When a program crashed in OS 7/8/9, it would often take down your whole system due to lack of memory protection. Also setting max RAM for each application one by one was tedious and annoying. While I wasn’t a huge fan of the skeuomorphic bubbly OS X interface, I was ecstatic to leave all that memory management nonsense behind.

I’ve used Macs all of my adult life, my first Mac came with System 7, and then up to Mac OS 8 and beyond. I’ve used every iteration of Mac OS since.

System 7, Mac OS 8, and Mac OS 9 were in a word: FUNctional! By that I mean the ol’ Apple tagline “it just works” wasn’t just marketing. It really did just work. Never crashed, no viruses, just easy, smooth, simple functionality.

And it was FUN to use. Since things did what they were supposed to do, and the system was build from the ground up to be intuitive for anyone - from children to the elderly, there weren’t any struggles to get stuff to do what you wanted, and especially the later versions, the OS interface was highly customizable. You could modify the window skins, scroll bars, icons, schemas, everything. Want to make your Mac look like a tropical fish aquarium, with all the windows swimming sound and making glub glub sounds when you opened files? Easy. Want it to be no-nonsense black & white fast as hell pro system? No problem.

Sometimes people got carried away and overdid it with the customizations, and they’d brick their computers (I was an Apple certified tech for a while and had to repair many a file system) - and that was even a fun challenge.

Ultimately, pre-OSX MacOS was a great product of its time. It was different from Windows - and that’s what threw off many Windows users - they’d try to approach MacOS as if it were a WinPC, and things weren’t where they expected them to be, but if you learned MacOS (which was easy) you’d find it did everything you needed it to do.

I don’t follow your comment that the current MacOS “being more fisher priced down in looks,” I think it looks very sleek & professional, but whatever. To each their own.

Windows ME was released a year before OS X, so that’s not really the era to compare. Also, Windows 2000 was pretty solid. Before Windows 95 there’s simply no comparison, the Mac was much better.

Classic Mac OS might as well be part of the 90s kid starter pack (Kid Pix usually is). Macs were ubiquitous in American schools.

It was pretty intuitive, especially if you grew up on it. It was also still fairly easy to trigger crashes and break things, but maybe not for more normal people.

They were fantastic to use. I remember using ResEdit back in the day to change my menu names in the Finder, knowing what every system extension did so I could delete non essential ones to speed up the system.

Unlike these days, you spent more time getting work done, rather than fighting the application or OS.

I loathe how new OS’s and programs change the UI / UX these days and make it worse every time. Looking at you Adobe / Microsoft!

I had to support the damn things for a university. Crash prone bastards they were. The windows 3.11 and 95 boxes in the same environment were so much more stable than the pre osx macs of the time.

The earlier ones - classics and the like were pretty stable.

I loved it dearly. There were lots of cool customizations that were possible because the OS wasn’t locked down pre-internet. There was a system extension to have Oscar the Grouch pop up in the Trash and sing when deleting files. There were GUI customizations that radically changed the interface. iTunes Visualizer was amazing to watch while playing music on LSD.

Someone figured out how to trick the AOL client to think you were in their Support section (which wasn’t billed against your allotment of monthly hours) and released AOL4Free so you could run forever without extra billing. Eudora was a fine email client that I only remember because other people talk about how much they liked it. I was too young to work and so received very few emails at the time, but I know I hated whatever came after it; I think maybe Outlook Express? We had to troubleshoot system extensions that had incompatibilities and used a tool that aided in a binary search of disabling some systematically across reboots. You could customize apps with a tool called ResEdit (a resource fork editor for attributes like icons and buttons).

The most important part (to me) at the time: The text looked beautiful. I could never understand how anyone using the janky Windows fonts didn’t look at MacOS and immediately think to themselves, wtf my computer must be garbage. Being a publishing-first platform really made our typefaces shine by comparison.

I used a Mac SE/30 running OS 7 quite a bit in the early 90’s. I remember it being incredibly reliable; in fact, I can’t even remember what a crash looked like on a Mac, whereas I can still picture the BSOD from Windows 3.1.

I don’t remember noticing much difference in snappiness or intuitiveness between Mac and Windows back then though. Both were pretty easy to learn, even for people with limited computer experience. Anything with a hard drive felt snappy at the time, because the previous generation of computers all ran on floppy disks which were slow as molasses.

Oh I liked it a lot. In the early 90s, I had enough UI extensions running that OS7 looked exactly like BeOS. Gaming life was a lot of Bungie and AmbrosiaSW games and shareware games. So many shareware games. I established my first gamer tag at that time when playing A-10 Attack and A-10 Cuba. You want to talk about Nintendo-hard… Bungie’s Myth - The Fallen Lords was super-hard in single player, and the cross-platform multiplayer was amazeballs. I miss that game so much. Did all my Warcraft RTS playing, and waited a few agonizing months for the mac version of Starcraft to come out. Coincidentally, it was around then that I started doing file sharing through Carracho and Hotline

Sorry if off-topic. You can try it here: https://macos9.app (or 8 if you replace the 9 with 8)

I had an ugly old Macintosh and it sucked because nothing I wanted worked on it and none of the things that did work were of any use.

First started using Macs with OS7 and I find the whole Mac vs. Windows arguments silly. Windows 386, 3.1, and 3.11 were garbage, yes, but all that changed with Windows 95 and it instantly went head and shoulders above MacOS.

OSX didn’t come about until 2001. So Windows had the edge for 6 years. To give you some idea, the initial G3 iMacs that came out in 1998 were still running OS8.

The big problem with using a Mac back then is that Steve Jobs had his own ideas about the way things should work and the lack of compatability with other industry standards was a problem.

Example: Getting my Palm Pilot to sync with my iMac was a NIGHTMARE. I worked with Palm support for several weeks and we finally got it working, if the dock was connected to the iMac directly. The USB ports on the keyboard didn’t carry enough voltage to operate properly.

Windows machine? No problem… until Windows 98, when Microsoft decided to prioritize Windows CE devices and intentionally broke Palm functionality. That was fun! Took a while to get the driver updates to fix that one!

I used to joke that the last Mac I used was the first one they made that had colour - I’ve used every Mac from the seminal one up to and including the Color Classic (MacOS 1 up to 7) - but my last job gave me a MacBook. I was curious about it since I’ve seen many a coworker love them, but I soon found myself hating the damn thing so much that I ended up installing the work tools on my own Linux-laden ThinkPad.

Used to be, they were fast and no nonsense, simply effective and efficient work horses. No doubt they still are, but it was fighting med in everything I wanted it to do. What do you mean “there’s no way to mount a USB stick on MACOS”?!

Hardware wise they’re still brilliant wrt. power and battery life, but getting a 2nd (or, gasp, even 3rd) monitor to work with it? Yikes what a shit show that was. Truly a walled garden, I stand by my usual words of “they’re excellent machines if you want to use them exactly as Apple intended.”

…sorry for going off track. So, back in the day. There was MacWrite, MacPaint, Aldus PageMaker (which, then, was way more useful for actual publishing work than after the Adobe take-over), and a ton of games! Granted, you only had 512*whatever in pure black and white, but it was crisp and the games had excellent sound. Pinball Construction Set had 4-voice digital sound and flawless physics (hmm, except I don’t actually remember if it had a Tilt feature). Oh yeah, add in AppleTalk which blew Novell and Windows for Workgroups plain out of the water. The ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) connector predates PS/2 and curiously allowed a Mac to have any number of keyboards and two mice connected, something we made good use of when gaming.

There was the ImageWriter which could do plain copy paper rather than Leparello paper and had exquisite resolution compared to the clunky 8-pin DOS offerings. Really, the Mac SE and the ImageWriter II are, in my mind, the pinnacle of industrial design - at least of the 80s era.

Thanks for reading all that. You should go have a look at folklore.org if you’re interested in stories from the inside.

I didn’t use it myself, but the parents of a friend of mine. They had two macs of different generations.

On the newer one we played command & conquer (although not being able to right click to cancel placing a construction was annoying).

We didn’t use the older one a lot, except that the Screensaver was also a game of some sorts, kind of a cross between Asteroids and some 2d space exploration game.

It would crash every fifteen minutes…

So early to mid nineties the macs were way easier to do graphs off of spreadsheets as office and excel did not really come into their own and lotus was a bear. It the main thing I used them for outside of the neat networked tank game.