An OS 9 odyssey: Why these Mac users won’t abandon 16-year-old software

Illa than ill

Cameron Kaiser develops OS 9 Web browser Classilla and its PPC OS X counterpart TenFourFox(as the names suggest, both are based on Mozilla’s Firefox browser). As Cunningham found, even with a browser under (semi-)active development, the Web is horrible on OS 9. Many websites are completely unusable. Ars just barely scrapes by. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are down to the barebones, too. This, Kaiser notes, is often enough all on its own for many people to justify leaving Apple’s classic Mac OS in the last millennium. “I really intensely dislike the idea that the ability to run Facebook is the sole determining factor of whether a computer is obsolete to some people,” he told me over e-mail. “But that’s the world we live in now.”

In terms of raw computing power, however, Kaiser says that G4 and G3 Macs have the necessary power to properly load most sites on the Web. He notes that comparable Pentium 3 and 4 systems cope fine with light browsing of the modern Web, so the problem facing OS 9 as a platform for going online is instead its software. Things like toolchain support and drivers and OS-level implementations of things like multithreading and multiprocessing are where the OS 9 environment is lacking. With Classilla, Kaiser is very, very slowly battling against these.

“I don’t think anyone who worked on the Mac OS 9 compatible Mozilla will dispute the build system is an impressive example of barely controlled disaster,” he says. It uses scripts and hacks and only actually builds into an executable app under very finicky, hard-to-replicate conditions that Kaiser suggests scared away “all but the most motivated (or masochistic) contributors” to both Classilla and the original OS 9 branch of the Mozilla project.

The longterm viability of Classilla development is harmed by toolchain limitations. Kaiser sings the praises of the CodeWarrior IDE (that’s short for integrated development environment, or “app used to write, fix, and maintain code” in layman’s terms). But the code he inherited from Mozilla was essentially locked to a specific version of CodeWarrior that isn’t compliant with the newest versions of the C++ programming language. This means Classilla’s JavaScript interpreter will remain painfully slow, and it’s unlikely to get much of anything from newer versions of Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine.

“I find these challenges stimulating,” he says. “I like the feeling of getting something to do tasks it wasn’t originally designed to do, sort of like a utilitarian form of the demoscene.” Kaiser believes such constraints force creative, innovative solutions to some problems and serious breaches of coding best practices for others. “Making the browser into a series of patches upon patches is surely asking for trouble, but there’s something liberating about that level of desperation,” he continues. “Anything from amazingly bad hacks to simply accepting a certain level of wrong behavior in one module because it fixes something else in another to ruthlessly saying some things just won’t be supported, so there.”

Kaiser’s decisions about the best way forward for Classilla don’t always go down well with all of the browser’s few thousand or so users. The most controversial change came in 2012, when he altered its user agent to prefer mobile content. This worked pretty well at the time, since most of the mobile-optimized Web was very lightweight and simple. “I even ate my own dogfood and took nothing but an OS 9 laptop with me on the road periodically,” he says. “It was enough for e-mail, some basic Google Maps, and a bit of social media.” (Kaiser told me he once took it to tech journalist Leo Laporte’s podcast studio, much to Laporte’s wonderment.)

Few people still use Classilla for anything more than accessing internal sites or files on a server, so Kaiser shifted his limited development time (TenFourFox and his day job keep him busy) to just improving his own browsing experience by introducing site-specific optimizations. However, at least one of his users genuinely needs the dev support. “I get occasional reports from one user who for reasons of his particular disability cannot use OS X,” Kaiser says. “Classilla is pretty much his only means of accessing the Web.

Music to their ears

The largest concentration of OS 9 diehards seems to be in audio production and music composition. The Mac has long been popular in the sound-making business, so there’s a plethora of professional software and hardware available for OS 9. Two favored digital audio workstations (DAWs) from the era, DigiDesign’s Pro Tools 5 and Prosoniq’s SonicWORX Power Bundle, were both made freeware in the mid-2000s. Other old DAWs are cheap to buy secondhand and easily pirated. That’s only the enabling factor, however—these users also hold a reverence for classic Mac OS.

This goes back to the days when Macs were criticized for dumbing down computing, as though it were a bad thing that your grandparents could operate a computer. Apple stringently followed its own human interface guidelines, and the Macintosh community expected third-party developers to do so, too. The result was that you could predict how most things would work, and this made it easier to offload mental processing such that you could do stuff on autopilot. Once you recognized the logic to it, the interface disappeared.

Classic Mac OS proponents like to single out thespatial Finder in particular as one of OS 9’s biggest advantages over OS X and Windows. They deem it more intuitive, more natural, more coherent than the Windows Explorer or OS X versions of the Finder. As John Siracusa wrote, in the spatial Finder “each window is permanently, unambiguously associated with a single folder” and everything stays where you left it in the manner in which you left it. For this reason, one person I talked to, Emilio Souto, argued that the classic Mac OS interface is better than anything released since. “The mix of power and simplicity of this system is unique,” he said. “It’s pure art. The Mac OS 9 environment is easy to use and troubleshoot. It doesn’t disturb you from doing your main work, be it audio or whatever.”

You could describe OS 9 as a thinner operating system than modern-day Windows and OS X. “I’ve heard it said that OS 9 is just a loose jumble of libraries stacked under a file browser,” says Kaiser. “That’s really not too far off. The kernel, if you can call it that, is nearly non-existent—there’s a nanokernel, but it’s better considered as a primitive hypervisor. There is at best token support for memory protection and some multiprocessing, but none of it is easy and most of it comes with severe compromises.”

It’s definitely flawed, but these problems happen to also make it super fast and responsive. Even my 700 MHz iBook G3 flies when I boot it into OS 9 (as does my 300 MHz PowerBook G3 on OS 8.6). OS 9 feels noticeably snappier on a G4 machine than El Capitan does on a new Core i7 Mac with SSD storage. Audio people love this. They claim that the latency on their virtual instruments and recording and monitoring gear in OS 9 is miles better than anything else.

Swap back and forth repeatedly between the latest version of OS X and a Power Mac running OS 9, and you see what they’re getting at. Even the simplest tasks suddenly feel weighed down on OS X. In OS 9, you open a new Finder window and it appears instantaneously—with a subtle, almost-subliminal wireframe animation from the point of origin to its screen position. Do the same thing in El Capitan, and you have time to quickly glance away and back again before the window pops into existence.

Community

I found several websites and two Facebook groups meant as meeting places for classic Mac OS diehards, even including one for using System 7 today. But all but two of these seem to be ghost towns today. One of the two I already mentioned—the Facebook group “Mac OS 9 – it’s still alive!”—has fewer than 200 members and sustains mostly lighthearted discussion. The other is a website called Mac OS 9 Lives, which hosts a thriving audio-focused forum with around 1,500 members.

Bob “mrhappy” Boyer is one of the community members here. He works as a musician, producer, and audio engineer in a 10-piece band and at a recording studio. In the studio he works with modern gear, but at home it’s a different story. “Six years ago or so,” he tells me, “I began trying to ‘modernize’ my home setup, as it was still based around reel to reel tape recorders and Mac OS 9 gear.” He soon realized that it’d take a far larger financial investment than he could afford. A few years later, he noticed how cheap the older pro gear was getting. Tools and equipment that would have cost a fortune a decade ago were being abandoned or sold for a tiny fraction of their original price.

Boyer fell down the rabbit hole, so to speak. He has constructed his home studio around a Digidesign ProControl mixing and recording console and a Power Mac G4 running ProTools 5.1.3. Connected to that Mac via its four PCI expansion slots, he has an array of mixer cards and “other ‘obsolete’ items.” The setup would have cost tens of thousands of dollars 15 years ago, but he scrounged it together for far less off sites like eBay and Craigslist over the last few years.

“It can be quite fun being on the ‘cutoff’ edge and acquiring things/tools that I used to drool over back in the day,” Boyer says. All this old pro audio gear serves him well for writing, recording, and mixing his own music as well as for working on any bits he wants to bring home from the studio to finish.

The raw processing power of these older Macs does at times fall short of what’s required—or at least required to work without costly compromises. One senior forum member, Roman Thilenius (who goes by the handle IIO), explains that real-time processing “is the most effective way to do creative work” in audio and video production. Even the latest Intel-based computers sometimes fall to their knees beneath the load of real-time production, but PowerPC Macs from the turn of the century cross that threshold much sooner. Thilenius tells me he has built some custom audio software on his G4 that won’t actually work on the machine because it’s too slow.

Those custom audio apps may get a lifeline if any one of the community’s ambitious efforts to modify OS 9 succeeds. They’re aiming to make Mac OS 9 accept more powerful hardware. Not new PowerPC processors (yes, PowerPC lives on today in some areas of research, in game consoles such as the Wii U and as a CPU platform of choice for Amiga hobbyists). Nor x86 or x64 systems like the latest Intel Macs. They’re thinking more modest: late-model PowerPC Macs.