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Macs Won't Boot Into Mac OS in 2003
Magnus Olsson writes "Apple announced at Apple Expo in Paris, that they are dropping the ability to boot into Mac OS after January 2003. It will still be possible to access Mac OS via the Classic environment under Mac OS X." Apparently, eWeek was right, and the final nail is being driven. So, where's mol for Mac OS X?
Can they really do this?
Apple has required minimum versions of system software to boot a Macintosh computer since at least 7.0.1, when the Classic II, LC II, and Quadra series couldn't boot anything before 7.0.1. It lets Apple gradually get rid of legacy hardware in a computer, something the PC side can't seem to do for some reason.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Apple even watched it happen once before, when they switched from 68k architecture, to PowerPC. They ended up having to include an interperater/emulator for 68k apps in later versions of Mac0S.
This is completely untrue.. PowerPC machines emulated 68K code from the start, which is often lauded as one of the most graceful computer transition in the industry's short history. Completely transparent, totally useable.
Oh, and yeah, Steve Jobs will not personally go around to Mac users' homes, deleting all old copies of MacOS 10 so you can all relax ...
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Apple *does* include the functionality to use OS7/8/9 apps in OSX, you just didn't bother to find that out. This article is about *ne hardware* not booting OS9 anymore - something that was bound to happen eventually, and not suprising if you know anything about the pairing of the Mac OS and Apple hardware. Essentially, Apple is just choosing not to continue to update OS9 for new hardware - which they've always had to do previously whenever new hardware was launched. Why should they update an OS they've long-since put on EOL, and which they already provide a solution for? Regardless, OS9 will still continune to boot within OSX, as it always has been able to, in the form of "Classic" - which will provide the exact capabilities you are attacking them for not providing.
Get your facts straight. You have a right not to like Apple - but at least know what you're talking about.
Apple is not explicitly doing anything to the hardware to prevent OS 9 booting that could otherwise occur. They are simply not bothering to update OS 9 to boot on the new hardware, since it is legacy code.
isn't Classic that interpreter/emulator for OS 9?
No.
Don't think of Classic as an emulator, like Virtual PC. Think of it instead as just a program. Mac OS 9 was a shared-memory, cooperative multitasking system. Classic implements that entire system as a UNIX process. Within the process's address space, you have the entire Mac OS 9 operating system and all your apps. But the apps aren't running under emulation. They're executing native PowerPC binary code. In some cases, apps run faster under Classic than they did under OS 9.
Of course, some stuff had to change. Since Classic isn't really an OS, but just a process running under UNIX, it can't talk directly to the hardware. Some software-- not much, but some-- can't work under Classic because of this.
But it's not an emulator. It's more like vmware than it is like an emulator.
Yeah, but a lot of Macs are bought by schools and universities, and they like to have homogenous environments and haven't upgraded yet. At my institute of higher learning, all of the Macs (even the brand-new ones) run OS9.2 and a good portion of the PCs are still running NT4.
Maybe this will convince them to upgrade.
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