[mistrial9]

I want to counter the idea that OS 9 was either stable or not stable. I made money in grad school fixing people's Mac OS 9 setups, and I had many satisfied customers. Basically, one bad Apple spoils the barrel. If you add "crazy media network extension from hell" alongside all your dozens of working apps, then yes, the whole OS becomes unstable. Similarly with low-quality Photoshop plugins, OS startup services, odd hardware drivers or even corrupt font files.. yes, the whole OS can crash "daily".

On the other hand, like a great day at a public theater act, when it goes well, it really does go well. I have OS disks and applications saved to this day, in their own filing system in a drawer, that run great, look great, and are a joy to use. And so you know, months of daily, extensive use, with no crashes.

[guessbest]

I didn't start using a mac until iPhone development started, so the earliest version was 10.5 for me, but in that and later versions, the entire system could be crashed by corrupted fonts, not even system fonts.