[Ham-Mac] PERCENT MAC USERS AMONG HAMS

[Chris Smolinski]

James Johnson wrote:
>>         I am now using Macintosh 8.6 but I wish I could go back to
> Macintosh 7.5.5.  Apple is not nice to those who want to customize
> the look of the interface.  With Mac 7.5 I could use Aurora to make
> the menu bar black with grey lettering and the menus could be
> customized the same way.  With Mac 8.x the menu bar has little white
> diagonal lines in the upper right and upper left and the menu bar
> becomes more than twice as tall at times, and the folders do not have
> the nice neat icons that they had in Mac 7.x and before.  I hope that
> software writers will not abandon Macintosh 7.x too soon because I
> intend to use it when I can on a partition on my second internal hard
> drive or on one of my external hard drives.  

You're joking, right? MacOS 7 is already long since unsupported by many
(most) authors and software companies. I'd consider 9.x to be the
present minimum bar, although you could get away with 8.6. (I am
speaking of running new apps of course, you can always continue to run
ancient apps on ancient machines running an ancient OS)

There are always some folks writing freeware for older machines (heck,
in the peecee world lots of hams are still using DOS boxes, some
probably still use their C64), but that's about it.

Software companies don't offer support for older OS versions to be mean
and nasty, they do it because they want (or need) to take advantage of
features only available in the new OS versions. And while you can code
around some old OS deficiencies, you end up spending an enormous amount
of programming time to cater to a very small part of the installed base.
(I won't say market because the older the machine, the less likely the
owner is to buy software for it) Sorry, these are the brutal facts of
the software world. 

73
Chris
N3JLY