I recently ran Mac OS 9 on an emulator, out of curiosity, after having been using modern macOS/OS X/whatever you call it for the last 10 years. Now, to set the context, I'm Russian, and back when classic Mac OS was current, Apple computers were generally stuff of legends. "Insanely expensive beautifully made things, very good with colors and fonts, that professional designers sometimes use and most people can't afford". Macs only started gaining popularity around the very end of 00s — probably not least because of the Intel transition and the ability to try out the OS as hackintosh.

Anyway. It was interesting to see how it evolved. There definitely are familiar elements and patterns, but it's... different. There's no dock. You can't minimize windows. The menu bar is there, but the item with the current app name is to the right and it's an app switcher; what is now in that item, is under File, so you do File -> Quit. There are no status/tray icons in the menu bar, they're instead in a separate bar at the bottom left. There are desktop shortcuts to programs, something that feels Windows-only to me because no one does that in the modern macOS. Files don't have extensions, but instead rely heavily on extended attributes in the file system to remember what type the file is and what program it opens in. There's some third-party software installed with the system, and craploads more bundled on the installation CD for you to install manually. Inclusion of third-party software with the OS felt very un-Apple to me. And, the most perplexing thing, there's no support for scroll wheel and right mouse button! I understand that Macs of the time came with single-button mice, but c'mon.