Some of the Macs back then were fairly upgradeable. I think some had ZIF sockets to allow processors upgrades, although the bus might have imposed limitations. Again, pulling this back from memory.

The lower end machines weren’t particularly upgradeable, though. I had a 6500 that wasn’t technically processor upgradeable, but I had a card that slipped into the level 2 cache slot (equivalent of “pipeline burst cache” on intel machine, I think) to make the 225mhz 603e behave like a 300 mhz G3. Not sure if that was so that I could run OS X or something else.

One cool thing, though, was that you could go to Apple’s website and immediately see if your computer was officially supported for OS X or not. No tap dance between OS vendor and hardware vendor.

OS 9 to OS X was a pretty sizable technical jump – the entire basic infrastructure was completely replaced.

Ah, good memories …
Total Comments by kosmo: 589

The other is the fact that a majority of the machines running Mac OS 9 had to be upgraded to run Mac OS X (sounds like Vista). That’s no easy task with Apple computers and generally means tossing out the old machine and buying a new one.
Total Comments by James Bathgate: 6

What sort of problems did you run into when upgrading from OS 9 to OS X? A clean install was definitely not required – I’m am certain I didn’t do one.

If you’re referring to the lack of applications that ran natively in OS X, you have a point. The implementation of the classic environment could have been a bit better. However, worst case scenario, you could simply reboot into OS9.

I loved the OS9 and earlier method of fixing OS problems. Keep a good backup stashed on the HD. When problems popped up, boot from CD and activate the “good” system folder (and incrementally add back the changes until you figured out what broke it.

I have a Mini and an eMac (main blogging computer, built in 2002) at home, but have to use Windows at work.
Total Comments by kosmo: 589

@Peter: I’m waiting for my new MacBook Pro from work and I can’t wait. However, the upgrade process from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X was not very nice either.
Total Comments by James Bathgate: 6

I use a Mac, have converted my wife to Macs, have converted my niece and my parents to Mac.

While I am not one to bash Microsoft as I use all Windows products at work and like them this is a big problem.

I think many, many people will wipe out their data without even knowing it and many are just not tech savvy enough or don’t have the equipement to do full backups.
Total Comments by Peter Rabbit: 44