Why, Apple, Why?

[Syntho]

Does someone have any history on why older Macs are so notorious for crashing? I can leave a modern operating system running for an entire month and I'm fine. With an oldschool Mac, just moving the mouse makes it freeze sometimes

[Protools5LEGuy]

Maybe the RAM have its age...

[IIO]

the key is that in Mac OS Classic you should not ignore when you get an error in an app.

e.g. you work in program A and get an error 2 from your audio driver. if you now ignore that, this is usally okay for 1 or 2 times.
but when you do something else on the machine 4 hours later then things might freeze and you wonder why.

best is to restart immediately after a serious system error.

[Daniel]

The stability of Mac OS 9 can be highly variable. Most of the systems I have work flawlessly. I have one iBook G3 that is cursed. It is very unstable and crashes often. It is also unstable on OSX. Sometimes it can't even boot to open firmware. Pretty much everything else I have is fine.

[MacOS Plus]

  Agreeability with RAM is often a huge issue which won't always be explicitly reported.  Also add-in cards - some of my machines are super-sensitive to even the slightest mis-seating in the slots.  (The same problem plagued Nubus too and often worse as oxidation and loose contacts set in over the years.)  Even with perfectly stable hardware, however, the Mac OS seems to perpetually corrupt files or file attributes.  Unless these things are constantly being scanned for and corrected they will eventually ruin the whole operation.  I don't think I've ever had a Norton scan (or similar product) more than a few days apart not find at least a few minor errors.  I could never understand how this happened so consistently and progressively to any drive throughout the entire life of the Classic OS.  OS X isn't much better is this regard though.