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

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Jobs was his own worst enemy for a while on the compatibility issue.

New OS launches- all your old programs don't work on it.

Want to use a floppy to transfer files between a Dos/Win and a Mac? Nope, not compatible. When USB drives started coming out they dropped all support for floppy drives, even in machines with them installed.

Constant driver issues with all sorts of things. Many never got resolved. To be fair the market share for Mac's was so tiny, offering support for them didn't make business sense.

Want to play a game? Good luck. The majority of games didn't work on Mac. Same reason as the drivers.

As for stability issues, for a while I ran a computer lab for a college 50:50 win/Mac machines. They both crashed about equally as often.