[LINK] Re: Mac OS Back-Compatibility

[Jim Birch]

Roger Clarke wrote:
> 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 ran a network with mixed workstation environment - an advertising 
agency - at the time, with a bunch of high powered Macs graphic design 
studio boxes.  We moved to OSX fairly quickly and while there were some 
problems, there were a lot of improvements too.  In that environment 
there is a continual process of upgrades to hardware because the new 
machines work "meaningfully "faster (unlike the average Win/Office user 
who gets only marginal benefit from new hardware.)  The newer Macs ran 
OSX, so we moved to OSX.  Running in a mixed OS9 emulation mode was not 
a good idea for both for speed and reliability and the newer versions of 
software optimised for OSX and newer processors ran better and faster, 
so we upgraded more or less all software.  Emulation probably improved 
over time too, but we just avoided the issue. Crash rates were higher 
with the early versions of OSX but it stabilised.  The networking of OSX 
- being nix-based - was way easier to wrangle than OS9.

Jim