Basically this all started in a pit thread regarding Mac bringing out its own version of a PC tablet , and I made the assumption of microsoft investing in Mac ,that it constituted a bail out.
While looking up information from that time , since I can quite clearly remember mac fans were inscensed with Jobs , for probably a lot of reasons , but selling out might have been the one that I assumed meant being bailed out.
Anyways ,this came up on a link , and curious as to how many people had their own stories about having to switch from the duece to the Macintosh.
I always here windows horror stories , so pony up folks.
At the time of the bailout, Apple’s Independant Software Vendors needed some real assurances that OSX was going to make it out alive. The prime requirement was Photoshop and Office. When Gates’ big head appeared on the screen behind jobs, Adobe announced they were going to port, too. OSX would be real. Without that, OSX may never have come off. Without the ISV’s it was dead in the water and may well have killed Apple off entirely.
Now, OS9 had a number of problems (though its UI was great) Ive heard of persistent sound issues and a heck of a lot of crashes - probably worse than Win2000 or XP, and maybe as bad as 98 depending on how well you took care of it. Oddly, the Macaddicts tend to say that there were no problems with it whatsoever, ever, which actually hurt the Mac, as people were not likely to believe any hype (even real hype).
OS 9 (and its predecessors MacOS 8 and System 7 for that matter) apparently were more stable on some machines than others, and for some people & their work habits than for others.
There were certainly specific programs and extensions and control-panels in combination with machine and specific OS version that were more likely than others to vaporlock your whole machine, and it is true that the entire memory space was one unprotected and one misbehaving bit of software, or misbehaving software combo (more likely) could indeed bring the whole thing down. Repeatedly.
Me, I had extremely stable experiences with MacOS 8.6 and then 9.0.4 on pre-USB Macs if I stayed away from loading flash-powered websites (easy, just remove the plugin). I would regularly launch more than 16 programs and be working (or playing around) in several while the important one(s) (usually FileMaker) was doing something time-consuming that didn’t require my immediate input.
MacOS X did not, for me, catch up to the stability of my MacOS 9 environment until after version 10.2 and the new/upgraded applications that were of that era. While so many early adopters were talking about the wonderful oh so much more stable world of OS X, I would reboot in 9 if I wanted to get any serious work done and could not afford crashes. Well, OK, the OS itself, OS X, hardly ever crashed. But the applications would croak left and right (losing my work as they did so). The Finder would sometimes die (leaving me with no way to do anything with my still-alive OS short of a hard restart or ssh’ing in from someone else’s computer).
Now, keep in mind that I wreck very stable operating systems just by staring hard at them. I completely nuked a Windows NT Workstation 11 minutes into my first use thereof, so thoroughly that it could not be salvaged and the HD had to be reformatted and reghosted. So I’m not saying that MacOS X in the 10.0 and 10.1 days was a badly unstable OS, just that it was too much so to be useful to me.
“Classic” MacOS (anything pre-X) was fairly stable for me, but to get that stability required some careful user management – you had to make sure your system wasn’t weighted down with extensions, you turned off “virtual memory” (not real VM, but a half-assed workaround), you didn’t run more than two or three apps at a time, stuff like that. As long as you didn’t try to push the system too hard, it was stable.
(Granted, I also avoided the entire System 7.x fiasco, so my experiences may be slightly better than some folks in that regard. System 7 was a total train wreck of an OS, from what I gathered.)
MacOS X, needless to say, has been nothing but stunningly stable for me. I started with 10.1 about three years ago, I can count application crashes on the fingers of one hand, and I still haven’t experienced the “Grey screen of death” (kernel panic). New OS upgrades actually make my computer run faster, I can run a dozen heavy-duty programs without care, and I trust the computer to keep running so much that I simply assume everything will work – which it does. If we disregard the times I’ve rebooted the computer for some fundamental software upgrade, I’d easily have an uptime of 700+ days. I even have a little clock on my desktop that tells me how long I’ve gone between reboots, just because I like seeing how high I can make it go.
Or, as heard recently on Slashdot, “Those Mac zealots aren’t just elitist morons, working on a Mac actually is like receiving a blowjob!”
It was more complicated than that. The Apple II proved to be a much more durable platform than anybody expected, due to the huge installed software base. Once the Apple II had reached maturity - once improved versions like the Apple II+ and Apple IIe had replaced the original - Apple tried to introduce successors like the Apple III. Unfortunately, the Apple III - despite its Apple II compatability mode - was a huge failure. Then Apple introduced the revolutionary, but hugely overpriced Apple Lisa, which was also a huge failure. So anyone looking to upgrade from their Apple II had to be wary that whatever came next would also fail. Also, when the Macintosh was released, it was very expensive compared to the Apple II. Many didn’t see the value, especially as GUIs like GEM were beginning to be released for the 8-bit computers. So many users took a wait-and-see attitude towards the Macintosh. Apple ended up producing Apple II variants (like the IIc and ending in the IIgs) much longer than they expected.
Commodore had many of the same diffficulties when they tried to phase out the venerable Commodore-64 in favour of the infinitely superior Amiga.
