This page lists some of the best software for the Classic Mac OS – System 6 through Mac OS 9.2.2 – in my admittedly biased opinion. Listings are alphabetical, and some programs have OS X versions as well as classic ones. Many links are to archived files in my Dropbox.
Category Archives: Classic Mac OS Software
This is a list of some apps and extensions that work on 68000-based Macs including the Mac Plus, Mac SE, Mac Portable, Mac Classic, and PowerBook 100. Notes and RAM requirements are in parentheses. (Compatibility tested mainly on a 4 MB PowerBook 100 or Mac Plus running System 7.0.1.) Note also that newer versions might work.
Way back in the Mac II era, someone discovered that certain Mac NuBus video cards could support slightly higher resolutions than the standard 640 x 480 pixels – but only with certain displays. This discovery gave birth to MaxAppleZoom, a $25 shareware control panel by Naoto Horii designed to support those higher resolution.
Need a copy of System 6.0.8, 7.0.1, or a newer version of the Classic Mac OS for your vintage Mac? You can dig through apple.com and try to find them – or you can download them using the updated links on this page. (Apple does rearrange things, making it more difficult to find things.) All versions […]
While compiling what was to be my latest article for Low End Mac, a column detailing my media center project, I was simultaneously testing a program for review. I’m sure my adventures setting up a Mac media center are positively engrossing and will be sorely missed, but TopXNotes Classic has proven itself a helpful addition to […]
The Macintosh was released to the public in 1984 and changed the way we interact with our computers. The Macintosh operating system gave the Mac a competitive edge in the computer market.
Last year I began fiddling around with a program called A-OK! The Wings of Mercury, a computer program written by Joe Nastasi that completely simulates a Mercury space mission from the 1960s. Nastasi realized that today’s computers are sufficiently advanced that they can replicate not only the interior of a Mercury capsule and simulate its […]
I’ve been using ramBunctious for years and have mentioned it several times in my writing, but I never got around to writing a review until now. Why now? Because as I migrate to Mac OS X, I have to leave ramBunctious behind. I will miss it – a lot.
2001 – This is the fourth in a series of reviews of planetarium software for the Macintosh, with emphasis on its use in schools. Planetarium software, at a minimum, simulates the appearance of the night sky given certain parameters such as the date, time, and observer location.
StuffIt Deluxe is the most comprehensive compression solution for the Mac. It is not just an application that compresses files; it handles everything that a user needs to do for file exchange or compression. StuffIt Deluxe 6.5 is the best version to have, since some of the features discussed, such as StuffIt Express Personal Edition, […]
2001 – This is the third in a series of reviews of planetarium software for the Macintosh, with emphasis on use in schools. Planetarium software, at a minimum, simulates the appearance of the night sky given certain parameters such as the date, time, and observer location.
2001 – This is the second in a series of reviews of planetarium software for the Macintosh, with emphasis on its use in schools. Planetarium software, at a minimum, simulates the appearance of the night sky given certain parameters such as the date, time, and observer location.
2001 – This is the first in a series of reviews of planetarium software for the Macintosh, with emphasis on its use in schools. Planetarium software, at a minimum, simulates the appearance of the night sky given certain parameters such as the date, time, and observer location.
2001 – You are not very likely to face direct attacks from hackers because you use a computer, because those people mostly target businesses and large networks. On the other hand, the security of your files is never 100% guaranteed, even though you use a computer that less people know to hack than, say, Windows.
BBEdit Lite (BBEL) from Bare Bones Software is a program I use daily. It looks like a simple text editor, but I don’t use it for designing pages or writing; I use it because BBEL has a blindingly fast search-and-replace function. In fact, that’s the feature I use most of the time.
I’m a bipolar extensions user: I go from one extreme to another. First I’ll go download a bunch of cool extensions that improve my user experience. Extensions are part of what make the Mac so fun. Over time, the extensions build up to the point where I feel like I have too many. Maybe I […]
Greg Landweber is far better known for Kaleidoscope than for SmoothType. I know a lot of Mac users who love to play around with their interface; I know few as interested in how good text looks on the screen. Yet I suspect cleaner type does more to improving the interface than different colors, sounds, and […]
I don’t know when I first discovered Clean-Install Assistant (C-IA), but it’s been an invaluable tool ever since.
This is rather unusual for us – two different Low End Mac staffers reviewing the same software. But what Battery Amnesia does can be so incredible that you might not believe just one of us. (Note that Lithium-ion batteries, which Apple has used since the PowerBook 3400c in 1997, are not susceptible to the memory […]
Extensions Strip 1.9.3, a $15 ($8 educational) piece of shareware written by Ammon Skidmore, is the best Control Strip replacement there is. Apple would do well to follow Ammon’s example.
2000 – America Online’s Instant Messenger (AIM) is one of a host of chat applications that has become part of an Internet user’s standard suite of tools in the past two years.
2000 – I’ve been using MenuChoice 2.1 for ages, probably going back to the System 7.1 era (1992-94). It’s one of those remarkable pieces of shareware that I’ve come to depend on – and it’s so well written that, despite the fact that is hasn’t been updated since April 18, 1994, it works flawlessly with […]
2000 – It’s been a couple years since Scott Barber posted information on running Mac OS 8.1 on a Macintosh IIsi. It was a fairly convoluted method that only worked with a few Macs and required first booting from an older OS, then from an OS 8.1 hard drive – but it was possible.
Rather than have six separate pages for the remaining case studies, all of which are quite brief, I’m combining them all on a single page.
My workplace computer is a Power Mac 7600 with 48 MB of RAM. For some reason, it doesn’t want to run RAM Doubler, so I have virtual memory set to 96 MB to provide enough memory for Photoshop, FrameMaker, Netscape Communicator, GraphicConverter, and the other memory hungry applications I run regularly.
In early December 1997, MacWeek announced a new version of RAM Charger. Version 8 is fully compatible with Mac OS 8. As I would discover, it is also a big improvement over RAM Charger 3.
1997 – RAM Charger is a sophisticated memory manager for the Macintosh. It works on any Mac (compare this with RAM Doubler, which requires a 68030 or better and at least 8 MB of RAM). The current version works transparently, allowing you to simply install it and forget it on any Mac running System 7 […]
