Last week I helped some friends out by resurrecting their original Bondi-blue iMac, which was dogged by corrupted system files and extensions conflicts. All it took was reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling the system software I updated it to Mac OS 9.1. It struck me how incredibly easy it is to perform maintenance on the Classic’ flavor of the Mac OS, and how, in spite of its kludgey late history, it remains in essence an incredibly elegant system. I’m still looking forward to moving over to Mac OS X, but I’ll miss the structural transparency of its predecessor.
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