One of my periodic "drop by now and then" sites is System7Today, extolling the virtues of System 7 to those people still rocking 60x-series Power Macs (that's Mac OS 7.0 through 7.6.1 for those of you who only know Mac OS as starting with a lower-case m, and also, get off my lawn), and I was disheartened to see that the System7Today forums are going read-only. I regretfully understand his reasoning though one wonders what will happen to the rest of the site. It hasn't changed in years, but it hasn't had to, and I love the frozen-in-time mockery of the Apple front page from at least a decade or so prior.

The only Macs I have still running System 7 are all running 7.1 (not counting the NetBSD 68K systems, which just use System 7 as a bootloader): one is my IIci with a 50MHz DayStar '030 and a MacIvory Lisp card, another is my recapped SE/30 looking for a job to do, and the last is my super-cute Mystic Color Classic. I like 7.1 a lot more than 7.5 or 7.6, and you can transplant lots of the 7.5 CDEVs and such back to 7.1 for a slimmer but still feature-filled experience. That said, I have to confess that I jumped to OS 8, and then OS 9, whenever I got the chance on my Power Macs. Part of this was that I upgraded those systems aggressively -- all of my Old World Power Macs in regular use have G3 or G4 upgrade cards, including my beloved PowerBook 1400, so they all run 9.1 or 9.2.2 -- and part of it is to run Classilla, but the biggest reason was just that OS 8 looked nicer and felt better, and 8.1 and 8.6 were still pretty speedy. I still run OS 8 on my PowerBook 2300c and Quadra 800.

But still, nostalgia dies hard. (No doubt being a TenFourFox user, you'd empathize.) While I've got lots of classic System 7-era software backed up for posterity on the Floodgap gopher server, it just doesn't have System7Today's throwback vibe and playful attitude. I'll miss it dearly pending its inevitable slow-motion decommissioning, most of all because it remains a great example of doing the most you can with the little you've got. Typing this blog post on a 2002-vintage 1GHz iMac G4, us PowerPC holdouts are still living in that spirit today.

Watch for 45.4 later this week(end).

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2016/09/system7soontobeyesterday.html