Today I took a nostalgic ride on an old iMac running Mac OS 9. I acquired this old iMac from work since they no longer needed it. It is running Mac OS 9.0.4. I had some fun installing different applications and just noticing the differences and similarities between OS 9 and OS X. I never ran OS 9 back in its prime, but I wanted to. I was unable to afford a Mac back then, so I was stuck in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 land around that time.
As I was playing around with this old system I found that Netscape 7.0.2 was the latest version of a gecko based browser - and it is discontinued both in support and development (any version). I found that iCab is a web browser that seems to be the last one standing that is in active development for the OS 9 platform, however, it was so slow I opted to browse around with Netscape 7.0.2.
The latest version of Flash I was able to find was 7 - and 8 is required for my girls to play around on BuildABearVille.com and CartoonDollEmporium.com, so they could not enjoy it. :-)
Although I enjoyed playing with this old OS, I was reminded of how much progress has been made with OS X and today's hardware. This blog posting, for example, could not even be done on the old OS 9 machine due to outdated browser standards (I did try with iCab and it came the closest to allowing me to post but the moment I put the cursor in the subject field the browser crashed and I did not try it again).
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