I used to use both, but I don’t know if I would like to go back to it now. It used to be comforting and familiar to boot my old iMac back into OS 9 after spending some time only using OS X, but now I don’t know if I’d feel that way.
Well, actually I do use it from time to time on the old Power Mac, but not for any length of time.
Yeah, I remember how scared I was to move to OS X at first… a month later using OS 9 felt like computing with one hand tied behind my back. I used an OS 9 machine again a few days ago, and was struck by a few things:
The recent applications and documents menus are incredibly useful.
Although I liked the spatial Finder at the time, I now find that every folder opening its own window is incredibly annoying.
Tabbed windows (sticky windows? whatever they’re called) are really cool.
Well, what version was that on? I waited until Jaguar to make the move and loved it immediately, but I think if I’d started using OS X under 10.0 or 10.1 I would have been ready to switch back to OS 9.
I got my iMac with 10.0, but upgraded to 10.1 the day after I got it. My issue was more so trying to figure out where everything was. Speed wasn’t so much an issue, partly because the Mac I had before was glacial (100 MHz PowerPC 601 running OS 9 on a 500 MB hard drive ).
I (usually) managed to avoid the multi-window annoyance of OS 9 (and even OS X these days, to an extent) by always using list view, and simply viewing everything in one long window. Sometimes, though, it would get to me. Of course, nowadays, when I have a lot of Finder windows open, I can simply F10 them all into view, but it could be annoying in OS 9 with no Exposé (or Cmd-tilde to switch windows).
