Using Mac OS 9 in 2014
Andrew Cunningham of Ars Technica was challenged by his coworkers to use Mac OS 9 for a few days. Armed with a 2002 PowerBook G4, Cunningham set out to do his job with the now 12-year-old Mac OS 9.2.2… and found that he could get nothing done. However, he discovered that it was a nice setup for classic games that no longer run on modern Apple devices.
I loved Mac OS 9. I'd go back to it in a heartbeat. It was so simple to use. And give the last version of MacWrite and pdfFile.
I use Basilisk, an old-style Mac emulator, to run Mac OS 9 on my iMac. It runs HyperCard, including the disk image of my Voyager Macbeth CD-ROM, quite nicely.
I still use Mac OS 9.2.2 (Japanese) _every day_, on my PowerMac G3 (Blue-White), for text writing (I am a translator for the TidBITS-Japanese translation team) and for e-mail. The main reason is Apple Extended Keyboard II, which is so much more comfortable to type with, faster and more correctly.