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People who used older macintosh OS in the 90s, what was it like for your daily use, work, games etc?

I have uses the newer OS’s of Mac but never the classic series that were numbered.

For those who have used apple computing back in the day, what was it like using it? Was it a lot more snappier and better user interface intuitiveness?

I say this because it always seemed to me that the macintosh operating systems seemed to be more… “smooth sailing” than Bill’s 50/50 BSOD contraptions (Windows ME anyone?)

Obviously things have changed a lot more with newer macos being more fisher priced down in looks but I’d really like to know what you guys thought about OS 8 or 9!

Thank you!

bazus1 ,

Oh I liked it a lot. In the early 90s, I had enough UI extensions running that OS7 looked exactly like BeOS. Gaming life was a lot of Bungie and AmbrosiaSW games and shareware games. So many shareware games. I established my first gamer tag at that time when playing A-10 Attack and A-10 Cuba. You want to talk about Nintendo-hard… Bungie’s Myth - The Fallen Lords was super-hard in single player, and the cross-platform multiplayer was amazeballs. I miss that game so much. Did all my Warcraft RTS playing, and waited a few agonizing months for the mac version of Starcraft to come out. Coincidentally, it was around then that I started doing file sharing through Carracho and Hotline

jordanlund ,
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

First started using Macs with OS7 and I find the whole Mac vs. Windows arguments silly. Windows 386, 3.1, and 3.11 were garbage, yes, but all that changed with Windows 95 and it instantly went head and shoulders above MacOS.

OSX didn’t come about until 2001. So Windows had the edge for 6 years. To give you some idea, the initial G3 iMacs that came out in 1998 were still running OS8.

The big problem with using a Mac back then is that Steve Jobs had his own ideas about the way things should work and the lack of compatability with other industry standards was a problem.

Example: Getting my Palm Pilot to sync with my iMac was a NIGHTMARE. I worked with Palm support for several weeks and we finally got it working, if the dock was connected to the iMac directly. The USB ports on the keyboard didn’t carry enough voltage to operate properly.

Windows machine? No problem… until Windows 98, when Microsoft decided to prioritize Windows CE devices and intentionally broke Palm functionality. That was fun! Took a while to get the driver updates to fix that one!

errer ,

When a program crashed in OS 7/8/9, it would often take down your whole system due to lack of memory protection. Also setting max RAM for each application one by one was tedious and annoying. While I wasn’t a huge fan of the skeuomorphic bubbly OS X interface, I was ecstatic to leave all that memory management nonsense behind.

FiniteLooper ,

Oh wow, yeah I remember always having to open that info for each program and change how much RAM was allocated to it. Running slow? Quit it, increase RAM and try again. So glad all that nonsense is gone now.

Bitrot ,
@Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I remember Ircle having instructions to open the terminal and run emacs to enable some service (identd probably). It was so traumatizing I’ve only ever used vi since.

OhStopYellingAtMe , (edited )
@OhStopYellingAtMe@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve used Macs all of my adult life, my first Mac came with System 7, and then up to Mac OS 8 and beyond. I’ve used every iteration of Mac OS since.

System 7, Mac OS 8, and Mac OS 9 were in a word: FUNctional! By that I mean the ol’ Apple tagline “it just works” wasn’t just marketing. It really did just work. Never crashed, no viruses, just easy, smooth, simple functionality.

And it was FUN to use. Since things did what they were supposed to do, and the system was build from the ground up to be intuitive for anyone - from children to the elderly, there weren’t any struggles to get stuff to do what you wanted, and especially the later versions, the OS interface was highly customizable. You could modify the window skins, scroll bars, icons, schemas, everything. Want to make your Mac look like a tropical fish aquarium, with all the windows swimming sound and making glub glub sounds when you opened files? Easy. Want it to be no-nonsense black & white fast as hell pro system? No problem.

Sometimes people got carried away and overdid it with the customizations, and they’d brick their computers (I was an Apple certified tech for a while and had to repair many a file system) - and that was even a fun challenge.

Ultimately, pre-OSX MacOS was a great product of its time. It was different from Windows - and that’s what threw off many Windows users - they’d try to approach MacOS as if it were a WinPC, and things weren’t where they expected them to be, but if you learned MacOS (which was easy) you’d find it did everything you needed it to do.

I don’t follow your comment that the current MacOS “being more fisher priced down in looks,” I think it looks very sleek & professional, but whatever. To each their own.

friend_of_satan ,

Speaking of fun, I wish somebody would port Gravité to macOS! Not at all helpful, but just kinda fun. Like a fidget toy.

wildbits.com/gravite/

Bitrot , (edited )
@Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Windows ME was released a year before OS X, so that’s not really the era to compare. Also, Windows 2000 was pretty solid. Before Windows 95 there’s simply no comparison, the Mac was much better.

Classic Mac OS might as well be part of the 90s kid starter pack (Kid Pix usually is). Macs were ubiquitous in American schools.

It was pretty intuitive, especially if you grew up on it. It was also still fairly easy to trigger crashes and break things, but maybe not for more normal people.

ryannathans ,

Windows ME was shit, it didn’t even ship with completed error messages

friend_of_satan ,

Windows 2000 was peak Windows, IMHO. It was the last clean and simple design.

DickFiasco ,

I used a Mac SE/30 running OS 7 quite a bit in the early 90’s. I remember it being incredibly reliable; in fact, I can’t even remember what a crash looked like on a Mac, whereas I can still picture the BSOD from Windows 3.1.

I don’t remember noticing much difference in snappiness or intuitiveness between Mac and Windows back then though. Both were pretty easy to learn, even for people with limited computer experience. Anything with a hard drive felt snappy at the time, because the previous generation of computers all ran on floppy disks which were slow as molasses.

I_Miss_Daniel ,

I had to support the damn things for a university. Crash prone bastards they were. The windows 3.11 and 95 boxes in the same environment were so much more stable than the pre osx macs of the time.

The earlier ones - classics and the like were pretty stable.

HubertManne ,

I find this hard to believe. I feel 3.11 and 95 crashed pretty often. They generally recovered on a restart though so was it more that the macs crashed in a way that needed support more often?

I_Miss_Daniel ,

I suspect they just didn’t like being on a network. Often, killing off the startup extensions (or whatever they were called) would improve their stability. It was 28 years ago…

HubertManne ,

I just remember it seemed like more often than not I would come to a windows machine in the lab and it would be in a bad state and I would restart it and it was fine and much less often I would encounter a mac in a bad state but a reboot would not bring it back and I would have to bring it to the attention of the support person on shift.

I_Miss_Daniel ,

Could be.

I think what I didn’t like was they often simply froze. There was no error message, so you had to just try different things to see if you could get it stable.

HubertManne ,

were the windows error messages that useful. I mean im thinking of the blue screen garbage.

HubertManne ,

So early to mid nineties the macs were way easier to do graphs off of spreadsheets as office and excel did not really come into their own and lotus was a bear. It the main thing I used them for outside of the neat networked tank game.

thouartfrugal ,
@thouartfrugal@lemmy.world avatar

In my high school we had several of the Compact Macintosh models and I remember using them in two classes. One was English where we used a word processor. The other was more interesting: some sort of computer literacy course where we wrote HyperCard programs on the Mac.

Apart from the HyperCard stuff I found the courses and Macintosh computers quite dull. Maybe because I had been using Amiga computers for years at this point, and knew “The Fastest Apple Mac is an Amiga” (piped).

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