I know, it's kinda late that I'm doing this intro, and I apologize for just going straight into that dial-up tutorial and then kinda diappearing for a while, but I'm still around!
I must say, it might be a personal opinion of mine, and maybe a few others on this forum, but I think Mac OS 9 is the most complete unfinished OS out there! I've been keeping on finding all these cool things I wondered as a teen and things I would just stumble upon that still are kinda relevant today, without looking for them!
I had very few experiences with Macs as a kid, but I do remember twice going on a B&W Classic Mac in Florida, and then playing Oregon Trail toward middle school on some newer Macs, and messing around with KidPix once or twice in Canada (so we had that French Canadian layout on those). Then in high school in Florida, I took programming class for TrueBASIC and we were using Macs there too. I knew about emulators on DOS and Windoze in the late 90s then I had a classmate who knew about those for Mac OS, along with how to disable the security system the school had set up on the computers
. I also learned there that you can hook up 2 keyboards inline and use them to game on those emulators! Those were some good times! That class is also where I learned about the resource fork, after taking a floppy disk from home and putting it in a Mac!
The following year, I took programming for C++ in that same classroom. I started learning more about the resource fork, and was really getting interested about the OS, so much so that I downloaded and installed that free version of System 7.5 that Apple was offering for free onto Basilisk II on Win2k at home
. Then I moved and changed schools that didn't offer programming, so that halted. But I still messed with Mac emulators in one of my classes.
Then Mac OS X really took over and started transitioning to Intel, then I never really thought much about Mac OS after that for a while. Several years later, I started a retail job and the manager was good with me and randomly gave me a Powermac G4 AGP, a Powermac G5 DP 2.0GHz (i think?), and one of those iMac G5's, little by little, while I worked there. I got the G4 first and actually went straight to installing Mac OS X and bought compatible a Wifi card for it, then I used that to tether internet from some neighbor in the area
.
I did end up selling the iMac and regretfully disposing of the PowerMac G5. (still not certain these days if the issue it had was repairable). The hard drive I had in the G4 also started failing, so I put this machine away for a few years.
I dealt with a couple of natural disasters just before the pandemic and about a year ago. The pandemic led to our office doing work-from-home indefinitely. About half a year in, I took the G4 out from the closet to test it out, along with this Compaq that surprisingly was intact after it was submersed underwater for a few hours
. I installed Win98 on the Compaq, nothing special with that. I also discovered MR and MG that were hosting Mac OS 9 CDs, so I gave it a go to install that on the G4. Installing that worked without a hitch and reminded me alot of installing System 7.5 back then.
Little by little, the stuff I knew from school started coming back. I visited this site a few times over the years but never really thought about signing up. Then I visited here more during the pandemic. I kept stumbling on more and more interesting things about OS 9 here, then found other existing sites and learned more there. I went on the WayBack Machine and visited the ResExcellence website, then stumbled on the WhackedMac Archive and Freaks Macintosh Archive, and these sites seriously brought me back to 2000 lmao! I never really tried anything on those sites because of the computers in school being locked down, but now it's different lmao!
I'm a big Sega fan, more so than Apple. I've been following their consoles and trying to understand how they work since I was a kid (a big reason why I knew about emulators so young). One thing that did fascinate me back then was the fact that the Genesis/MegaDrive and the first Macintoshes used the same exact CPU! I have a Dreamcast and a Saturn and always wanted to put them online, so after I did it on Win98 following tutorials, I found none on how to do it for Mac OS, and then I figured it out, so that's the reason I kinda hurried to put that up there, so all major OSes from the late 90s and early 2000s have a documented way to do it. I also think alot of graphics and maybe some music for Genesis games were done on Macs, and maybe the music continued on Macs through the Dreamcast. Btw, my avatar (at the time of this post) is a sprite of a Streets Of Rage 3 apple that I blew up and tweaked in GraphicConverter
I also have Mac OS X and Linux installed on the G4, and I've been learning a bunch about this computer, OpenFirmware, and Mac OS indirectly that way, as well. I probably spend the least time on Mac OS X, though. I also found my Basilisk II machine from high school on a CD, and I installed it on the Compaq, so now that's running unfrozen like nothing happened over all these years
. I also have a Netatalk server where both Macs can share files. Timbuktu between both machines has been pretty useful too.
Besides these 2 installations of Mac OS and those moments in school, I've been exposed to just Windoze 3.11 through 11, with some light M$-DOS (I've been messing with M$-DOS alot more recently though). By Vista, I was using Linux alot and I use it even more now. I currently do tech support at my job, but I'm looking to switch gears for something more advanced and also move from where I live to somewhere that has more of those advanced jobs are. I'm pretty flexible with technical skills.
Just like with the dial-up, I hope to share anything else that is undocumented or heavily buried here with all of you, any chance I get
Also, big, big shout out to Bruce Willis, Daft Punk, and the black owl here on macos9lives
. Alot of your posts really inspired me to check out a bunch of stuff on Mac OS that I haven't thought about previously, so thanks. Mac OS 9 still lives!
