Booting in OS 9

How many years has OS X been out now?

Any reputable company who wishes to continue supporting the Mac platform should surely have OS X versions of their software by now. Why should we have to boot into OS 9 ?

They aren't developing OS 9 anymore and so it can't be made to work on new system architecture. Think about it.

Can you boot an OS 9-capable G4 into OS 8?

Can you boot a Rev A. iMac into OS 7?

Can you boot a Quadra into System 6?

Think about it.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the children's software market is mostly not OSX native. And don't tell me about Finding Nemo. I'm trying not to buy anything new unless it IS updated but at the moment that means we don't buy much.

I have three kids at different ages and a wide range of software, some of which won't install or run in Classic and requires rebooting.

I know kids' software is not on the minds of most of you guys but it's a major computer usage area which isn't being updated very aggressively.

Very different situation, there.

OS X is a complete rewrite, with totally new foundations.

Most System 7 apps work in 8 or 9 regardless; or have been updated to do so. Etc.

Not so for OS X.

I've rebooted five or six times in the last few days, back to OS9, to play Korea or UT or something similar.

Pfft. In a perfect world, maybe; but the fact that companies SHOULD have updated software out doesn't help the fact that many do NOT, so when it comes down to it, the end user gets ****ed over.

I understand why Apple did it, but I'd like to be able to boot into 9 with my G5. I have customers who have files that were created on pre-OS X machines and to get any work done on those files, OS 9 is much faster. Classic is just too slow. So when I bought my G5, I kept my old G4 because it still dual boots. And, like Cipher said, there are still games that haven't been optimized for X, like UT (I actually like the TacOps mod for UT).

I haven't booted to OS 9 since last week... I still prefer UT in 9, and some older games just don't work in X. Also a 3D program I use on the occasion used to work in pre-10.2.8, now it doesn't, and my SCSI UMAX scanner doesn't work in X either. I'm a big SCSI fan BTW.

Not being able to boot into 9 is the only reason why I haven't bought a new G5, and likely won't for a year or so. A new Powerlook III is expensive, plus all the other software I need would double the cost of a G5 system. I'm not complaining, because I'm quite happy with my setup. But having a dual boot option would be wonderful.

Happy New Year everyone!

If you need a machine that runs Windows, buy a PC.

If you need a machine that runs OS X, but a late model Mac.

If you need a machine that runs OS 9, buy one that runs OS 9.

Just don't expect one machine to do all of the above well.

Chris

I have a G4 and still running Mac OS 9.2.2. All of my software compatable with 9.

It wasn't something that was 'taken away' - it was just something that wasn't added.

Each new machine model uses different hardware (or else why would you want a new machine?) Each new machine had to have parts of OS 9 re-written in order to be able to boot on the new machine.

Apple has decided that devoting development dollars and manpower to OS 9 is a losing proposition, and has straddled supporting two very different OS releases for long enough.

OS X is far more flexible in addressing the hardware it can run on. This means that each new release of hardware won't require a specific OS X cd for that model unless it's something as huge as the processor changeover in G5, which required 10.2.7 while everyone else used 10.2.6.

If you could make a dollar-value case that Apple will make X hundreds of thousands of dollars by continuing to update OS 9 to boot on new machines, I'm sure they'd be happy to consider devoting one or two developers to the task, but unless you can come up with a way to pay the developers salaries and show a profit, it just no longer makes sense to devote that effort. If you truly need OS 9, get one of the last top of the line powermacs that ran it, or pick up a gigabit ethernet or newer machine and upgrade it's processor and enjoy all the blazing fast OS 9 you like.

Wanting the machine I just spent $1500 on to run both OS 9 and X is NOT an unreasonable request. You can't possibly compare it to running OS X and Windows on one machine. All the later Power Mac G4's and many other Macs from the last few years were dual-boot, so it can be done.

And I also agree with Cipher - just because software companies SHOULD be rewriting software for OS X, doesn't mean they all are. I would like to run UT and Descent 3 on my PowerBook in OS 9 and I can't. I can run them in classic but there is a clear speed penalty. On my 1 GHz 12-inch, UT runs about as well as it did on my old Pismo 400 MHz.

I'm sorry, but I won't listen to any of the apologists in here saying that Apple shouldn't need to include OS 9 boot capability. They do - there is a lot of great software out there that will never be made OS X-native. And don't tell me to buy a second new computer to run the stuff.

Rubbish. My current G4 and iBook 900 can do it just fine. Heh.



Semantic rubbish, again.

It most certainly was taken away, given the previous generations had the capability.

Victor - I hear you, and this is a much more reasonable argument than those before you. However, Apple would not be the first company to have legacy obligations. I say it's all part of the business. If you are going to sell computers and you want to have loyal customers, sometimes you have to spend some money to keep them happy. This includes writing sofware for older machines, developing upgrades, etc. I am disappointed that Apple hasn't spent the time and money to keep new machines bootable is OS 9.

EDIT: There is one guy in here who said that the only thing keeping him from buying a G5 is that it's not bootable in OS 9. Sure, this is not a statistical random sample, but if there is one guy in here, then perhaps there are more elsewhere. Apple might lose some money doing it, but I doubt it would be as much as you think.

baloney!

apple did it to nudge [force] people to migrate to os x faster and developers to upgrade their products to x.

os 9 is still very usable and as long as machines could boot into it people were inclined to stick with it because they were familiar with it.

"Taken away" vs "not added" is, perhaps debateable for the G4 machines. For the G5s, I don't think it is. Would any of those loudly decrying the lack of OS9 bootability like to volunteer to root through the OS9 source code, and locate all the points where assumptions were made about four byte addresses and registers? And has the fact that your new machine doesn't run Descent 3 as well as your older machine stopped your older machine working?

I'm guessing you haven't been around long enough to remember the System 6 -> System 7 transition then.

System 7 broke nearly everything. Close to none of the System 6 software worked on it, especially games. System 7 broke apps left and right. And it didn't even have a Classic environment to keep the old stuff working like X does.

It was a much worse situation than OS 9 -> OS X. But Apple didn't waste manpower then by continuing to support System 6 for all eternity.

Heh.

Cipher would have been about six at the time.

IIRC, Apple even brought out a compatibility checker that would scan your entire hard drive and give you page-long lists of all the software that *definitely* needed updating, and a somewhat shorter one of the software it wasn't sure about, and about two lines of software that were (remember the stickers?) "System 7 Savvy".

PLUS, I had to pay a couple hundred dollars to upgrade my Mac SE to 2.5 MB RAM to run it!

-s*

What if Apple released all the OS9 source code to the public so users could try to make their machines boot OS9? Or made OS9 free?

They did it with System 7.5.3 and should do it with OS8, 8.5, and probably even OS9.

There are plenty of programmers working to keep OS9 around. Instead, they could be working to move to OSX. Either way, the end result is the same.

What are we gonna say when Apple moves to OS11?

I doubt that those with the technical skills to do that (assuming it is possible - see my comment above) would be interested in doing it.
Personally, I'm probably going to be pleased with myself for taking the extra bit of trouble to ensure that all my important work is fully portable between Solaris, IRIX, Linux, OSX....

Then why the **** did you start this topic? You are just another looney ranter. The world moves forwards, get over yourself.

I just wonder when this move to Mac OS 11 will occur. Is it possibly with the release of the G6?

There is no Mac OS 11. The current OS should last indefinitely into the future. The OS 9 foundation couldn't support modern features. But the foundation of OS X can.

Chris

I don't agree. Consumers are stupid and will get confused if they don't differentiate between future releases of OS X. I don't know what the naming scheme will be but it has to change at some point. Even if I was wrong about that they only have 6 more revisions of the operating system left before they will be out of .1 increments.

Not true. Version numbers only look decimal, but they don't have to be. So we can have 10.4, 10.5 ... 10.9, 10.10, 10.11 etc.

Not only that, but Apple has distinguished major version of the OS more by the cat name than by the version number. Thus we refer to Puma, Jaguar, Panther, etc...

Chris

I hope not. It would be a bit of tragedy if UNIX is the best OS the human race can think up.

Good post and good point. I was doing pre-press at the time with all the Aldus, Adobe and Quark apps and all our extra DAs that we needed for font management, RIP checkers, file organisation etc broke with System 7 until they came in a new box with the little "System 7 Savy" sticker on it. Being pre-press, we were quite conservative about the whole thing and it took us more than a year before we had finally moved everything over to System 7.

What people also forget is that Apple's marketshare was much bigger then, around 15% IIRC, and there was much more incentive for developers to speedily update apps. Today though, I think it is only due to OSX that Apple is still here.