Mac OS 9

» see apple.com/macos9 as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i missed Mac OS 9 entirely. Wrong region and wrong stack. In 1999 i was a fifteen-year-old PC user in turkey working through high school on Windows 98 at home with a 33.6k modem. The mac install base in turkey at that point was small and lived mostly inside graphic-design studios in istanbul. The classic mac os never had a turkish-localized retail presence in any meaningful sense, and the home-user machines in my circle were all PCs running successive Windows versions from 98 through XP.

Apple released Mac OS 9 on October 23 1999. It was marketed as "The Best Internet Operating System Ever," which read as ambitious copy even at the time. The release added Sherlock 2 as the system-wide search tool, plus a Multiple Users feature that let several people share one machine with separate file spaces. The final point update was Mac OS 9.2.2, shipped December 5 2001, by which time the company had already released OS X 10.0 in march 2001 and OS X 10.1 in september.

The actual funeral was on May 22 2002 at the WWDC opening keynote. Steve Jobs walked out next to a black coffin that contained a boxed copy of Mac OS 9 and read a brief eulogy confirming that all new mac development would target OS X. The release that had shipped less than three years earlier was now officially dead at the company that had made it. The classic environment continued to live as a compatibility layer inside PowerPC versions of OS X up through 10.4 Tiger.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

Mac OS 9 was the last release of the cooperative-multitasking Mac OS lineage that had started with System 1 in 1984 and run through System 7, Mac OS 8 and into 9. Cooperative multitasking meant that an application that crashed could and frequently did take down the whole machine. The crash culture of the classic Mac was famous: the bomb dialog at runtime and the sad-mac icon at boot were both regulars in mac magazine letter columns through the 90s. OS 9 was the final iteration of that model.

The version added some genuine functional improvements on top of OS 8.6. Sherlock 2 unified file search with internet search through plug-in channels, while the new Multiple Users feature was a first stab at the kind of separate-account model that OS X would later deliver properly. Carbon API support was bolted on so that developers could start writing applications that would run on both Mac OS 9 and the new OS X line. The integration work was what kept the classic platform alive while OS X was being readied behind it.

~ the funny part ~

The May 22 2002 coffin keynote is the part of Mac OS 9's death that people still remember. Steve Jobs walked on stage at WWDC in his usual black turtleneck and stood next to a literal coffin to deliver a deadpan tribute to OS 9 in front of an audience of developers. He thanked the OS for its years of service, reading from a card. He then made it clear that any developer still targeting OS 9 was on borrowed time and that the OS X transition was the only forward path.

The bit was funny because it was also a real business decision. Apple was telling its developer base to stop investing in a platform with a known end date and to commit engineering resources to a successor that was still rough in places. The coffin made the message unmissable. The press coverage was substantial and the keynote remains one of the more-shared Apple moments from the early OS X era. As a piece of corporate theater it landed exactly the way the company intended.

~ what replaced it ~

Mac OS X was a different OS underneath. It was built on the NeXTSTEP code that Apple had acquired when it bought NeXT in 1996, which had brought Steve Jobs back to the company along with the technology. The kernel was a Mach-derived BSD unix. Protected memory and preemptive multitasking arrived for the first time on the mac side. The Aqua user interface was a new visual layer over an OS that had nothing structurally to do with the system that preceded it.

The last Mac that shipped with OS 9 as a bootable system was a re-issued Power Mac G4 Mirrored Drive Doors model from June 2003, which Apple discontinued in June 2004. After that the only way to boot OS 9 natively was to keep an older Mac running. Classic mode inside OS X kept the apps alive a little longer, but the support ended with the Intel transition in 2006. By the late 2000s Mac OS 9 was a museum artifact. The graphic-design shops that had been holding onto Quark XPress 4 on OS 9 had mostly migrated to InDesign on OS X, and the hardware that ran OS 9 natively was getting harder to find. The OS that Jobs had buried on stage in 2002 was actually buried in usage terms by around 2007.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »