[Ti] How to remove OS9

[Kynan Shook]

The decision was certainly reinforced by the fact that they don't want 
to encourage OS 9 use any more, however you're missing what is probably 
a stronger reason; for every new Mac, they have to rewrite portions of 
the OS to allow new features to work.  Every new technology that comes 
out needs a rewrite or brand new code in at least a few places, if not 
many; the G5 (plus its U3 memory controller, and tons of other new 
logic board components), Serial ATA, USB 2.0, FireWire 800, BlueTooth, 
Airport Extreme, the backlit keyboard, new graphics cards, etc. etc. 
etc.  It is not financially feasible to continue development of a 
product that has been end-of-lifed and will no longer generate 
revenues.  If you need it, they still sell an old PowerMac G4 that will 
boot OS 9.  There really wasn't much sense in pouring tons and tons of 
man-hours into the old OS any more, however.  The OS 9 that shipped 
with the last PowerMac capable of OS 9 booting didn't have complete 
support for all of its features - IIRC, the fastest ATA bus didn't work 
(or didn't work at full speed?) under OS 9, or something like that.  
It's been a while since I've thought about OS 9, really.

Personally, I haven't had OS 9 (not even Classic) on any of my personal 
machines for about 2 years now, and I didn't use Classic much at all 
before then, either.  I have a demo machine for one of my jobs that I 
keep Classic on in case a customer wants to see it in action, but I've 
never actually needed to use it (even for a demo).
In my other job (hardware repair of Macs for an Apple Authorized 
Service Provider) I almost never see OS 9 any more; I'd say maybe once 
or twice per month I see somebody running OS 9, and as often as not 
that's just because of complete ignorance of the existence of OS X as 
anything else.

Anyway, there are certainly many people that still need (or just want) 
OS 9 for some reason or another, but they are a dwindling minority.  It 
wouldn't have made much sense for Apple to continue pouring thousands 
of dollars into its development.


Dennis Fazio <dfz at mac.com> writes:
> --On Wednesday, May 26, 2004 04:28 PM -0400 John Griffin 
> <jwegriffin at mac.com>
> wrote:
>> So, when is some genius going to come along and write a hack that 
>> will allow
>> machines that will not boot into 0S9 to do so?
>
> I believe that is not possible since there is either hardware or 
> firmware
> missing or such a task would require knowledge or information about the
> system that is not available outside of Apple. I think Apple did what 
> was
> necessary to make sure OS 9 has no chance of survival into the future.