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Comment by Mikhail_Edoshin | Hacker News Reader

I've just bought an old PowerBook G4 precisely so that it could boot Mac OS 9 and I could install some old programs to play with. As I switched it on to see if it's OK, I was impressed by how quickly it started up its current Mac OS 10.4.

I still think classic Mac OS was a truly gem of UI and UX and things just went downhill from there :)

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I'm very much in agreement. Classic MacOS had a lot of great ideas, and it fit much better with Apple's unapologetic rhetoric. The switch to Unix was cool, but it represented a larger conflict of interests that made OSX and onward feel... wrong.

They employed right principles. Stability, for example or direct control.

I'm reading the "Patterns" book by Christopher Alexander, it's about architectural patterns that feel human and it very much relates to what's happening in the UI/UX area. E.g. a lot of traffic around tends to move people inside houses as they feel the outside is not theirs anymore.

Similarly UI that jumps around or reduces the interaction to answering questions also changes the behavior of users as they feel powerless. The current Mac OS is less guilty in this aspect, I guess, I'm ranting about the overall trend.

My first laptop had OS 7 I think and it was a bit of a nightmare of UX crashing totally daily or so. High Sierra that I'm now on is rock solid in comparison. The one thing I miss was the find feature. You could do find and start typing a filename and the thing would pop up in a fraction of a second. The modern experience of that isn't nearly so good.

I just bought Macintosh Classic. I want to do some retro programming at some point using old hardware & software.

The article seems dead, so maybe it's answered there, but can't you install OS 9 in a virtual machine?

I've found that the PowerMac era of hardware is emulated at a 'technically works but pretty janky' level. Particularly when emulating OS 9 rather than OS X.

It would need to be more than just a virtual machine, it would need to be an emulator. Different architecture, different endianness, etc.

I'd say it's a virtual machine employing emulation, just different vernacular.

This was my first attempt, but

a) SheepShaver doesn't quite emulate the experience, e.g. the mouse movements appear to have a slight lag, some icons don't draw, etc. and

b) I didn't manage to set up network there and found no guide of how to get files to that VM in any other way.

So overall I decided to just try a real machine and got it for around ~$50 in the local fleamarket. Tried Ebay first, found a great candidate (Powerbook G4 1Ghz/Ti, last model capable of booting Mac OS 9), but there was quite a few bidders and the price went up to ~$450, so I passed.

For me QEMU works very well for running OS9 on a contemporary mac. I don’t use it heavily so I can’t promise that it’s glitch free, but I’d recommend trying it before seeking out old hardware, unless you particularly want to run old hardware.

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