Hacker News Reader

Comment by haroldp | Hacker News Reader

I mean, I worked for years as a professional web developer on MacOS 8 and 9 machines. The stability wasn't great, but it was fine.

View on HN

Same history here, but to be honest, a good day with Mac OS 7/8/9 was literally defined by having no forced reboots due to a crash. Especially somewhat heavy multitasking with Photoshop, BBEdit, Netscape and Eudora usually lead to a system crash once every few hours. You can tell the seasoned Mac user by them having seconds enabled on the menu bar clock, so they can see whether the machine is still doing anything :)

With later hardware and software, especially G3/G4 with Mac OS 9.x, the machine crashed less often, but usually still did at least a few times per week.

You could have stopped and started your list with “Netscape” causing crashes. IE for Mac was a “glass of ice water in hell” compared to Netscape.

Yes, for a while IE was the best browser for Mac, not just in terms of stability. But before that time, we had to make do with Netscape, as there wasn't really any worthwhile competition.

For a long time, the Mac version of IE 5 was one of the best browsers on the market. It used a completely different renderer from the Windows version; as a result, its CSS support was quite good. It even supported transparent PNGs, which the Windows version of IE struggled with for years.

> Same history here, but to be honest, a good day with MacOS 7/8/9 was literally defined by having no forced reboots due to a crash.

I recall having unexpected reboots every few days (except on systems with complicated SCSI chains, what a nightmare), but my bar for system extensions was also unreasonably high. I remember feeling a little sick seeing multiple rows of extensions when friends restarted their Macs.

I gave up the "Oscar the Grouch" system extension where said Oscar sung a little song on emptying the Trash only reluctantly, but doing so did make my system more stable.

> Photoshop, BBEdit, Netscape and Eudora

This exact combo, plus MacSSH, Ircle and SoundJam, for years.

Of course, I only mentioned the essentials :) I wasn't much of an IRC person, and I remember using a different SSH client, but don't recall which one. Also, Fetch.

Well now we are enemies! I was Anarchie over Fetch all the way. Really all of the Stairways Software apps were tops.

same, but I pissed off Onno when I pirated Ircle, and ended up going with a different program. ShadowIRC. :) still friends on Facebook with the developer all these years later.

Well we all pirated it, but I think actually I ended up paying for it in the end. I did spend some time on ShadowIRC. I have a vague recollection that that author hung out on Undernet and his website had an animated gif of the moon that I spent WAY too many hours trying to duplicate in PhotoShop. DShadow?

yep, that's the guy. the channel #Macintosh is still there and gets the occasional user logging in from one of the old clients.

Netscape, in general, was incredibly unstable. I remember 3.x crashing every half hour.

I recall OS 8 crashing often and loosing lots of work. Back then I was doing graphic design work and just getting into web programming. Photoshop, Illustrator and QuarkXpress all day with those apps crashing unexpectedly. MS Word for Mac was awful back then too. OS 9 was much better and Windows 2000 was actually really good. It's great that that sort of instability is a thing of the past!

"Save early, save often!"

As another respondent also remembered it, I would probably get less than one crash a day. Windows 95 had it's own (multifarious) problems. I was maintaining servers with years of uptime and definitely looking forward to OSX. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com