Mac OS Back-Compatibility [Was Re: [LINK] Microsoft]

[Roger Clarke]

At 13:29 +1000 6/8/06, Howard Lowndes wrote:
>I wonder how Apple went when they switched from OS9 to OSX.  Can any 
>of the Apple aficionados shed some light on the backward compat of 
>these two.

Patchily, and on the whole somewhat poorly.

I continue to use OS9 for MS Word 5.1a (1992 - straightforward and 
clean, but no revision-marking capability), MS Word 98 (a dreadful 
product, but at least it's pre-MS-spyware-phase), MS Excel 98 (fine, 
and nothing more is needed), PowerPoints 92 and 98 (ditto), RTF2HTML 
2.7.5 (it's time to move on, but if Dreamweaver was meant to be the 
future, it failed dismally).

The OS9 emulator creaks, and falls over a lot more frequently than 
OS9 did (which was reasonably often).

OSX is a serious disappointment as a whole.  I was going back to *nix 
after a break of well over a decade.  (Anyone want to read my 1986 
paper on 'why Unix isn't ready for prime time'?).  I assumed that 
*nix had been cleaned up and buried beneath sensible user-interfaces, 
and that Apple had further improved the user-interfaces and done some 
tinkering under the bonnet to make it (a) better and (b) theirs.

Not so.  The services went backwards, and it's seriously unstable - 
of the order of 3-8 crashes per week.  They come in all shapes and 
sizes, and I've yet to find anything to associate them with (apart 
from maybe the language I use when talking to the device).  Later 
versions since the original release seem to be no better than earlier 
ones.  The Spotlight (own-directories search) is simply useless - 
full of errors and with an incomprehensible user-interface, and not a 
patch on the beta of Sherlock.  I abandoned it, and reverted to a 
limited but effective freebie called EasyFind.

No, I'm not a happy Appler any more (and I'm a user since the second 
shipment of Macs to Australia in April 1984, and prior to that an 
occasional Apple II, IIe and Lisa user).

-- 
Roger Clarke                  http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
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Visiting Professor in Info Science & Eng  Australian National University
Visiting Professor in the eCommerce Program      University of Hong Kong
Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW