentration of OS 9 diehards seems to be in audio production and music composition.

[Mat]

Damn cool! Has Richard Moss being around here and did he contact you via the forum, or other ways?

Well the article is quite nice, but there are two thoughts completely missing in my opinion.

1.) Mac OS 9 is not to compare with DOS, Amiga or similar Retro plattforms. It is at least at the level of Win2k and was extremely professional in 2000 to 2002! So it once was a mainstream plattform which was able to do everything. That means that the fact that it was abandoned man-made (and not becoming obsolete because of new inventions), is hightly important. Apple made a decision against its user base, for the shareholder value. So mixing it up with some Retro gear and OS is not correct as I think.

2.) And it leads us to the 2nd thought that I belive is really important: Apple got a lot of critics back than. They needed to put a lot of power into marketing and forcing people to use X. They needed to make X man-made incompatble to older hardware, as they needed to make newer hardware man-made incompatible to 9 as we know these days. So they really forced us at every possible way to use the "new" OS. They even intervened at other companies to stop supporting 9. I once read somethign from the Opera-Browswer chief, that Apple was really unhappy that they didn´t abandon the 9 browser immediatly and supported Mac OS 9 till Opera 6.03.
So all that developments generated a kind of resistence that could never be killed completely (just remember how long it took Qark to do a X-version of XPress). And on the other hand as the advantages of X were not real, there simply was no need to switch to a different OS.

The fact that we got a proprietary OS at proprietary hardware, and a "mother company" thaat is working agains us for 17 years, and that we are still around, should tell everything.

BTW, I am really stunned that I should be the only one reporting Cameron that Classilla is my only way to browse the web. I cannot imagine that concering that there have been more than 120.000 Classilla downloads yet.

[MacTron]

Damn cool! Has Richard Moss being around here and did he contact you via the forum, or other ways?

Yes Richard Moss has been here.

He asked to some of us -myself included- to answer some questions for his work in Ars Technica.

BTW. In the Ars Technica text I am named by my real name ...
to avoid confusion with the MacTron "character"

[DieHard]

Come on now MacTron, we all know you are not Human   In the future, where you come from, Mac OS 9 is the only OS that exists in 2089

[MacTron]

Come on now MacTron, we all know you are not Human   In the future, where you come from, Mac OS 9 is the only OS that exists in 2089

In the future as in the past, the computers ( with Mac Os 9 of course) are used to make actual work, and the phones to communicate . LOL

I have to travel to past to convince S. Jobs about to keep the Mac Os 9 development

[MacTron]

My favourite extracts:

I found that most of the people who cling staunchly to Mac OS 9 (or earlier) as a key component of their daily—or at least regular—workflow actually have good reason for doing so.

By only allowing a couple of active programs, classic Mac OS streamlines your workflow to closer resemble the way people think (until endless notifications and frequent app switching cause our brains to rewire).

"I really intensely dislike the idea that the ability to run Facebook is the sole determining factor of whether a computer is obsolete to some people," he told me over e-mail. "But that's the world we live in now."

in the spatial Finder "each window is permanently, unambiguously associated with a single folder" and everything stays where you left it in the manner in which you left it.

the classic Mac OS interface is better than anything released since. "The mix of power and simplicity of this system is unique," he said. "It's pure art. The Mac OS 9 environment is easy to use and troubleshoot. It doesn't disturb you from doing your main work, be it audio or whatever."

OS 9 feels noticeably snappier on a G4 machine than El Capitan does on a new Core i7 Mac with SSD storage. Audio people love this. They claim that the latency on their virtual instruments and recording and monitoring gear in OS 9 is miles better than anything else.

[nanopico]

Come on now MacTron, we all know you are not Human   In the future, where you come from, Mac OS 9 is the only OS that exists in 2089

So we will solve the 2040 bug!!!!?

[mrhappy]

I have to travel to past to convince S. Jobs about to keep the Mac Os 9 development

Now THAT is a great idea!!!

[MacTron]

So we will solve the 2040 bug!!!!?

Yes, you will solve it in 2037 being Apple CEO at that time. 9 years before going crazy and force the whole industry to use freeDOS with a Mac Os 9 like graphic shell.
 

[nanopico]

So we will solve the 2040 bug!!!!?

Yes, you will solve it in 2037 being Apple CEO at that time. 9 years before going crazy and force the whole industry to use freeDOS with a Mac Os 9 like graphic shell.
 

I have to say that about a week ago I almost decided to switch to freeDOS at home for pure sadistic enjoyment.  Then reality set in and I realized I like OS 9 too much.

[soulseeker]

great article - one thing i would like to mention is that our "buy and throw it away when something new turns up" mentality is a pain!
i'm sure if we could return to "use and repair it as long as possible" the world would be a better one.
a seeking soul

[MacOS Plus]

  Speaking of TenFourFox, it just got a major update.  It's wonderful I can still have near-perfect browsing on my PPC machines with it, CPU speed aside.  Hopefully Classilla will get more of the same treatment soon.

  Perhaps the ARS article will bring more members our way.  Surely there are more OS 9 enthusiasts still out there that have much expertise and enthusiasm to contribute to the various projects.  I also hope awareness can prevent a lot of unnecessary junking of perfectly good old Macs and accessories for a little longer.

[Philgood]

Hopefully Classilla will get more of the same treatment soon.

Yes. Look what Cameron say a on his blog.

I do have some work done on a 9.3.4 which fixes some JavaScript bugs, has additional stelae for some other site-specific workarounds and (controversially, because this will impact performance) automatically fixes screen update problems with many sites using CSS overflow. (They still don't layout properly, but they will at least scroll mostly correctly.) I will try to push that out as a means of keeping the fossil fed. TenFourFox remains my highest priority because it's the browser I personally dogfood 90% of the time, but I haven't forgotten my roots.